Producer of Robin Williams’ ‘Popeye’ Movie Says It Was Powered By Something Much Stronger Than Spinach
The combination of a 29-year-old Robin Williams, legendary filmmaker Robert Altman and a 1980’s Popeye, a big budget family musical that turned out to be about as fun as a trip to the mortuary.
But at least the people making Popeye had a good time.
Per Page Six, billionaire and former Paramount Pictures CEO Barry Diller was recently interviewed by Anderson Cooper for an event at the 92nd Street Y, and he spent at least some of the talk describing just how coked out the set of Popeye was. “You couldn’t escape it,” Diller said of the rampant nose candy.
Don't Miss
The cast and crew even came up with inventive schemes to import drugs to the filming location in Malta after producer Robert Evans was busted for possession at the airport. “Film cans would be sent back to L.A. daily for processing the film,” Diller explained. “And we found out the film cans were actually being used to ship cocaine back and forth to the set. Everyone was stoned.”
He also claimed that the effects of the drugs are evident in the final product, pointing out that if a normal movie is like a vinyl record that plays at 33 rpm, Popeye “is a movie that runs at 78 rpm.”
Diller’s revelations aren’t exactly a shocker. Musician Van Dyke Parks, who worked with Harry Nilsson on the film’s killer soundtrack, once told an interviewer that the set was full of hidden coke. “I was the hero of the regiment for opening up a walkie-talkie to change the battery and finding a bag of cocaine,” Parks recalled. “I don’t how much there was or to whom I gave it. But I that I recoiled, because I knew that it would be a component in the way people behaved, and the difficulties of the production right up to the top.”
Since the original set was abandoned in Malta, and has since become a tourist attraction, this news may inspire more than one drug-fueled scavenger hunt.
In the documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? Nilsson’s friend Eric Idle explained that the raucous atmosphere was partly because “Altman thought it was a good idea to take all the musicians to Malta, which is a crazy idea, because they just took all the drugs in the Middle East with them. And it became this huge party; people were lucky to get out alive.”
If only Paramount could have released a two-hour documentary about the production of Popeye instead of Popeye.
