‘The film cans were full of coke': The 10 most debauched movie shoots of all time

Telegraph

a day ago

Contemporary Hollywood is a very well-behaved place, by historic standards at least. This might sound implausible, given the amount of gossip and scandal that seem to emanate from the industry. But over the past few decades, the truly disastrous film shoots, have tended to owe their infamy less to the unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll and more to unforeseen problems with Covid-prolonged production schedules – or simply inexperienced directors who have failed to account for the necessity of complex visual effects.
But it wasn't always so. Over the past century or so, some classic pictures have emerged from a chaotic and licentious atmosphere on set. Likewise, the sheer moral turpitude that has existed on some productions has overwhelmed any kind of coherence or sense in the process.
Occasionally, the true story of what happened does not come to light until years, even decades, later. While nobody would ever have thought that director Robert Altman was a goody two-shoes of the industry – his on-set marijuana intake was epic, by all accounts – it has still come as a surprise to hear that his flop 1980 musical Popeye was, according to the former Paramount CEO Barry Diller in a recent interview promoting his new memoir, 'a movie that… runs at 78 RPM and 33 speed' on the grounds that 'everyone was stoned'. The drug-fuelled absurdity that engulfed the cast and crew did not, alas, translate into creative genius – but on other occasions the results can be jaw-droppingly surprising.
Here, then, are 10 of the most outrageous and eventful film shoots in history. Some produced decent pictures; others are memorable only for their on-set excess.
1. Shanghai Express (1932)
Damien Chazelle's opulent, absurd 2022 epic Babylon, which explored the sheer chaos of the silent film era, was a flop on release but now shows every sign of becoming a cult film. Although its characters are largely fictitious or composites of several actors, one figure – Li Jun Li's bisexual, adventurous Lady Fay Zhu – stands out for being a blend of the legendary Marlene Dietrich and the not-as-legendary-as-she-should-be Anna May Wong, who fell foul of the lazy Oriental stereotypes that Hollywood majored in for decades.
Dietrich was flamboyantly omnivorous in her sexual tastes ('Sex is much better with a woman, but then one can't live with a woman!' she once declared) and Wong, who was more discreet but also rumoured to share similar appetites, was less a fellow actress and more a potential match. The only picture that the two starred in together, Josef von Sternberg's Shanghai Express, not only saw both cinematic icons heat up the screen on camera, but rumour has it that they found themselves in an offscreen menage à trois with, of all people, Hitler's favourite film director Leni Riefenstahl.
The three notoriously spent time in Berlin together, and rumours about the establishments that they visited, including the infamous Kit Kat Club – the model for Cabaret – have proliferated ever since. It was perhaps with this in mind that Dietrich knowingly delivered some of her most outrageous dialogue – 'It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily' – and audiences and studio heads alike spluttered, as the overt chemistry between the female leads far outshone what was expected or normal for the time.
2. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Where to start with this evergreen classic of cinema? There were all the usual production problems – directors leaving and being fired, the screenplay being rewritten on a daily basis – but the more interesting, and shocking, behind-the-scenes stories have passed into Hollywood legend. Its 16-year-old star Judy Garland suffered especially badly, being given Benzedrine tablets and cigarettes alike to stop her putting on weight. Such was the film's hectic and chaotic schedule that she was given amphetamines or 'pep pills' to keep her awake, and sleeping pills to give her rest. Nonetheless, as she later recalled, 'After four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep pills again.'
It sounds more like slavery than filmmaking, but she also suffered the indignity of being objectified in a sexual fashion by filmmakers and cast members alike, not helped by her having to bind her breasts down so that she would convincingly pass as a pre-pubescent girl. (In the books, Dorothy is aged around 11.) The most notorious of these incidents came in the form of the MGM founder Louis B Mayer, who Garland later said groped her on set. Eventually, after several of these incidents, she riposted, 'Mr Mayer, don't you ever, ever do that again. I just will not stand for it.' The surprised mogul desisted.
The actress had a miserable and troubled life, in large part because of her experiences on this picture, but an even worse fate awaited the dwarf actors who played the Munchkins. Many of them had come from The Singer Midgets, a European troupe of performers who had escaped Nazi persecution, but they did not adjust easily to the high-pressure world of Hollywood and took refuge in drinking heavily, casual sexual liaisons with each other and in attempting to molest Garland.
