15 Facts About "The Blues Brothers" That You Did Not Know

By Missy aka Tizzy in Entertainment On 16th January 2018

People were a bit baffled when the Blues Brothers made their initial appearance on Saturday Night Live. We really did not know what to make of them in the beginning. However, by the time the pair made it to the big screen, they had plenty of fans. Their comedic adventures still bring us some good laughs, almost 40 years later. But, we can bet that you didn't know any of these facts about the movie.

Dan Aykroyd saved Carrie Fisher's life, then asked her to marry him.

Aykroyd and Fisher really hit it off on the set and started dating. The pair were out to dinner. Fisher told CNN, "I almost choked on some kind of vegetable that I shouldn't have been eating: Brussels sprouts. He saved my life, and then he asked me to marry him. And I thought ... wow, what if that happens again? I should probably marry him." Unfortunately, the couple split before making it to their wedding.

The movie was not an instant hit.

Newsweek called the movie "desperately unfunny", and the LA Times called it a "$30 million wreck." Down south, there were boycotts by movie theaters that said it was too long and a "black movie" that white people would not watch. I guess the joke is on them because the movie ended up making $115 million.

Paul Shaffer was kicked out of the Blues Brother Band for treason.

Paul Shaffer was an original member of the band until John Belushi discovered that he was working on another project by a Saturday Night Live star. Paul was also performing in Gilda Live, and Belushi could not stand the disloyalty.

The prison scene turned violent.

In the beginning of the movie, when Jake is being released from prison, a helicopter crew was used to film the overhead shots. The guards at the prison actually opened fire on the helicopter thinking that it was some sort of elaborate jail escape.

There are a few famous faces hiding in the movie

If you pay good attention, you will see several young stars throughout the movie. The officer who hands back Jake's belongings is Frank Oz, the Dark Crystal director who also played Ms. Piggy and Yoda. Steven Spielberg plays the tax assessor. Chaka Khan is the Triple Rock Church choir singer. Pee-wee Herman plays a waiter. And, John Landis, the movie's director, is the cop with a mustache in the upside-down car.

People thought the car chases were real.

The movie was shot in downtown Chicago. They shot the movie on Sunday mornings when traffic was quiet while the rest of the city carried on as if nothing was going on. The police were getting tons of calls about the crazy stuff they were seeing.

All the car stunts sent the film $10 million over budget.

The crew wrecked more than 100 cars while shooting this movie. There were 40 stunt drivers and 60 retired cop cars used to pull off all of the stunts. Some of those stunts included dropping a car off of a ramp and driving up to 118 miles per hour on city streets.

The original script was 324 pages long

To give you a better idea of what we are talking about, one page of a movie script equals one minute of screen time. Using that information, if they went with Aykroyd's original script, the movie would have been more than five hours long. John Landis trimmed the script down so that it would fit within two and a half hours.

The crew built a working mall for that famous scene.

The Dixie Mall in Harvey, Illinois was empty when the crew rented it. They had to build 32 full-sized stores to make the building look realistic, before trashing everything all over again.

One Blues Brother was paid twice as much as the other.

Belushi was widely popular at the time because of his movie Animal House, but it seems unfair that he made $500,000 and Aykroyd only made $250,000 for this movie.

There was no shortage of cocaine on the set.

Landis admitted that he actually budgeted for cocaine for the movie's actors to use during the movie's night shoots. Belushi used the most out of all of them. At one point they had to flush a pile of coke to keep Belushi from using it. Belushi was literally being handed vials of the drug on the streets of Chicago by his fans. There was a point when Belushi actually wandered into a home that was near the set. When Aykroyd went to go get him, the homeowner said, "Oh, you mean Belushi? He came in here an hour ago and raided my fridge. He’s asleep on my couch."

Belushi was injured during the big finish.

Belushi hurt his knee while trying to use some kid's skateboard before shooting the final scene. Landis commissioned the city's top orthopedist to come wrap up Belushi's knee and give him a shot of something. Whatever the orthopedist did, it seemed to work well because Belushi was able to pull off them cartwheels.

The crew nicknamed him "The Black Hole.

Belushi had a real talent for losing his sunglasses between takes. He went through hundreds of pairs while shooting this movie.

The movie gets the Vatican's seal of approval

Apparently, his holiness approves of Jake and Elwood's mission from God. For the movie's 30th anniversary in 2010, the Vatican newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano, called the movie a Catholic classic and recommended it for viewing by all good Catholics.

There were 13 different Bluesmobiles on set

Each of these cars was outfitted for the different stunts that it would be used for. One car was designed specifically to just fall apart. Aykroyd's brother-in-law still owns one of the original cars, a 1974 Dode Monaco.

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