John Belushi walked into Jane Byrne's office, sweat beading on his forehead. Dan Aykroyd waited outside the door. He gave Belushi, a Wheaton native, the breathing room to appeal to the mayor, hat in hand, local boy to local girl. Belushi was nervous. Byrne expected him to be. She sat at her desk stone-faced and silent, she recalled, offering no relief.

Belushi and Aykroyd wanted to shoot a movie in Chicago, but, as everyone knew, Chicago government wasn't exactly amenable to movie production. There wasn't an official policy or anything. Movies did shoot here. Brian DePalma shot "The Fury" here a year earlier. A lot of commercials were shot here. There was even a cottage porn industry in River North. But the cooperation needed for a large-scale Hollywood production — the kind Belushi, Aykroyd and director John Landis had in mind, only bigger — was out of the question. It had been for years.

It was 1979, and Byrne had just started her term. Mayor Richard J. Daley, the reason movie studios usually didn't consider Chicago a viable location, had died three years earlier. Byrne, now 76, remembered that Belushi "looked kind of fat, a sweaty guy already, but he wore a suit jacket and I thought he looked sick, to be honest. To the point that his hair was getting wet. I was a fan of his. But, of course, I wasn't going to say this right away."

So, for a laugh, she let him drown. She thought it would be funnier if she "acted like the first Daley, nodding like Buddha."

"I know how Chicago feels about movies," the comedian said to the mayor. Byrne nodded. Belushi said the studio would like to donate some money to Chicago orphanages in lieu of throwing a big, expensive premiere. "How much money?" she asked. He said, "$200,000." She nodded again.

"And so he kept talking," Byrne recalled. "Finally, I just said, 'Fine.' But he kept going. So again I said, 'Look, I said fine.' He said, 'Wait. We also want to drive a car through the lobby of Daley Plaza. Right though the window.' I remember what was in my mind as he said it. I had the whole 11th Ward against me anyway, and most of Daley's people against me. They owned this city for years, so when Belushi asked me to drive a car through Daley Plaza, the only thing I could say was, 'Be my guest!' He said, 'We'll have it like new by the morning.' I said, 'Look, I told you yes.' And that's how they got my blessing."

And that, more or less, is how Chicago became a regular location for movie production.

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On June 16, 1980, 30 years ago today, "The Blues Brothers" premiered. Keeping with Belushi's promise to eschew a flashy debut, it screened in Norridge for local crew and politicians only; the musical- comedy-action-film about two bluesmen on the run opened nationally a few days later. There will not be a parade to mark this moment, but there should be. Not just because, as film critic Gene Siskel wrote in his four-star review in the Tribune, it is "the best movie ever made in Chicago," etching iconic images in the imagination (Daley Plaza surrounded by hundreds of police and soldiers, a car chase in a shopping mall); not because it serves as a reminder of a city long gone, with nods to everything from the Illinois Nazi party to Maxwell Street to the swanky, now-defunct restaurant Chez Paul; not even because, as Aykroyd said by phone earlier this week, "it changed the way Chicago looked on film, and probably turned a lot of people on to Chicago in the first place."

But because without "The Blues Brothers" — "which we conceived as a love letter to the city," Landis said — Chicago might not have had much of a film industry. Or rather, it might have taken longer to develop. We might not have had the 900 film and TV productions that have shot in Illinois since 1980, spending an estimated $1 billion, mostly in Chicago, according to the Chicago Film Office. Comparatively, before 1980 (not including Chicago's healthy silent film industry in the 1910s and '20s), fewer than 100 features were shot here, and usually only for a scene or two. Indeed, if you have ever worked on a film here, recognized your office in "The Dark Knight" or pondered the havoc "Transformers 3," which starts shooting next month, could wreak on July traffic, thank "The Blues Brothers."

"I still hear from people who say they were 9 but they were in the background of this or that scene," Aykroyd said. "And you know what I tell people? You know the four stars on the Chicago flag? I tell them the stars represent the Chicago fire, the city's founding, the first Daley and 'The Blues Brothers.'"

It closed Lake Shore Drive. A car was dropped from 1,000 feet. A mall was demolished. "I remember the 1968 Democratic Convention," Landis said, recalling the police beatings in Grant Park that still characterized Chicago in 1979. "And here we were getting permission on outrageous requests: Shut downtown streets? Yes. Allow 90-mile-an-hour car chases with 50 vehicles? Yes. 'How do you propose (doing) this?' they asked. Weekend mornings. 'OK.'"

"I remember old-timers thoroughly amazed at what the city was allowing," said Mark Hogan, who served as an electrician for production of the film, "because Daley wouldn't have closed a lane of traffic for a film, and now they had entire streets closed." Hogan is now business manager of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 476, which represents more than 800 crew members on Chicago sets. Before 1980, it had 300 members. Jane Alderman, a well-known local casting director who retired last year, said, "All the things Chicago has to make a movie, like crews of people who know what they're doing, just didn't exist at that time." In fact, the Chicago Film Office was microscopic — a minor part of the mayor's press office — and hadn't established itself until interest from "The Blues Brothers" led to both a need for movie productions to run more smoothly and a need to attract more movie business.