Penny Marshall on John Belushi's Death 30 Years Later

[JamesG]

John Belushi's Death: Penny Marshall Sounds Off 30 Years Later
3/5/2012
by Bill Higgins


On March 5, 1982, a few weeks before the 54th Annual Academy Awards, where he and friend Dan Aykroyd were set to present the visual effects Oscar, John Belushi was found dead in Chateau Marmont's Bungalow 3.

No immediate cause was given, but The Hollywood Reporter said the comic actor's drug use was "ill-concealed in accounts and explanations surrounding his death," which turned out to be true.

An intravenous "speedball" of cocaine and heroin killed him at age 33. Robin Williams and Robert De Niro had been with him at the hotel -- though both had left earlier -- during an all-night binge by Belushi that began at The Roxy on the Sunset Strip.





Penny Marshall, who had known Belushi since his pre-"SNL" days, says his death was "devastating." They met in 1973 after she saw him in the stage show National Lampoon's Lemmings in New York.

"I thought he was funny, and Rob Reiner and I went to dinner with him after the show," Marshall tells THR. "Rob and John must have done Marlon Brando impersonations for two hours straight."





As for Belushi's drug use, Marshall says: "I swear, you'd walk down the street with him, and people would hand him drugs. And then he'd do all of them -- be the kind of character he played in sketches or 'Animal House'."

When he died, Belushi was pursuing the lead in Noble Rot, which has become a legendary unproduced script centered on winemaking that he and Don Novello (aka Father Guido Sarducci of "SNL" fame) were rewriting. Belushi, whose widow, Judy, was his high school sweetheart, was buried in Martha's Vineyard.

"I love him, and I miss him, and I wish he hadn't gotten in with the people he was around," says Marshall. "But in the '70s and '80s, people were crazy."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...arshall-296818

[Schmoopie]

When I realize how long he's been gone it makes me wonder what kind of movies he would have ended up doing were he still alive. I wonder if he would have had the same kind of success as people like Bill Murray and Chevy Chase.