Feature: ‘The Blues Brothers’ Book Brings Together What Made The 1980 Film A Classic

Saturday Night Live over the decades has served as a building block for comedians, using that platform as a way to get your name out there and eventually spin their popularity into other ventures. One of the earliest, and most iconic cases, being the American Classic that SNL alums Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi created with “The Blues Brothers.” A new book, by writer and journalist Daniel de Visé, gets into how Aykroyd and Belushi’s kinetic, comedic energy was spun into a just as entertaining production process. Along with the film’s influence on pop culture humor, it also shares how the film’s appreciate of blues music is best encapsulated by its soundtrack and appearances by Aretha Franklin and James Brown.

For this week’s FilmWeek feature, we talk to Daniel de Visé, author of “The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the making of an American Film Classic” about what he was able to uncover from revisiting this film the captured a special moment in American film and comedy.