5 Famous Movies That Were Insane Parties Behind the Scenes

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.

Universal Studios

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.

Universal Studios

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

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.

Universal Studios

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.

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."

Universal Studios

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.

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.

Universal Studios

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."

Warner Bros.

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?

Warner Bros.

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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.