I was fascinated — not necessarily in a good way — by Bob Woodward's biography of John Belushi many years ago. It was called Wired and it was done at the behest of Belushi's widow…and she and all or most of the performer's friends were pretty unhappy with the final product. They felt Woodward had been such an outsider to their world that he'd not really understood what he was writing about and that he'd sensationalized the truth to the point of oblivion. Woodward countered by suggesting that, well, the truth sometimes hurts and that's what he'd reported. As an old Watergate junkie with mixed feelings about Woodward's role in that episode, I came to be more interested in the controversy around Wired than I ever was in John Belushi.
A writer named Tanner Colby worked on another Belushi bio years later, which meant covering the same ground, interviewing the same people. Granted, as the co-author of a less famous book about the Saturday Night Live star, he could well have an underlying resentment of Woodward's…but I tend to think not. As he states in the linked article, the consensus among the folks in Belushi's world was that even where they'd been quoted directly, Wired did not depict the guy they knew or the incidents they related to its author. Colby didn't make that part up…and it makes you wonder about other things Woodward has written.