20 Things You Didn't Know About The Blues Brothers
18. The First Draft Of The Script Dan Aykroyd Wrote Was More Like A Textbook
The Blues Brothers was the first screenplay Dan Aykroyd ever wrote. In fact, before starting work on the movie, he had never even read one.
The first draft took him six months to complete and was 324 pages, which was three times as long as a standard Hollywood screenplay at the time. As a joke, when he presented it to director John Landis, he encased between the coves of the Los Angeles Yellow Pages.
Aykroyd wrote it like free verse, more story than film-making tool. In it, he laid out very elaborate backstories for the Blues Bros. - their birth, upbringing, how they fell in love with music, how they ended up at the orphanage, and so on. In fact, there was so much material that much of it was taken and used to create a companion book to the movie.
Ultimately, most of what Aykroyd created was unusable and had to be re-written by Landis. As a result, because there was no final script, the film began shooting with no budget, which in turn led to the movie's cost quickly spiraling far past what Universal planned.