Movie Sets That Were One Big Party
Lots of movies look like the actors had fun making them, but the real behind-the-scenes story is most often nothing like the onscreen hijinks. Instead, it's maybe more like a ho-hum experience, strictly professional, or even downright despicable.
So we totally love it when we hear about movies where the cast totally bonds, and it's even better when they maybe enjoy each other's company a little too much — like, so much that they destroy a fleet of golf carts, or get inebriated before that big scene, or are nowhere to be found when the director calls for action.
Here's a look at some of those awesome times when movie buds became real, honest-to-goodness friends, hung out even when they weren't filming, and got into trouble together. Some people involved won't be a shocker (John Belushi), but some might catch you by surprise (sweet, gorgeous Rebecca Romijn?). Here's the real scoop on the real-life sex, drugs, and rock and roll that happened even after the director called cut.
More Like Drunkard Games
Jennifer Lawrence is pretty open when it comes to partying (and how she's not that great at it). As she told Harper's Bazaar, "If I do stay out late and I'm partying hard, I will throw up. I don't have the tolerance to black out; I just start puking." Like the time she and Emma Stone yacked after an Adele concert, or when she barfed after Madonna's Oscar after party. She even got tipsy with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show after finding out he had a Mad Men-style bar onset.
Another time JLaw hit the bottle? While filming Hunger Games: Catching Fire. She and Woody Harrelson (who was there for the Adele debacle) decided to get drinks, but — whoops! — they were needed on set. Oh well. Co-star Josh Hutcherson remembers the two running around laughing the whole time. "We were drunk," Lawrence later admitted. "That was fun. That was the first time I've ever drank at work."
Even when the cast wasn't drinking, there was still other merriment going on. According to director Francis Lawrence, it wasn't only Lawrence and Harrelson getting into mischief together. "It's usually Jen and Josh and Woody, the trio. When that trio gets together..." Co-star Liam Hemsworth added that Harrelson was always making everyone laugh, whether in character or not. Sounds like filming this one was a blast, and the friendship Lawrence and Harrelson formed is firmly at the center of it all.
Dazed, Confused and Having a Blast
Richard Linklater's 1992 cult favorite Dazed and Confused is a coming-of-age classic. It was where we first saw Renee Zellweger, it's where Matthew McConaughey's "All right, all right, all right" originated, and it brought a huge group of future stars together.
Considering most of them were in their 20s and playing beer-drinking stoners, is it any wonder they got into a heap of fun? Linklater has admitted that although he had strict rules on set, the actors later confessed to actually being stoned in many of the scenes. The cast was seen smoking, drinking beer, and playing cards in the hotel lobby together — sometimes into the next morning, when the regular clientele came down for breakfast. Milla Jovovich and Shawn Andrews even fell in love and eloped to Las Vegas during filming. The marriage was later annulled, since Jovovich was only 16 years old at the time.
On days off, McConaughey arranged tubing expeditions down the Guadalupe River. Castmate Sasha Jenson told Texas Monthly, "We'd work all night and then go watch the sun come up, floating on the river. Sometimes we wouldn't even sleep — but, hey, we're supposed to look like we're so damned tired and stoned and drunk anyway." Joey Lauren Adams confirmed how bonded the ensemble was, admitting there were "crazy hook-ups... all (of us) in a hotel for two months together." Well all right, all right, all right.
Blurred Lines
2013's indie Drinking Buddies is a gem set in a Chicago brewery, starring Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, and Ron Livingston. The Atlantic calls it a "charming, effective, and plausible romantic comedy." Though director Joe Swanberg had a story arc and specific beats he wanted the cast to hit, the rest was up to the actors. Also, the beer they drank throughout the movie? It's real.
Between the alcohol and improv, it's not surprising the cast got super chummy. "We were hammered the entire movie because it was real beer," Wilde said. The authentic nature of the set took Kendrick by surprise; as she put it, "I was pounding beer, and I didn't realize it was real until halfway through the take. I was like, I'm super drunk right now! " Wilde added, "We were like, 'Oh, we forgot to tell you — the beer's all real and everyone's drunk. It's 10AM, welcome to Drinking Buddies.' "
The cast had just as much fun together offscreen. They hit the town several times in Chicago, and had a blast staying at a Lake Michigan hotel Wilde described as "cool, rickety, haunted." There, things the actors did together recreationally ended up in the actual movie. A beach bonfire scene when Wilde's character goes skinny dipping was inspired by the bonfire the cast enjoyed together the night before. In Drinking Buddies, art imitates life, and life imitates art.
Brothers from another mother
When Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi took the Blues Brothers from SNL to double platinum album to movie, things were bound to get crazy. Though the two were opposites — Akyroyd a mad scientist type and Belushi the teddy bear everyman — Aykroyd told Vanity Fair their first meeting was "love at first sight." The same article reveals the movie's legendary behind-the-scenes stories.
Most of the film was shot in Chicago, where Belushi liked to take advantage of his hometown hero status by hailing police cars like they were taxis. Belushi and Aykroyd lived on the top two floors of the Astor Tower, and were regulars at local bars as well as the Blues Club, an on-set drinking establishment they had built expressly for them. One night, the pair pilfered Nazi uniforms and drove offset and down the freeway. Belushi even set up Aykroyd with castmate Carrie Fisher, and the two got engaged during filming after Aykroyd had to Heimlich Fischer when she choked on Brussels sprouts at dinner.
