The movie Robin Williams called a “perfect storm” of addiction, alcoholism, and craziness
Sometimes, it’s the most unlikely productions that become bastions of Hollywood hedonism and excess run amok, as Robin Williams discovered very early on in his film career.
Of course, the actor and comedian was no stranger to living life in the fast lane himself, whether it was his stream of consciousness stand-up style that made it look like he was always operating at 100 miles an hour and wouldn’t know how to slow down if he tried, or his well-known and highly publicised battles with addiction.
From the outside looking in, a musical caper set in a heightened reality that was based on a comic book doesn’t seem like the kind of movie that would become a haven for alcohol, cocaine, and insanity. And yet, from almost the second Williams stepped foot on the set of Robert Altman’s Popeye, he was caught in a maelstrom of complete and utter madness.
It was his first big-screen starring role, and it hardly launched him toward the A-list. It made money, sure, but reviews were more stale than week-old spinach, even if it’s become a cult classic in the years since. Williams wasn’t entirely thrilled at how his maiden tilt at cinematic superstardom had panned out, but some of the blame can at least be placed on how batshit crazy the set was.
Producer Robert Evans was convicted of cocaine trafficking the same year Popeye was released, so it goes without saying that there was plenty of the white stuff available to the cast and crew. According to Barry Diller, “film cans were being used to ship cocaine back and forth to this set,” with the former studio chief calling it the most “coked-up” production he’d ever seen.
Altman was known to be an eccentric presence, too, and he was a noted fan of being stoned out of his mind whenever possible. Add that to the budget being whittled down following the Heaven’s Gate debacle, the shoot running three weeks behind schedule, a script that was constantly being rewritten, and the studio deciding enough was enough and ending filming on a whim, Williams’ claims might be an understatement.
“Robert Evans, who was coked out of his tits at the time, said, ‘How are we gonna do the movie? I don’t know how we’re gonna do the movie?'” he recalled. “I joked, ‘Well, I could walk on the water like Jesus’. And he went, ‘Yes, let’s do it!’ And that ended up being the end of the movie. It was a perfect storm of addiction and alcoholism and craziness, but I wouldn’t trade the experience.”
“They used to say that working with Altman is like getting pushed off a cliff,” he added. “You may not know what you’re doing, but you’ll do some interesting screaming on the way down.” That sounds like the Popeye shoot in a nutshell, with Williams doing the best he could, working on a movie that seemed more interested in providing its cast and crew with narcotics than focusing on the basics, but like he said, he didn’t regret it.
