Given that this was the '70s and he's only the seventh-weirdest-at-the-time thing in that picture, you might think that the cast and crew must have been blasted out of their minds half the time -- and not in the plasma-gun sense. You would be right, to the extent that character animator Phil Tippett thought nothing of nipping off for a little acid break during production of Return Of The Jedi. He felt fine, so he went back to work, where he realized he was so not fine, maaaaan. But he powered on, having received a vision for the Rancor pit monster, which he describes as "a cross between a bear and a potato."

At least this explains Tippett's future failure at dinosaur supervision. He was far from the only one "expanding his mind" while making these movies. It's hard to tell how much of what we see on-screen is the result of creative genius and how much is just drugs, but one thing's for sure: Once you notice Carrie Fisher's coke nail, you will never unsee it.

Lucasfilm
She confirmed it on Twitter, but we're just impressed she can remember that decade at all.

Thankfully, Fisher didn't let the infamous partying that once prompted John Belushi to tell her she had a problem affect her performance -- mostly. Have you ever noticed how Han and Leia are smiling when they arrive in Cloud City, a dangerous mission that they should be not at all happy to embark upon? That's because, according to Fisher, they were both up partying with The Rolling Stones and Monty Python the night before and arrived on set still wasted. To paraphrase Fisher: Look, when The Stones come over, you don't turn them away, early calls be damned. It's hard to say she was wrong.

Lucasfilm

Lucasfilm

Lucasfilm
Maybe the prequels would be a lot better if Natalie Portman and the other dude had partied with 'NSync.

How could a junkie write some of the best family entertainment of the past 25 years? The answer is, he didn't mean to.

It turns out that Cool Runnings, Swerdlow's and Goldberg's first movie, wasn't supposed to be family-friendly at all. Swerdlow's original draft featured that scrappy Jamaican bobsled team "fucking the Scandinavian ski team and smoking spliffs," according to him. Which would have been truer to the spirit of the Olympics, actually. But when Executive Producer Chris Meledandri saw the script, he took a deep breath, arranged his face into a model of straightness, and began to fix it, doling out notes to the writers little by little ... until they woke up one day and realized they had written a PG movie. After its success, Swerdlow and Goldberg became known as the guys you go to for a family film, and Swerdlow, at least, was hardly in a position to refuse. Heroin is expensive, y'all.

At one point, he and Goldberg were even hired to write the original Chris Farley version of Shrek. While the final product is very different from their outlines, Swerdlow says, he came up with the buddy-comedy angle -- basing Shrek and Donkey's friendship on Midnight Cowboy (so one's a con man who dies, and one's a gigolo).

Reddit
Wonder how long it took him to realize he was writing a movie about a "donkey," not a "junkie."

This could have been a real Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead situation, but the odd couple of Goldberg and Swerdlow worked surprisingly well together. Goldberg was the "social mouthpiece" for the duo, so no one had to see Swerdlow nod out on the conference table. This left him free to write and shoot up in solitude, after which Goldberg would provide the invaluable criticism that turned those dope-soaked drafts into after-school outings. One can only imagine what those notes must have looked like. "No, Cuba cannot get the snow dogs stoned."

Before the scene, Shaw disappeared just off-set, and it immediately became clear that he interpreted the concept of "a few drinks" rather liberally when he had to be carried out onto the boat and propped up in his chair like a corpse posing for a Victorian death portrait. He admirably attempted to perform anyway, but he was apparently in not-ideal shape, because Spielberg cut the shoot short. At 11 in the morning. It wasn't even noon yet and the man who got a dysenteric Harrison Ford through an entire Raiders Of The Lost Ark was telling Shaw to go home.

Universal Pictures
Crushing a can with a tiny bit of beer left was the toughest part of the shoot for him.

Later that night, at about 2 a.m., Shaw called Spielberg in a panic, remembering nothing that happened that day and begging the director to tell him he didn't embarrass himself. It's not known how Spielberg answered that question, so it was presumably a polite silence. According to Spielberg, a chastened Shaw performed expertly the next day, knocking out the speech in only four takes, although co-star Roy Scheider later insisted that at least some of the final product came from that fateful blackout. If you watch the scene and pay attention to Shaw's diction, you'll be inclined to believe Scheider (who himself will go down in behind-the-scenes history for deciding it'd be fun to beat the crap out of the producer of Jaws 2).

