5 Insane Parties (Disguised As Movies)

5

Dazed and Confused Was Fueled by Drinking, Hookups, and Real Pot

Dazed and Confused, at its heart, is a movie about high school kids whining and being stoned for 90 minutes, and yet it still managed to become one of the biggest cult hits of the '90s and launched the careers of both Matthew McConaughey and Ben Affleck, which is a dubious but undeniable distinction. This is even more noteworthy considering that just about every member of the cast treated it like one extended teenage fuck party. And no, the cast of Dazed and Confused didn't bother to sober up once the cameras started rolling. They figured the best way for their characters to appear stoned was to actually be stoned, because when you're making a film about ultra-high teenagers, authenticity is everything.

Pictured: Not acting.

The craziness started before the movie even began filming, when McConaughey managed to get cast without even knowing he was auditioning. He just happened to run into the casting director at a bar, and the two got along so well that they wound up getting kicked out for being too loud and rowdy, officially marking the first time that people in a public setting became tired of Matthew McConaughey.

"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").

4

The Blues Brothers Was John Belushi's One-Man Cocaine Party

John Belushi was equal parts comedic genius and cocaine-possessed party demon, but the man was also a career performer and a reasonably talented actor. That means he at least made an effort to clean up for work, right?

3

The Animal House Actors Acted Like Frat Boys the Entire Shoot

Before The Blues Brothers, John Landis had cast John Belushi in Animal House, one of the craziest films about college debauchery ever produced. It all but invented the R-rated booze-and-sex comedy genre, so you can only imagine the kind of Herculean mischief Belushi got himself into on the set of that film.

Actually, the answer is nothing. The rest of the cast, however, more than made up for it.

Pictured: acting?

That's right -- while filming a movie about drunken fraternity sex goblins, Belushi didn't do a fucking thing. Improbably, his most famous role as a frenetic substance abuser went off without a hitch. The people in charge of Animal House had the amazing foresight to anticipate that Belushi's trademark Belushiness might cause a problem with production, so they stuck him in the suburbs with his wife, Judy, far away from everyone else. (For whatever reason, Landis forgot this powerful lesson when making The Blues Brothers years later.)

However, the rest of the cast apparently got together and decided to method act the shit out of this thing. Once shooting had wrapped at the end of each day, actor Bruce McGill's room became the nexus of recreational self-destruction, complete with loud music and "strange smoke" emanating at all hours. The loud music, by the way, came from a hotel piano that the cast had stolen from the lobby.

2

Slap Shot Was an Excuse for Paul Newman to Drink Beer and Act Crazy

Slap Shot, the cult hit movie about a bunch of assholes playing hockey, was brought to life by a bunch of assholes drinking themselves into oblivion and then pretending to play hockey, the chief asshole being the film's star, Paul Newman.

Newman reportedly ordered a hundred cases of Coors beer, and would go through at least one case each day. Ashamed of this obvious shortcoming, the other guys in the cast would pick up Newman's slack and attempt to drink even more. Actually shooting the movie they had all been hired to make revolved around whatever time of day the crew was able to tear free from their booze-haze slumber and decide to start acting. This is a tactful way of saying "whenever Paul Newman could stop throwing up on himself long enough to recite his dialogue."

"My boy says he can drink 50 beers, he can drink 50 beers."

The behind-the-scenes lunacy didn't begin and end with mere drunkenness. The cast would routinely enter rental cars into impromptu demolition derbies, because alcoholism doesn't become hilarious until you're driving a car. Pranks were all the rage, ranging from the merely amusing (filling Newman's private sauna with popcorn) to the flat-out disturbing (duct taping a cast member to a bench and shaving his pubic hair). One time, Newman even staged a seemingly fatal car crash to punish the director for refusing to buy him any more beer that day.

1

Caddyshack Was a Raucous Drug Fest (Barely) Disguised as a Movie

Caddyshack was arguably the first great improvised comedy, paving the way for Will Ferrell to make millions of dollars screaming at things 20 years later. However, "improvised comedy" back in the 1970s was another way of saying "cocaine-misted sleepover with a half-assed script lying around for some reason." Director Harold Ramis had never directed before, Rodney Dangerfield had barely ever acted before, and getting toasted every night was both tolerated and highly encouraged. It wasn't so much a movie as an 11-week party whose hosts occasionally turned a camera on to film something.

Dangerfield set the tone very early on by whipping out a bag of cocaine and doing a couple of lines during his audition. It should be noted that at no point in the film does his character do drugs -- Rodney apparently just felt that the casting director should know he meant business. He then proceeded to make up just about every line of dialogue he had, not bothering with the "script" Ramis and a few others inexplicably decided to write.