Troubled Movie Shoots

[Gothampc]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 10:55pm

We always hear about troubled movie shoots, sometimes where the actors don't get along, sometimes where the actor is going through personal problems, etc.

Is there any scene where you think the personal came through and can be seen on film?

[best12bars]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 11:01pm

Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Baby Jane. There are several instances where I think it showed on both sides.

[Liza's Headband]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 11:02pm

THE PIRATE with Judy Garland. Sadly, It was the beginning of the end for our dear Judy.

[Gothampc]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 11:06pm

I believe it was said that Vera-Ellen was anorexic and had to wear costumes that hid her thinness and premature aging.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 11:11pm

I think THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU reads on film as a troubled shoot, patched together in the editing room.

What with Brando wearing an ice bucket on his head and all.

[Jonwo]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 11:16pm

Cleopatra is the most infamous with the massive budget overrun with changes in location, illness etc which nearly bankrupted Fox, it was The Sound of Music two years later which saved the studio.

George Clooney and David O'Russell didn't get on at all during the shooting of Three Kings as Clooney thought O'Russell was mistreating an extra.

[jnb9872]

Posted: 12/14/13 at 11:38pm

I'll give Clooney and Russell credit, though, and say I don't THREE KINGS suffers any from any visible, apparent tension there.

Isn't the one of the definitive examples of this Terry Gilliam's attempted THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE, which turned into the great documentary LOST IN LA MANCHA after it completely fell apart?

[SNAFU]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 12:52am

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is absolutely HEARTBREAKING! The flood scene was incredible!

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 12:56am

The Exorcist

[bobs3]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 2:22am

THE DIVINE RAPTURE started filming in Cork County, Ireland in 1995. It starred Johnny Depp, Marlon Brando, and Debra Winger but the producers had no money. The actors weren't paid, the director wasn't paid, the crew wasn't being paid, the local vendors weren't being paid. Winger's agent went to collect her fee from the production company's escrow deposit company in Los Angeles, only to discover a parking lot at the given address. Brando received $1 million of his $4 million salary in advance but none of the other actors received a dime. Two weeks into filming production was halted and the actors and American crew had to pay their own way back to the states.

[bobs3]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 2:43am

There was no love between Ed Harris and James Cameron on the shoot of THE ABYSS -- to this day Harris will not talk about the film.

Bill Murray was notoriously troublesome on the shoot for CHARLIE'S ANGELS -- it got so bad at one point that Lucy Lui reportedly punched (or slapped) him in the face.

Faye Dunaway and Roman Polanski had a notoriously difficult relationship on the set of CHINATOWN.

During the filming of I HEART HUCKABEES, Lily Tomlin and David O. Russell had several screaming matches (some of which are on YOU TUBE -- leaked by an anonymous crew member).

The clashes Alec Baldwin had on THE MARRYING KIND with the director, the studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg and writer Neil Simon are notorious.

Cher had director Frank Oz fired from the set of MERMAIDS and Richard Benjamin was brought in to complete the film.

Director Bryan Singer and leading lady Halle Berry were at each others throats during the filming of X2.

Nick Nolte and Bette Midler couldn't stand each other while shooting DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS. Years later when a reporter asked her if she would like to another film with Nolte she replied very coldly "Not particularly."

And of course, JAWS, WATERWORLD and TITANIC all had troubled shoots -- as one director said "Anytime you are working on water, you are just asking for trouble."

Updated On: 12/15/13 at 02:43 AM

[AEA AGMA SM]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 5:33am

"And of course, JAWS, WATERWORLD and TITANIC all had troubled shoots -- as one director said "Anytime you are working on water, you are just asking for trouble." "

What's interesting there is that in the case of JAWS all that trouble seems to have led Spielberg to deliver a better movie. Because of all of the troubles with the mechanical sharks he had to rely on a lot of other, probably far more successful, ways to build up tension and create fear of the titular shark.

[best12bars]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 8:24am

Walter Matthau and Barbra Streisand couldn't stand each other while making Hello Dolly!, but I don't think it shows at all on the screen. Their scenes together are the best in the film. That's two pros for ya. When the cameras rolled, there chemistry was great. But it's common knowledge that they didn't like each other at all.

Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy didn't like each other either. And they made many successful films together.

[trentsketch]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 9:53am

Indie horror superstar Lucky McKee was supposed to have his big break with the thriller Red. No, not the action film about retired secret agents. The revenge film about an old man making a group of bad teens pay for robbing him and shooting his dog just for fun.

The studio hated everything about Lucky McKee's approach to the film. McKee does character study above all else. Look at May. Nothing overtly scary starts to happen until over halfway through the film when the title character is desperately seeking someone (anyone) to be her friend.

