Posted by Mr. Beaks ;

; The year:; 1980.; The location:; the Vamos’ rec room.; The film:; a bootlegged copy of The Blues Brothers.; The life being changed by the wildly unprecedented mix of music, comedy and car chases:; mine.

; I was seven years-old at the time, and John Landis’s puckish imagination was already warping the way I processed information.; What I loved about The Blues Brothers, which was just re-released as a two disc Special Edition DVD by Universal Home Entertainment, was that everything seemed possible.; I hadn’t seen West Side Story yet, so the notion of people breaking into song in a very real urban environment, which couldn’t be more otherworldly to me if it were Mars, was wonderfully liberating.; Watching John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd and

Illinois state troopers lay waste to an entire shopping mall was as much a primer on anarchic comedy as anything I read in the pages of Mad Magazine.; And hearing Cab Calloway enchant an entire auditorium with his rendition of the call-and-response classic “Minnie the Moocher” was an invaluable introduction to jazz music for which I am eternally grateful. ; That gratitude would only swell as I was exposed to National Lampoon’s Animal House, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places and, whilst rummaging through my dad’s voluminous Betamax recordings of anything that struck his fancy on The Movie Channel (the only cable station we subscribed to in my adolescence), The Kentucky Fried Movie.; That I can still, at thirty-one, recite verbatim the entire “Catholic High School Girls In Trouble” sketch and Big Jim Slade’s hyperbolic resume speaks tellingly to how profoundly and profanely that film influenced me.; ; John Landis’s films even helped my schoolwork:; I remember astounding my ninth grade “Introduction to Business” teacher with my vast knowledge of the stock market, all of which was cribbed from innumerable viewings of Trading Places; my interest in Illinois Nazis led to an “A” paper on Skokie in my junior year of high school; and, of course, I could never forget that the capital of Nebraska was Lincoln. ; Most importantly, there’s always the not insubstantial fact that my pseudonym is taken from Clarence Beeks, the guy who ends up getting sodomized by a horny male gorilla at the end of Trading Places.; This is an interview I’ve been clamoring to do ever since I made my half-assed segue into online journalism.; And now, as of last Tuesday, the Beverly Hills restaurant Kate Mantilini has been home to two classic meetings of the minds:; Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, and John Landis and Jeremy “Mr. Beaks” Smith.; ; Not surprisingly, this interview went a bit long, so I’ve broken it up into two parts.; In this first installment, John and I discuss the critical sea change regarding his early comedies, the integral role popular music plays in his films and the great John Belushi.