According to Young, Scott would manipulate her from day-to-day in order to coax the kind of performance he wanted, being friendly as could be one day and humiliating her in front of the rest of the cast and crew the next. Likewise, Ford apparently completely dismissed the actress whenever the cameras were not rolling, ignoring her and refusing to actually rehearse any of their scenes. Of course, considering this is a woman who was once arrested trying to crash an Oscars party and was also sued by James Woods for stalking him, maybe Ford just smelled the crazy before everyone else did.

There was also the small problem of the studio absolutely hating whatever they were sent.

Warner Bros.
"Is it physically possible to make Harrison frown less? If not, can we use puppetry?"

In fact, some of the notes Scott received included super-supportive, constructive notes of encouragement like, "This movie gets worse every screening," and, "Were they all on drugs when they did this?" And when they didn't like something, the studio folks always knew the perfect fix for a scene that wasn't working, making such wonderful suggestions as, "They have to put more tits ..."

Hollywood: If it's broke, add tits.

The movie was based on a novel by William Peter Blatty, who also adapted it for the big screen, and he claimed that it was based on actual events that took place in Maryland while he was a student at Georgetown University. Naturally, a film that involved such heavy religious themes created a lot of controversy, but we suppose that's bound to happen in a movie that uses a crucifix in some ... creative ways. The content was so horrifying that EMTs were often on hand at showings in case viewers suffered heart attacks, but it turns out the medical experts would have been better off hanging around the set during filming, since that's where people were just about tearing each other's heads off.

Why We Almost Never Got To See It ...

We won't go so far as to say that The Exorcist was a cursed set, but there were certainly some troubling -- and life-threatening -- ordeals people faced both before and during the production. For instance, Jack MacGowran, who played a character named Burke Dennings, died shortly after completing his role. In the film, the Dennings character is a film director who gets brutally killed by Linda Blair's possessed character, and when you realize how much strife there was between Exorcist director William Friedkin and members of the crew, you'd understand why some of them were probably wishing life would imitate art.

Patrick Riviere/Getty Images
William Friedkin, director and notorious dickhead.

Among the director's transgressions, Friedkin fired famed composer Lalo Schifrin just as Schifrin was finishing up his score, and that was just the beginning when it comes to how much people involved with the sounds of the film wound up detesting him. Friedkin found himself getting sued for refusing to pay for sound effects and voiceovers provided by a man named Ken Nordine. Originally, he also refused to give a credit to actress Mercedes McCambridge, who made one of the biggest contributions to the film: She was the voice of the demon itself, and she created the sound of Regan vomiting pea soup.

Appendages were lost on the set, including the thumb of a carpenter and the toe of a gaffer -- which sounds like the first two ingredients in some bizarre Hollywood good luck spell ... and maybe it was, because in spite of it all, the film went on to become a massive box office hit and one of the all-time great horror movies. Without the enormous success of The Exorcist, fans would never have been given the opportunity to debate which of its four prequels/sequels sucks the hardest.

Warner Bros.
It was Dominion.

His love of cocaine has, by now, become the stuff of legend, but at the time of production he was also into LSD, mescaline, and quaaludes -- or, as we like to call it, the Keith Richards diet. The film's director, John Landis, recounted walking into Belushi's trailer and seeing a "mountain of cocaine" at one point. Because, apparently, rappers aren't the only people who aspire to become Tony Montana. The film went wildly over budget -- ballooning from $17.5 million to the neighborhood of $28 million -- and fell weeks behind schedule. It didn't help matters that the script was a rambling monstrosity that today would read like a bizarre Jake and Elwood fan fiction. Which totally exists, by the way.

The story behind Aykroyd's original Ghostbusters script has become the stuff of legend, but even that may not have anything on his first draft of Blues Brothers. The typical script generally clocks in somewhere between 90 and 120 pages. Aykroyd's script was 324 pages long. If someone tossed it at you, you would die. The studio people had no idea what to make of it, other than recognizing there was some outstanding comedy hidden in those rambling, generally pointless pages written by Aykroyd in between stealing cars from the Universal motor pool and getting high at the Leave It To Beaver house. And yes, those were things that actually happened.

NBCUniversal Television Distribution
Defiled by Dan Aykroyd.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Landis hacked the script to pieces and reassembled it into what would become a smash success, raking in $115 million theatrically worldwide and paving the way for movies about more classic SNL characters.