According to Bob Anderson, the actor who played young George, by the time the afternoon rehearsals rolled around, Warner "had been drinking all day." Most employers frown on that, but it enabled Warner to do something we'll be charitable and assume he would never have otherwise done -- smack the shit out of a small child.

This was back in the good old days, before all those P.C. laws that say you can't abuse child actors, so Warner really was drunkenly wailing on that poor kid, hard enough to make him bleed. Yeah, according to Anderson, the blood in his ears (which appears without explanation between shots) was real. So was the fear, we're guessing.

Paramount Pictures
"Eh, no one's gonna watch this film more than once. They'll never notice." -The editor

Anderson would spend hours getting knocked around, pausing only to rest or go to school for a little while, presumably startling his teachers with his baby Tyler Durden looks. But he didn't hold it against Warner, who he said grabbed him and hugged him after that particular scene, describing the experience as "an emotional high." We don't wanna speculate on Mr. Anderson's sex life, but there's an alternate universe where he couldn't get off unless a drunk old man beat him up.

The best Highlander film was also the booziest. The people who insured the paltry $13 million budget had forbidden drinking on the set -- obviously not a common thing, but they knew what kind of movie they were making. Although, apparently they didn't, if the thousands of extras who charged drunkenly into battle (for the movie's "ancient Scotland" scenes) are any indication.

20th Century Fox
This is them before makeup.

Christopher Lambert, Highlander himself, remembers the extras pounding Scotch between takes, causing them to "[go] at it for real" right there on the set (hopefully he means fighting and not something else). Lambert doesn't say whether he partook, but that probably wouldn't have been a smart idea given that he was trying to act in a language he barely knew. Did we mention he couldn't speak English? When he was hired for the role, he spoke only French, having been chosen by director Russell Mulcahy from nothing but a photo. He spent four hours with an accent coach every day, which would have been pointless if he was going to slur anyway.

Curiously, nobody even bothered asking Sean Connery to change his accent to play a character named Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, because 1) you don't ask Sean Connery to change his accent, and 2) you certainly don't expect him to do it blitzed out of his kilt.

20th Century Fox
Or his ... whatever the hell is going on here, fashion-wise.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Connery was the hardest drinker of all. Mulcahy recalls that on the plane ride to the shooting location, Connery produced a bottle of homemade Scotch, which is apparently a thing, and offered him a sip, which "blew his brains out." Later, after a mishap during a scene in which Clancy Brown was supposed to slice a table in two with his sword, a chunk of it nearly took Connery's head off. Brown called a special meeting to apologize to Connery, who waved him off with a cool "Maybe we'll use my stunt double more." That is not the reaction of a man who is not impaired by Scottish moonshine.

But Sorkin has a long history of that sort of thing. His career began in the very un-sober atmosphere of the Palace Theater, where he wrote A Few Good Men on napkins while serving people who were decidedly not a few good men. By then, he'd already started experimenting with pot and freebase cocaine. You know Jack Nicholson's famous "You can't handle the truth" speech? It's hard to believe that probably shared space with his stoned dick doodles at one point.

Later, while writing The American President (the movie that inspired The West Wing), Sorkin says, he smoked crack every single day in his hotel room at the Four Seasons. He insists he always wrote sober, then put up the Do Not Disturb sign and crack'd it up all night. As a matter of fact, Sorkin points to these habits as the reason the movie took three years to write. Well, yeah, Sorkin, that's because you're doing drugs wrong; you smoke the crack, then you write the entire screenplay in two and a half days.

Columbia Pictures
Though "a romantic comedy starring the U.S. president" does sound exactly like a premise you'd come up with in that state.

Sorkin decided it was probably time for rehab, and after that small slip-up amid the pressures of coming up with inspirational speeches for President Martin Sheen, quit for good. But not before, presumably, smugly lecturing the TSA about the meaning of freedom, which they (especially the women) didn't understand, not because it's nonsense that sounds convincing only while you're listening to it but because they were clearly too stupid to comprehend his genius.

Science fact: Manna's Twitter both exists and does not exist until you click on that link.

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