How Ron Howard accidentally got high on set: “Somebody hit this guy with a hammer, please”
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and the ‘New Hollywood’ era began to enter full swing, the celebrity lifestyle became increasingly hedonistic, with alcohol, drugs, and sex the order of the day, not that Ron Howard had anything to do with it, right enough.
Even though he was in his late teens and early 20s when the counterculture movement seeped into Tinseltown’s every pore, he was still Ron Howard, the wholesome, fresh-faced star of The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days, with the kind of face that let you know butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
Child stars are even more likely to be dragged down a dark path when facing the difficulties of transitioning into adult roles, but it never affected him. His older brother, Clint, struggled with addiction for many years, which might explain why Ron never caved to peer pressure, hitting the down, or indulging in the other excesses and debauchery that defined the time period.
However, he did get high on a movie set in the mid-1990s, even if was completely by accident. To this day, the two-time Academy Award winner will call Apollo 13 his finest achievement from behind the camera, which it is, but it wasn’t easy to make. That’s true both personally and professionally, since the director pissed his pants in front of Kevin Bacon and bribed him not to tell anyone.
Beyond that, the notorious ‘Vomit Comet’ posed several problems for the cast and crew’s intestinal fortitude, which is how the filmmaker ended up running amok. “We took a little cocktail called Scopedex, which is half scopolamine and half Dexedrine,” he explained. “Scopolamine evens out your stomach, but wants to put you to sleep, and the Dexedrine keeps you working.”
To balance themselves out and ensure that they could handle the weightless scenes without suffering from ill effects, everyone who was heading up in the ‘Vomit Comet’ downed the concoction, only for Howard to discover that it has different side effects if you don’t actually take to the skies.
“We were all planned out, and then there was some engine failure, and we couldn’t go,” he elaborated. “Everybody was laughing their heads off at me, because I was on the stuff, and when you’re up there, with the adrenaline, you really don’t feel anything, you don’t feel any buzz.” He may not have felt the buzz, but he was buzzing nonetheless.
“Apparently, I was running around saying, ‘OK, so we can’t, but you can bring a camera over here, we have the set, we’ll use the mock-up, it’s OK, you can light it,'” while the crew looked at him in utter bemusement. In fact, Howard became so overcome with energy that the overriding sentiment among his colleagues was that he either needed to shut up, or they’d shut him up by force.
“They were all just looking, like, ‘Somebody just hit this guy with a hammer, please,'” the filmmaker conceded. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that, and Howard wasn’t bludgeoned after his drug cocktail went down the wrong way.
