Celebrity Birthday of the Day

(Thanks to all of you out there for your patience. After moving and then driving 20 hours across country without a break, I needed a few days off from everything but eating, shitting and sleeping. But now I'm back, and present without delay another entry in my Academy Award winning series on, you know, celebrity birthdays.) 

Happy Birthday, John Landis. 

Man, what the fuck happened to you? You used to be awesome. Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Coming to America. All great movies. 

Then, uh, something happened, and you started making movies like Beverly Hills Cop III, The Stupids and the monumentally bad Blues Brothers 2000 (the subject of one of my Worst Movies... Ever entries). 

Landis was born in 1950 in Chicago, but grew up primarily in Los Angeles. He got involved in Hollywood as a teenager, beginning as a mail boy at 20th Century Fox. Working on Kelly's Heroes in Yugoslavia in 1969, Landis was promoted to assistant director after the original AD had a complete nervous breakdown and left the set. 

Apparently he didn't do a very good job, because he stayed for several years in Europe, working as everything from a dialogue coach to a stunt double (specializing in horse falls, which is, you know, what they generally have the really talented people do). 

Landis returned to the US in 1971 and made the movie Schlock, which is apparently well named, as it is known as a piece of shit. It took six years before Landis was allowed to direct again, this time turning in The Kentucky Fried Movie, written by Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers, who would later make Airplane!. 

Then things really began to heat up for Landis. His next two movies, 1978's Animal House and 1980's The Blues Brothers, were, you know, awesome. 

In 1982, while directing a segment of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, an explosion mishap on set combined with a helicopter crash resulted in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow (father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh) and two child actors: Myca Dinh Le and Renee Chin-Yi Chen. Landis was subsequently sued for ignoring child labor laws and negligence, but was eventually acquitted. He later blamed the special FX man, a tactic he probably should have also tried on Beverly Hills Cop III. 

After this, Landis' career became more spotty, as he began to alternate really good movies (Trading Places, Coming to America) with mediocre to shitty movies (Spies Like Us, Three Amigos!). He also began directing humorless Michael Jackson videos like "Thriller" and "Black or White". 

Landis' career decline has never been able to be linked to anything in particular, like for instance brain surgery. But whatever it was, he just started to suck. 

As a result, Landis hasn't made a movie since 1998's Susan's Plan (no, I haven't heard of it either), working instead on TV documentaries and episodes of awesome shows like Honey I Shrunk the Kids: the TV Show. 

Yeah. 

Well, what can you do? Here's hoping Landis can return to making awesome, irreverent movies. But barring that, I'd rather him just not make any more movies at all. It's too painful.