5 Insane Parties (Disguised As Movies)

"This 'no shirts, no service' is some bullshit, man."

Those not fortunate enough to run into the casting director at a hotel bar had to earn their stripes at the "casting pizza party," a free-for-all where all the potential actors were gathered together to try out for just about every role. One part of the audition process involved pairing the actors off and having them make out with each other, because this is a critical part of the storytelling process. According to Jason London, who was eventually cast in the lead, he and every other guy got to make out with "like, three different girls each."

Once all of the unknown teenagers and 20-somethings were cast, it was time to cram them all into the same hotel for two months, where they spent most of their downtime drinking and smoking pot in the hotel lobby, along with having more sex than Olympic Village athletes. And when they weren't busy challenging the hotel's guest expulsion guidelines, the cast of Dazed and Confused were doing every single drug in the state of Texas while spending all night tubing in the Guadalupe River. The nightly mind expansion was so potent, it caused the then-16-year-old Milla Jovovich to run off to Vegas and marry one of her co-stars. Her mother had the marriage annulled, but unfortunately was not able to do the same years later when Jovovich married Luc Besson and the director of the Resident Evil movies.

Paul W.S. Anderson (the "W.S." stands for " way shittier").

Let's save both you and the universe some time by never asking that question ever again. As a general rule, John Belushi was destroyed when he was on set, perhaps no more so than when filming The Blues Brothers, his and Dan Aykroyd's tribute to doughy white people truffle-shuffling their way through blues standards. Everyone involved in that production did their share of drugs, especially cocaine, which was actually worked into the film's budget. But they all saved the brain-tickling moon dust for night shoots, because what maniac would load himself up in the middle of the day on the set of a multimillion-dollar movie?

It was originally set in winter, but he kept inhaling the fake snow.

John Belushi, that's who. Belushi treated drugs like his full-time job -- the movie was incidental. It didn't help that The Blues Brothers was filmed in his native Chicago, where every junkie in town wanted to say they got their hometown hero high. As a result, Belushi would routinely disappear for hours on end. Aykroyd had to go on numerous adventures simply to locate his sky-high co-star and carry him back to work. On one occasion, Aykroyd found Belushi sleeping on a couch in a complete stranger's house at 3 o'clock in the morning. Aykroyd just kind of shook Belushi into a state of semi-consciousness and dragged him back to filming. Presumably a portion of Belushi's scenes in The Blues Brothers were actually performed by Aykroyd manipulating Belushi's drug-slumbering body like the titular corpse puppet in Weekend at Bernie's.

"I paid Jim Henson 50 grand to help me jury rig pulleys to the steering wheel."

And if Belushi couldn't find any random enablers to party with, he'd host his own Miami Vice deleted scene all by himself. On one occasion, director John Landis walked into Belushi's trailer to find his lead actor perched behind a literal mountain of cocaine. Landis had to battle Belushi for about 15 seconds before the man finally apologized and agreed to allow his stash to be flushed safely down the toilet. Belushi got so out of control that he eventually hired a bodyguard whose sole job was to prevent him from doing any more drugs while they were still filming. He was essentially the Bruce Banner of that production, requiring constant care and vigilance to prevent him from hulking out, tearing his trailer in half, and reappearing four days later on a moped in a pair of hobo pants.

" That's my secret, Dan. I'm always high."

And while we're on the subject of Belushi ...

" Tom really wanted it."

In order to get into character as asshole frat boys, the cast decided to attend a real-life asshole frat party and mingle, because they somehow managed to convince the production team that this qualified as "research." The real-life fraternity members didn't appreciate these "Hollywood faggots" (that is a direct quote) taking up their precious drinking-and-sexual-assault space, so actor James Widdoes responded the only way he knew how -- by tossing a beer at the first jock he saw. This triggered a huge brawl that gave McGill a black eye and nearly cost Widdoes some of his teeth (to be fair, he had cruelly wasted an entire beer). When Belushi arrived on set the next day and heard about the fight, he had to be physically restrained from exploding into the fraternity house and teaching them exactly why an entire movie studio was keeping him annexed from the rest of the cast (see "John Belushi is the Hulk," above).

If only there were some inspiring words he could have said to get the crew on his side.

The rest of the cast was made up of real-life hockey goons (including the legendary Hanson brothers), who had absolutely no interest in pursuing acting careers but were utterly delighted to get stone-cold shitfaced with Paul Newman every single night. They would intentionally screw up their scenes, sometimes by stripping naked and slapping their dongs around like stingy ketchup bottles, just to get a laugh from their co-stars. Finishing the movie and eventually getting an audience to laugh was nowhere on their agenda -- that was a happy accident.

"Puttin' on the foil ... everywhere."

"What do you mean, 'He stole a boat'? Fuck it, keep rolling."

And it wasn't just him -- pretty much the entire cast did all of the drugs for the entirety of the shoot. To wit, the whole film crew requested to be paid in cash, because drug dealers don't accept forwarded checks. And when you have to send one of your actresses to go searching for Bill Murray, only to find him sleeping in a sand trap, it's not just because " He's Bill Murray and he can do whatever he wants." It's because "Bill Murray is titanically wasted, and also can do whatever he wants."

"So, I've got everything going for me ... which is nice."

Some of the cast would occasionally race golf carts in the dead of night in the pitch dark, destroying both the carts and the fairways on which they raced and nearly killing someone in the process, because comedy demands motorized cart sacrifice. Oh, and remember that climactic scene wherein Bill Murray's character blows up the golf course to try to kill a gopher? Not one bit of that was staged -- the cast and crew of Caddyshack decided to actually detonate a golf course without notifying anyone beforehand that they were going to do so. This led to someone mistakenly reporting the explosion as a plane crash. Why that person didn't use common sense to deduce that some drunken comedian was intentionally causing thousands of dollars' worth of damage to convincingly pretend to murder a puppet, nobody knows. By that point, didn't people just assume this sort of thing when a movie was filming nearby?

"If anyone asks, blame it on Chevy. Fuck that guy."

Follow Russell on Twitter.

Get the lowdown on more movies with 30 Mind-Blowing (True) Facts about Famous Movie Scenes.

Related Reading: Speaking of parties, have you read about the two times Andrew Jackson's shenanigans destroyed the White House? If you'd rather read about a party you AREN'T centuries too late to attend, check out this insane burning tar festival. If all this has you hankering for a shindig of your own, be sure to read these party hacks first.