First thing in the morning, the king of Hollywood receives a phone call. The call always comes from New York. The reason is simple. New York, being three hours ahead of Los Angeles, always has The Numbers. And The Numbers—daily accountings of every dollar spent, every box-office receipt—are all that matter.

That’s how Lew Wasserman sees it. And if Lew Wasserman sees it that way, that’s the way it is. This is what makes him Lew Wasserman, the feared and omnipotent head of Universal Pictures.

It is October 1979, and The Numbers are not to Wasserman’s satisfaction. The culprit is Universal’s big-ticket production The Blues Brothers, a movie that pretty much defies logic and description. Some call it a musical; others, a comedy; others, a buddy movie; others, a bloated vanity project.

One thing is clear. The movie is behind schedule and burning through its budget, which Wasserman considered too big to begin with. That Wasserman feels this way about every film’s budget is incidental.

“Goddammit!” Wasserman says to his second-in-command, Ned Tanen, the president of Universal. Tanen then finds the executive one rung lower. This is Sean Daniel, Universal’s vice president in charge of production. Tanen, shouting “I’m getting killed here!,” orders Daniel to do something, anything, to stanch the bleeding.

Daniel calls the movie’s director, John Landis. Landis then appeals to one of the film’s two stars, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. The latter is always easy to find and to deal with. He is also, by a mile, the best way to reach Belushi.

Everything revolves around Belushi, the most electric and popular comic actor of his time. It would be inaccurate to blame all the movie’s problems on Belushi. He isn’t responsible for the late-developing script or the unwieldy action sequences. It would be even more inaccurate to say Belushi isn’t responsible. He has become a blessed wreck, thanks mostly to his spiraling (and ultimately lethal) addiction to cocaine.

On days when coke gets the best of Belushi, production stalls. And when production stalls, money burns. And when money burns, Lew Wasserman burns.

It begins, as these things do, in a dark bar. The time is November 1973. The bar, a speakeasy called the 505 Club, is in Toronto and owned by Aykroyd, a bizarro 20-year-old with webbed toes, mismatched eyes—one green, one brown—and a checkered past as a two-bit hoodlum and a seminary student.

The club opens at one A.M. because Aykroyd works nights. For the past three years, he has been performing with Second City, the famed comedy troupe based in Chicago but also flourishing in Toronto.

Aykroyd is at the 505, unwinding after a show, when a bullish 24-year-old charges through the back door. This is Belushi, wearing a white scarf, a leather jacket, and a five-point driver’s cap of the sort worn by aging cabbies. Aykroyd wonders whether his guest had somehow mistaken himself for Lee J. Cobb.

The two had met earlier in the evening, backstage at Second City. “We had heard of each other,” Aykroyd recalls. “We took one look at each other. It was love at first sight.”

Belushi is a Second City alumnus, having spent two productive years with the Chicago troupe. But now he works in New York, running and starring in a show called The National Lampoon Radio Hour. He’s in Toronto to poach talent.

Aykroyd says no. He is contractually committed to Second City and happy in Canada, where he was born and raised (in Ottawa, specifically). Plus, he owns a private club, with a jukebox stocked with his favorite music: R&B, soul, and, especially, blues. Chicago blues. Memphis blues. Just a whole hell of a lot of blues, popular (B. B. King) and less so (Pinetop Perkins).