Touchstone Pictures, Paramount Pictures
And may God have mercy on his soul.

As we understand it, Star Trek: The Motion Picture is based on a television program that lasted three seasons and taught the world that it was OK to be sexually aroused by green women. Oh, and it also introduced the world to William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, and a dozen film sequels. Star Trek is by most metrics the second-most-successful science-fiction franchise in history and the most successful at not being ruined years later by George Lucas.

Paramount Pictures
"Shh, don't jinx it!"

It probably seemed strange at the time to base a big-budget film around a short-lived, cult-favorite TV show. After all, look at the enormous effort it took to turn Firefly into Serenity, and then look at the Fox executives snickering, "We told you so," when it became a box office disappointment. Still, Star Trek was used to overcoming the odds. After all, this was a show that nearly lost the character of Uhura early on, until freaking Martin Luther King Jr. stepped in and convinced Nichelle Nichols to stick it out. So, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that the film adaptation would become a huge success. Well, unless you knew anything about the behind-the-scenes troubles.

Why We Almost Never Got To See It ...

We mentioned before that Star Trek: The Motion Picture had a pretty significant budget, which was set at $18 million. For perspective, the budget for the first Star Wars was $11 million, and that was released only two years earlier and had gone over the projected cost. Just like Star Wars, the budget for Star Trek wound up surpassing the original projection, but to a degree so enormous that it makes George Lucas look fiscally responsible by comparison. The budget spiraled out of control at ... ahem ... warp speed, all the way up to a reported $45 million. That made it by far one of the most expensive films ever made at the time.

Of course, your budget is going to get a little bit out of control when you wind up paying a special effects house $6 million to do precisely jack with a side order of squat. See, Paramount originally hired a guy named Robert Abel to do the special effects for the film, but instead of doing his job the way humans tend to do, he turned around and used his $6 million budget to build a studio, and then never turned in a single finished effect for the film to Paramount.

Wikimedia Commons
Hopefully it was $6 million well spent.

And that's really just the tip of the iceberg for this titanic-sized disaster. According to George Takei, the problems started at the top with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. Apparently, Roddenberry would steal pages of the script before they could get to the actors and write his own material for them. As you can probably guess, that created an awful lot of confusion on the set. Even more troubling, Roddenberry hadn't even included Spock in the film, probably because he and Nimoy pretty much despised one another. Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, now two of the most famous producers in movie history, stepped in to find a way to get Nimoy into the fold -- a task made more difficult due to the fact that Nimoy was suing Paramount at the time. It wasn't until the lawsuit was settled out of court that Nimoy agreed to do the movie, which hammers home the point that Mr. Spock's emphasis was really on that "prosper" part of his most famous line.

Why We Almost Never Got To See It ...

Well, if Hepburn had ever decided to go ahead and make a movie about her anal winds, The African Queen would have supplied ample opportunity to get the footage. That's because, like many members of the cast and crew, Hepburn came down with dysentery while filming, because she rather foolishly decided that "drinking water" was something she needed to do. Bogart and director John Huston were two of the only members of the crew who didn't get sick, which has been largely attributed to the fact that they were basically drunk the entire time.

For the sake of authenticity, much of the film was shot on location in the Congo, which was considered a dangerous place to take a film crew, for obvious reasons. When dysentery wasn't threatening the health of the crew, other things like malaria and dangerous wild animals were. The studio hired local tribe members to help with the production, but, and we couldn't make this up if we tried, they generally refused to show up for fear that the filmmakers were cannibals.

United Artists
Don't worry; he's only hungry for booze.

Of course, life-threatening instances weren't limited to on-location filming, as screenwriter James Agee suffered a massive heart attack before he was able to finish his draft. To finish the script, Huston hired his friend Peter Viertel, promising to take him to "the very darkest, bloody corner of Africa." And he meant it when he said bloody, because Huston would often disappear from the production to go off and hunt elephants. In fact, according to Viertel, it became an obsession for the director, to the point where he "seemed willing to shoot everything in Africa except the movie." The entire situation became such an ordeal that it inspired Viertel to write a lightly fictionalized version of the events as a book called White Hunter, Black Heart, which was, in turn, adapted into a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. And when the insane behind-the-scenes shenanigans surrounding your movie become nearly as famous as the movie itself, well, you're in rare company indeed.

United Artists
"Hi! Welcome to the club!"