5 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
This Robin Williams movie had the most 'coked-up film set,' ex-studio boss says
The filming of Robert Altman's 'Popeye' was powered by a lot more than spinach, according to the man in charge of the studio that produced the movie.
The 1980 live-action adaptation, starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, was the 'most coked-up film set,' according to Barry Diller, the CEO of Paramount Pictures at the time.
'Film cans would be sent back to L.A. for daily processing film. This was shot in Malta,' Diller revealed during a recent onstage conversation with Anderson Cooper at New York City's 92nd Street Y. 'We found out that the film cans were actually being used to ship cocaine back and forth to this set. Everyone was stoned.'
Diller is currently promoting his memoir 'Who Knew,' which details his career, including his time in charge at Paramount from 1974-84.
'If you watch 'Popeye,' you're watching a movie that — you think of it in the thing that they used to do about record speeds, 33 (RPM), whatever — this is a movie that runs at 78 RPM and 33 speed,' he said.
Cooper then asked Diller if he 'instantly knew' that everyone on the film's set was high when he visited.
'Knew it?' Diller said. 'You couldn't escape it.'
'Popeye' was the big screen debut of Williams, a Redwood High School graduate who was a longtime Bay Area resident until his suicide at 63 in 2014. The stand-up comic had just experienced a breakthrough when he was cast as the alien Mork from Ork in an episode of the sitcom 'Happy Days.' The character proved so popular that it spun off into its own series, 'Mork & Mindy,' co-starring Pam Dawber. His performance as Mork caught Altman's eye when he was casting for the titular sailor man.
'Popeye' was originally a comic strip by Elzie Crisler Segar, which debuted in 1929 and was adapted into a series of short animated cartoons.
Williams openly discussed his fight against addiction, which escalated during his rise to stardom in the 1970s when cocaine was prevalent in the entertainment industry. He told People magazine in a 1988 interview that he used cocaine 'to hide' but quit when his first wife, Valerie Velardi, became pregnant with their son, Zachary.