They were paid less than Toto the dog for their sins ($100 a week as opposed to Toto's $125) and were treated with a degree of contempt by everyone around them, who regarded them as freakish overgrown children. They let off steam in spectacularly uninhibited fashion. As Garland later described it, 'They got smashed every night and the police would pick them up in butterfly nets.' Life over the rainbow really was quite different.
3. The Devils (1971)
There was no such thing as a restrained, decorous Ken Russell set, not least because the brilliant but undisciplined director took delight in drinking heavily, rowing with his cast and offending any studio executives who attempted to rein him in. Virtually any of his pictures would have qualified for inclusion here, but it's his particularly disturbing 1971 masterpiece The Devils that had perhaps the strangest and most troubled production. Given the film's themes of diabolically-induced sexual excess amidst a group of 17 th century nuns, it was hardly surprising that the on-set dynamic, especially amongst the extras, was a charged and highly eroticised one, which Russell took delight in whipping up; he later called them 'a bad bunch', and noted that one of the male performers, overwhelmed with excitement, sexually assaulted one of the female extras on set.
The film's principal cast were also a strange assortment, featuring classical actors such as Vanessa Redgrave and Gemma Jones, the perpetually sinister Michael Gothard as a witch hunter and Russell's frequent collaborator Oliver Reed, who was usually drunk while on the set of his pictures, and made no exception for the gravity of the subject matter here. Reed had an especially bad relationship with the director on set as a result, and was barely on speaking terms with him when filming concluded, although Jones recalled that he was kind to her and 'behaved impeccably', suggesting that he reserved his viciousness for those he believed merited it. In one of the film's strangest dream scenes, the actor is shown wrestling an (obviously fake) plastic crocodile, and it is hard not to feel that Russell included the moment to humiliate the actor in revenge.
4. The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday (1976)
Reed was – along with Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and a few other well-known hellraisers – one of the most committed drinkers in the industry, making him a nightmare to work with. However, even the bibulous Reed could meet his match, and it came in the form of the laconic Hollywood hard man Lee Marvin, who put away Herculean quantities of alcohol with few, if any, apparent ill effects. Reed, who invented a cocktail called 'Gunk' – so called because it contained any kind of alcohol that he could lay his hands on, shaken together, and then served up to the adventurous – was not to be outdone, and so when the two men were cast in the long-forgotten comedy western The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday, they attempted to outdo one another in their feats of drinking, to the picture's detriment.
Stories about their behaviour, even exaggerated ones, have become legendary in the film industry. The picture was filmed in Durango, Mexico, and Reed was said to have celebrated the beginning of production by drinking 126 pints in 24 hours, before informing a member of the crew that they should leave because 'I'm going to smash this f–king place up in ten minutes, and I wouldn't want you or your lady to get hurt.'
Marvin, meanwhile, challenged his co-star to a bourbon drinking contest and came off the worse, collapsing to the floor after telling a bemused mariachi band that they were all playing their instruments wrong. He got his own back, however, when an inebriated Reed passed out in a strip club when he was supposed to be participating in a shoot-out scene, and it was up to the American actor to save his bacon by placating the outraged Mexicans.
5. Caligula (1979)
A recently released new edit of Tinto Brass's notorious Roman epic Caligula, rescored and reassembled from entirely new materials, may have convinced many audiences that this much-maligned picture was in fact an underrated masterpiece. This may be the case, but it's also true that the production of the film, bankrolled by Penthouse owner Bob Guccione, was one of the more absurd and troubled affairs in cinematic history, not least because nobody involved in it seemed to know what they were doing. Brass wanted to make a serious, grim film about a megalomaniac; whereas Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay on which it was based, wished to explore the corrupting effects of power.
This was all too much intellectualism for Guccione, who was more interested in making the most expensive pornographic film ever made. Firstly, he cast various Penthouse models as extras – angering Brass, who retaliated by importing what the producer called 'fat, ugly and wrinkled old women' to participate in the sex scenes – and later on, simply abandoned all attempts at restraint and incorporated random hardcore footage into the picture, coherence be damned. Much of this depicted acts that simply couldn't be shown in any kind of cinema, even pornography – on-screen unsimulated urination was the least of it – and so the film was not released in an uncut version in the UK until 2008.