The studio hated the dailies, hated their onset visits, and eventually fired McKee against the wishes of the cast and crew halfway through the shoot. They replaced him with Trygve Allister Diesen, a Russian director best known for his work on TV after a minor indie success in 2002 (?). He focused his attention on the action scenes and gave the studio the mindless popcorn thriller they wanted.

When the film was edited together, half of it was a really heartbreaking character study about a man willing to do anything to avenge the loss of his best friend. The other half was bang bang shoot shoot tough guy posturing and squibs. It's a wild film to watch. I've never seen any other film so at odds with itself. The actors change their approach to the characters scene by scene because McKee and Diesen approached the film from such opposing viewpoints. They were both control freaks who both wanted everything done their own way, but the studio wanted mindless popcorn entertainment, not a genre-bending art film, so they let Diesen take over completely.

[bobs3]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 11:31am

You wouldn't know it by watching the finished the film but on the set of AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN, Debra Winger could not stand Richard Gere. In the famous sex scene where Winger is in tears while making love to Gere she was not acting -- she loathed having to pretend she was actually having sex with Gere and enjoying it.

Of course, there are the many stories of the turbulent relationship between Winger and Shirley MacLaine on the set of TERMS OF ENDEARMENT.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 12:21pm

Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine clashed on set for Terms of Endearment and the way MacLaine speaks of Winger in her Oscar speech can pretty much inform you that there was tension.

There's Kubrick and Duvall in The Shining that effectively creates that space of isolation of the character.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz treated Montgomery Clift very poorly and did not inform Katharine Hepburn just how harsh he would shoot her to match the character she was playing in Suddenly, Last Summer. After her last day for the film, she spat in Mankiewicz's face although mostly on Clift's behalf.

I was about to note the Lily Tomlin-David O. Russell spat. Just watch those clips for how the rest of the cast, namely Dustin Hoffman and Isabelle Huppert, go stone-faced. I don't really see it in the film but that's because there is no real correlation between the film's space and real-life because of its absurdity.

The Blue is the Warmest Color issues between the crew, actresses and the director have been long noted but of course, people just talk about the sex scene and not that the movie was swimming in a lot of labor controversies. I also don't really feel anything is out of place on-screen.

One shocking one, and this is because the man actually has a shockingly good reputation with actors, is that on the set of Michael Haneke's Amour that Jean Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva actually hated each other.

Raymond Massey and James Dean in East of Eden was one where I could see the tension but more in style. They're in battle of trying to be in their kind of movie with their kind of acting.

Look up The Devil's Candy on the making of The Bonfire of The Vanities. Melanie Griffith manages to be the only soul worth a damn in that movie but when you read how she was treated on set, she is almost doing in it in a 'I'll show all of y'all!' kind of defiance.

Then you have the mother of it all, Apocalypse Now. Francis Ford Coppola loses his mind, a hundred pounds, a lot of his lifetime savings, typhoons delaying filming, Harvey Keitel is fired from the role of Willard, Martin Sheen has a heart attack and is drunk during most of filming, Brando is seemingly putting on the pounds in a yo-yo diet that forces Coppola to cast him largely in shadows, Coppola having no idea that Laurence Fishburne was a teenager when he cast him, the ending being re-shot, re-written, and finally improvised which in the context of the film makes complete sense when you wonder how to exactly move beyond just killing Kurtz. It's a brilliant, exhausting film, that pretty much lived its entire experience.


Updated On: 12/15/13 at 12:21 PM

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 12:41pm

Mutiny On The Bounty. Richard Harris loathed Brando.Brando was being considered for Lawrence Of Arabia but his b.s. on Mutiny led Lean to go in a different direction. Albert Finney was to play him and did a few scenes and than pulled out. The rest is history.

Updated On: 12/15/13 at 12:41 PM

[trentsketch]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 1:57pm

You can literally see how much Alfred Hitchcock hated Vera Miles in Psycho with that intentionally awful wig he put on her head. The most worthwhile part of that Hitchcock movie with Helen Mirren was the sequence where Vera Miles talked about Alfred tormenting her onset. The negative relationship doesn't make itself clear in the performance or direction, just that wig.

Rumor has it that no one could stand Shirley MacLaine on the set of Bernie, but that would actually help that film. It's good to be hated when a town tries to get a man off of a first degree murder charge because the victim is an insufferable snit.

[JerseyGirl2]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 3:18pm

Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey couldn't stand each other on the set of Dirty Dancing. I think it totally shows.

[Jane2]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 3:46pm

Jaws - Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw disliked each other. I thought it showed at times in the film.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 12/15/13 at 6:37pm

Interesting that the cast had a hard time on THE ABYSS. I still think it's Ed Harris' sexiest and most charismatic performance.