Platoon. According to IMDB:
M. Emmet Walsh. Compare that brief scene with his whole performance in Blood Simple… I’ll wait… and unless he was drunk for that whole movie, it’s just a character aspect.
“Deah Jesus, you ah dis-gustin’!” - best line left out of the DVD recut.
I assume most of us know the story of the original Waco Kid being too drunk to be filmed.
I assume we’re taking the weed classics starring Cheech and Chong as a given?
That is not how I heard it. Shaw felt they should be a bit tipsy during the scene. But he started drinking with crew before everyone else. He tried and failed to do the scene. Nothing was usable. The next morning he remembered nothing and went to Spielberg and asked what happened. When he found out he was very apologetic and went to film the scene on the spot. He filmed it with an epic hangover and with no other actors present for reactions. He also helped write the monologue.
I’ve heard that Bogart was drunk on his ass in a bar when he was called back to the set to shoot the famous “Play the Marsellaise!” scene in Casablanca. All he had to do was nod, and it changed the whole tone of the movie.
Agreed. It’s called “acting”, and M.E. Walsh has long been a master of that art. Many years ago Roger Ebert explained his Stanton-Walsh Rule: “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”
ETA: one of the very few times I’ve agreed with Mr. Ebert about anything.
Marlon Brando in Apocalpyse Now?
:smack:
I actually thought…“wait…they didn’t mention this one in the OP, did they?”
Oh.
Robert Towne, the director of Personal Best claimed that to get Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly prepared for that girl-on-girl scene, he got them drunk in a hot tub. It worked!
Lee Marvin, in Paint Your Wagon. His role was a perpetually drunken gambler/gold digger and it’s pretty well documented that he never drew a sober breath during the filming. Played the part really well though…
In the scene where Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift play drunk sitting on the street, Clift actually was drunk, but Lancaster was not. (according to imdb)
There’s a moral in that, somewhere.
I suspect that in a couple scenes of Beat the Devil the director had been drinking that day and the cast was at least hung over.
Jackie Gleason is said to have regularly drank scotch out of a coffee cup on camera.
I can’t find a cite, but I’m sure I read or saw an interview with Janeane Garofalo where she said she hated one of the later scenes of The Truth About Cats and Dogs so much that she drank to get ready for filming it.
Maybe not drunk, but Ringo Starr was severely hung over when they shot the scene of him with the boy beside the river in A Hard Day’s Night. He got a lot of critical praise for the scene, and it probably jumpstarted his independent acting career.
For live shows, the cast of Cheers was snockered during their Tonight Show appearance.