The cast included several Shakespearean actors like Malcolm McDowell, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole, all of whom dealt with the chaos in their own way; O'Toole is barely coherent (Guccione accused him of being 'strung out on something') but Gielgud took to the absurdity with utter joy, announcing blissfully to McDowell on set, seeing the various handsome young men in various states of undress, that 'I've never seen so much c–– in my life!'
6. The Blues Brothers (1980)
Any film featuring the notoriously debauched comedian John Belushi was liable to run into some kind of trouble during its production. During the course of Belushi's brief but eventful life – he died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine at the age of 33 – he managed to ensure that every picture he was involved in became unforgettable for everyone involved, not always for the right reasons. He found his arguable onscreen signature role as Jake Blues in The Blues Brothers, opposite Dan Aykroyd as his brother Ellwood.
Although the characters declare that 'we're here on a mission from God' to save the orphanage they were raised in, Belushi's own mission was to enjoy a smorgasbord of as many narcotics as he could lay his hands on, to the despair of the film's director John Landis, who had to cope with the picture's ever-mounting budget. The film included many stunts involving car chases and the like, and these were, for understandable reasons, hard to capture when your lead actor has been taking a mixture of quaaludes, LSD and, most of all, marching powder.
It was originally intended as a relatively small-scale affair, designed to capitalise on the popularity of Belushi and Aykroyd from Saturday Night Live, but Belushi's love of cocaine and consequent lack of discipline meant that the costs spiralled from the originally intended $12 million to closer to $28 million. As one musician, Steve Cropper, later told Vanity Fair, '[Belushi] was like a big child, everybody's teddy bear. He just wanted to keep the party going. He was afraid that, if he went to sleep, he'd never wake up.'
To accommodate his wishes, there was an allowance in the budget for cocaine to keep night shoots going, and various crew members provided their own drugs; one hanger-on, for instance, was known as 'the mescaline girl'.
But Belushi was the centre of attention. His 'drug enforcer' Smokey Wendell, who tried to keep him sober, later reminisced that 'Every blue-collar Joe wants his John Belushi story. Every one of those guys wants to tell his friends, 'I did blow with Belushi.'' When the film concluded, most of them could. Ironically, the eventual injury that he did suffer, when he fell off a skateboard before performing the climatic song and dance number at the Hollywood Palladium, took place on one of the relatively few occasions he was sober, suggesting that whichever deity watched over production had a jet-black (or blue) sense of humour.
7. Popeye (1980)
The idea of a live action picture based on the perennially popular cartoon character Popeye – catchphrase, 'I yam what I yam' – to be directed by M*A*S*H's Robert Altman, starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, and with music by the hard-living Harry Nilsson, sounds like a strange fantasy. Although the musical comedy is commonly believed to have been a flop, it ended up being a reasonable hit, despite the awful critical reviews. The production, though, was a deeply eventful one.
Barry Diller, then the head of Paramount Studios, recently revealed the source of the problems: 'They were actually shipping in film cans at the time. Film cans would be sent back to LA for daily processing film. This was shot in Malta. And we found out that the film cans were actually being used to ship cocaine back and forth to this set. Everyone was stoned.'
Williams, in the midst of his heavy narcotics phase, disliked his director, and referred to the set as 'Stalag Altman'. Oddly, his performance was more soporific than stimulated, perhaps as a result of the unusual effects cocaine had on him; he later confessed in an interview that 'Cocaine for me was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down.'
Yet the anything-goes atmosphere translated into a near-incomprehensible narrative that nobody appeared to have any clue how to turn into an enjoyable film. Fearing utter chaos, execs simply cancelled production when the budget reached $20 million, and Altman, complete with film canisters' worth of cocaine, had to return to Hollywood and edit together what he had. It's a wonder, considering everything, that the picture isn't even worse.