But it wasn't all lighthearted laughs. Belushi's infamous drug problem spiraled out of control. One night, Belushi was AWOL and Aykroyd found him passed out on a couch in a random house in the Harvey, Illinois neighborhood where they were shooting. Director John Landis found Belushi with a mountain of drugs and flushed it all down the toilet. Admitted Aykroyd, "We had a budget in the movie for cocaine for night shoots."
Double Secret Probation
Animal House is the classic college party movie, so it's no surprise that the fun and games extended beyond the set. The offscreen stories include frat house fights, altered states, and a stolen piano.
Director John Landis brought Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert and the other actors cast as Delta Tau brothers up to the University of Oregon five days before shooting to bond. That week, they created all of the graffiti in we see the movie frat house. They also decided it would be a great idea to hit up a real frat party, which spurred a major brawl that ended in lost teeth and a black eye.
The hijinks continued at the Rodeway Inn after shooting wrapped each day. "It was a kind of campus," Reigert told Entertainment Weekly. "We all had gargantuan energy and no families or anything, so you never slept." When they noticed an old piano in the lobby, the cast absconded with it, wheeling it across the parking lot and into Bruce "D-Day" McGill's room. Every night after, that's where the party was. "There was a lot of strange smoke," said McGill. As for Kevin Bacon, who was cast as an Omega? "The Delta guys certainly didn't want to hang out with me. Sometimes I found my way in the door, but generally no."
Pranks and Beer
Slap Shot is the definitive hockey movie. The key is authenticity: The cast included real players, Paul Newman did his own skating, and the f-bomb count lands at 176. Sports fans still quote the film more than 40 years after it was released.
According to The Making of Slap Shot: Behind the Scenes of the Greatest Hockey Movie Ever Made, the team bonding extended offset, often until all hours of the night and sometimes into the next morning. Drinking contests were common, during which Newman downed entire cases. "I drank more beer on that shoot than I had in my entire life until that shoot," recalled castmate Allan Nicholls. The "Hanson Brothers" had never acted before and didn't care much about the rules of Hollywood — they would go out drinking all night and just kind of show up on set whenever they felt like it.
And then there were the pranks. Newman staged a "fatal" car crash after director George Hill refused to pick up a bar tab. When Hill approached the scene crying, Newman just grinned. The rest of the cast got in on the action, too. "We pulled more pranks I think than they ever experienced on a movie set before," Hanson told NHL.com. "It just became one big, happy family throughout the whole three months that we filmed together." The cast filled up Newman's sauna with popcorn, lit shoelaces on fire, and filled hair dryers with baby powder. Score!
Be the ball? More like have a ball
Another National Lampoon creation, another crazy party on and off set. The comedy classic Caddyshack was filmed in 1979 in South Florida, when the cocaine business was booming. The talented young cast, which included Bill Murray and Chevy Chase, were more than happy to indulge in the area's specialty. "It was a pretty debauched country at the time," explained director Harold Ramis in an interview with Sports Illustrated. "Everyone was doing everything." A hurricane that temporarily stopped filming was used as an excuse to party even harder.
One time Bill Murray was over-served and later found sleeping in a sand trap. And though Ramis abstained during the actual filming, even he went a little too hard during the wrap party. He apparently remembered very little of the evening and had to be carried home.
"It was pretty... nuts on that set," agreed Chase. "At night, we would race golf carts down the fairways, people whacked out having a good time." The cast reportedly even reenacted a tank battle at one point that left the club's carts in shambles. But not everyone was having a blast. Ted Knight, a traditionally trained actor and older than most of his castmates, was frustrated with all the shenanigans and improv. "The whole atmosphere was alien to him, young people running around in South Florida being crazy," Ramis said. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man.
Love Moves Pretty Fast
Ferris Bueller's Day Off is another comedy classic where on-set relationships transferred to real life ones, and vice versa. Alan Ruck and Matthew Broderick were actually friends before shooting, having worked together in the play Biloxi Blues. So when the studio complained that Ruck, who was 29 at the time, was too old to play an 18-year-old, his agent simply had to point to the fact that the two had already starred together playing characters the same age. They ended up sharing a trailer on the set.
Love blossomed twice during the making of the movie. Jennifer Grey, who plays Ferris' sister Jeannie, and Broderick totally hit it off while filming and got engaged soon after the film's release. Cupid hit again with the actors who played Broderick's parents: Lyman Ward (his onscreen father) and Cindy Pickett (Ferris' mom) got married soon after meeting on the set and had two kids.
As for Charlie Sheen, it would be easy to think his haggard, drugged-out look in the movie was due to excessive extracurricular partying given his history. But nope, that's not the case. He and Grey knew each other from filming Red Dawn, and Grey liked him so much she recommended him for the part. Sheen stayed up 48 straight hours to look that tired in his scenes with her.
Money...balls
Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah HIll, earned six Academy Award nominations including Best Film, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. But the biggest award it should have won was for the incredible pranks that happened behind the scenes.
In the film, Pitt's and Hill's characters have a sort of brotherly relationship that translated into real life. The bottom line: Brad tortured Hill like a little brother. Pitt attached fake genitalia to Hill's car, who failed to discover it until he was on the road. And then there were all the Wham!-based pranks. It started slowly, with Pitt hanging a picture of the '80s band in Hill's office. But by the end of the shoot, Pitt had turned Hill's golf cart into a Wham!-mobile, wrapping it in hot pink, attaching a photoshopped picture of Hill and George Michael, and rigging the cart so it blasted the song "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go" on a loud, endless loop.
All jokes aside, Hill called Pitt "insanely cool" and "extremely funny." The feeling is apparently mutual. As Pitt quipped on Inside the Actors Studio, "You complete me, Jonah."