John Belushi Had On-Set Beef With Jack Nicholson

Film critic Gene Siskel thought that Jack Nicholson’s second directing effort, the comedy-western Goin’ South, was just okay, giving the film two and a half stars out of four. There was at least one way it could have been better, he said. “The film could use more of John Belushi, the Animal House star, wasted here in a walk-on as a fat Mexican deputy sheriff.”

There was someone else who believed Belushi could use more screen time: John Belushi. And he would have had more scenes if he could have behaved properly. But things were goin’ south right after Belushi signed on to the project for five weeks of work at $5,000 a week. “What the hell does John Belushi want to do this for?” wondered Nicholson, according to Daniel De Visé’s The Blues Brothers. 

Good question. Belushi was a mess when he arrived in Mexico for filming. Producers were called over to Nicholson’s rented home where Belushi, almost certainly under the influence of something, ranted nonsense upon arrival. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he told them. “I got to go. I’ve got to get back. I can’t live here.” He took a knife out of a kitchen drawer, a threatening action that doesn’t sit well with movie producers. They told him to stop being an asshole and to take a nap.

Belushi did, and the next day he apologized. But it didn’t take long for things to once again go off the rails. Belushi “made petty demands and fought with the Goin' South producers, especially Harold Schneider, whose job it was not to lose fights,” wrote Patrick McGilligan in Jack's Life: A Biography of Jack Nicholson, per SlashFilm. 

Due to the tantrums and squabbles, Nicholson cut back Belushi’s part in the movie, which made the comic actor even more difficult. “Jack treated me like shit on Goin' South,” Belushi groused by the time filming concluded. “I hate him.”

Despite a lack of firsthand accounts of the Belushi/Nicholson beef, two brothers, Jake and Sam Lewis, created a fictional account of the conflict in their short film The Cowboy & the Samurai. Did a drunken Belushi actually threaten to cut off the producers’ testicles and feed them to each other? Did he really tell Nicholson to eat a bowl full of fuck? Who knows? But it makes for a helluva story.

In The Cowboy & the Samurai, Belushi expresses regret. “Deepest apologies from the bottom of my heart,” he offers after the two Hollywood hellraisers make up a story about how they worked out their differences.

According to Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, the reconciliation didn’t come until years after Goin’ South was completed. Friends once again, Belushi even consulted Nicholson about upcoming film roles — just days before he died of a drug overdose.