8. Caddyshack (1980)
Belushi was not a part of the Harold Ramis-directed golf comedy Caddyshack, but his influence could be felt on set regardless, not least because of the sheer amount of drugs that were consumed. As one young actor, 19-year-old Peter Berkrot put it, 'I had never seen cocaine before I got to the set of Caddyshack.' He was soon to be introduced to it, and in considerable quantities. Its users justified their actions by claiming that it was of a superior quality. As another actor, Hamilton Mitchell, put it, 'I would never recommend drugs to anyone. But this was really good cocaine. Pure, like they had just beaten it out of a leaf in Colombia and somebody had carried the leaf to us and turned it into powder in front of us just so we knew how pure it was.'
Organic qualities of the drug aside, it turned the set into a strange, bacchanalian place, where dealers were omnipresent and where actors would turn their per diems – daily expenses handed out in cash – into drugs. Weed had made films such as Easy Rider slurring, slow environments, but the mania that cocaine led to meant that the picture was made in a perpetual frenzy. The actor Michael O'Keefe, who was on set for 11 weeks, called it 'a permanent party'.
'Cocaine was everywhere,' he recalled. 'It was driving everyone. People would come into your dressing room with salt shakers and it would be lunch and someone would say, 'Do you want to do a line?' 'Yeah, sure!' It was no big deal. This was the '70s. No one thought anything was wrong about it. Those of us that did it got sucked into the whole bacchanalian rave of it, and believe me when I tell you we went as mad as any of the ancient Greeks.'
The finished film – for better or for worse – lives entirely up to this madness. The subplot about the cast (including Bill Murray and Chevy Chase) being frustrated by an omnipresent gopher, in particular, has a Loony Tunes-esque quality that suggests that it was dreamt up in a cocaine-fuelled frenzy, and remains one of the film's strangest, yet most enduring, facets.
9. Dazed and Confused (1993)
Today, Richard Linklater is one of Hollywood's most venerated directors, an eclectic filmmaker whose carefully considered pictures normally receive critical raves. Three decades ago, it was quite a different story. When the 33-year-old director began making his cult coming-of-age picture Dazed and Confused, he was keen to have his young cast behave as naturally as possible. Arguably, he took this to extremes. Ben Affleck, who appeared in an early role, later recalled that the director was 'just letting all these 19-year-olds hang out and get drunk and get stoned and run around the hotel and cause trouble'.
Linklater had cast many of the young actors via what he called a 'casting pizza party', in which he placed various photogenic types (including Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger) in duos and encouraged them to kiss one another to see if there was real chemistry.
In some cases, this chemistry went slightly too far. Two of the actors, Milla Jovovich and Shawn Ashmore, hit it off so well that they left the set and eloped to Las Vegas, although their initial plan to marry was stymied by Jovovich only being sixteen at the time. And although Linklater made sure that the copious quantities of marijuana being smoked on camera were fake, there was a great deal of Method acting taking place.
10. The Canyons (2013)
Most mainstream pictures these days are (apparently) clean-living and well-regimented, which is why we must give thanks for the sheer chaos that proliferated on the set of The Canyons, a study of sexual mores on the fringes of the film industry. Admittedly, any collaboration between Paul Schrader, Bret Easton Ellis and Lindsay Lohan – three individuals hardly known for their restraint in public life – was likely to be an eventful one. But even by the standards of other pictures, The Canyons proved to be debauched.
Lohan took the role as she wished to be taken seriously as an actress and escape her reputation as a party girl, but it did not help that she spent her nights drinking and her days hungover, often failing to turn up on set for filming. Eventually, Schrader tired of her poor behaviour and fired her – he had wanted to cast the French actress and model Leslie Coutterand instead – only for her to tearfully petition him to be reinstated by banging on his hotel room door for 90 minutes straight.
Worse was to come. Lohan had been cast opposite the adult film actor James Deen, who kept disappearing from filming simulated sex scenes to go off and film the real thing. Audio later leaked of her shouting at him on set to 'do his f--king job', which, with the best will in the world, he knew rather more about than she did. When the time came for him to shoot a love scene with Lohan, the actress refused, and so Schrader stripped naked himself to put her at ease.
Finally, Lohan refused to promote the picture with interviews or photoshoots, claiming that she was newly sober and that the stress of remembering what she had been through on set would cause her to relapse. Bizarrely, given everything, Schrader and Easton Ellis continue to stand by the picture; Lohan has been less effusive about it, although she has acknowledged that she was 'a pain in the ass on set'. This was, to say the least, an understatement.