Today's Blind Items- One Crazy Summer - Part Two
When I first saw AS I have to say I was a little intimidated. Not that he was imposing or legendary because he wasn't at that time, but he was just a force of nature. He and FT were best buddies. They had worked together for most of the past several years and had an easy camaraderie from all that time spent together. Literally they had spent as much time together as some of the Hobbit cast later and in even tighter spaces. The only time they were not together, TS was working with some of FT's buddies. I found out later that their working relationship was defined by the amount of drugs and booze they did together. When they first worked together they were small timers. A year of working 20 hour days together though got them to the big time. I don't think I ever saw one of them go longer than 15-20 minutes without ingesting something or drinking something. This went on from the time they arrived on set until they departed. Later, when I would see them after the working day, I discovered they kept up that pace until they passed out where they were. During that summer that included several pools from which they had to be fished out. There were four or five times they fell asleep on front lawns of homes and the owners would call the police who would call the producer who would wake up at 3am and fetch whichever one of them was there. Several arrests for public intoxication or disturbing the peace were tossed or just removed from the record for a few hundred bucks. They usually had a driver take them places, but there were times when they would get behind the wheel of a car. The only serious damage either of them did to a car was TS who was trying to drive. He was in a parking lot and it had light posts with cement bottoms about three feet high for support. TS kept slamming his car into them. He was so drunk, he could not figure out how to get the car in reverse and would slam into the concrete which would move the car slightly and he would turn the wheel and repeat the process. Finally, with one last hit to the light post he was free, but the light post was finished and landed on the hood of the car. TS was lucky he was not killed. Instead he just left the car in the parking lot for someone else to deal with.
These guys were the stars. There were a couple of older actors who had a nice career who were also working on the movie but they were just background noise. These guys came in and just were bulldozers. This was a big budget movie, they were stars and they were on location on a set and were going to party.
Brought into all of this was MW. This was her first movie. Ever. She was not a shy wall flower and had traveled the world modeling, but models doing a few lines of coke while they chain smoke and complain about going to another go see with a photographer who gets handsy was not the same. Neither of the actors knew her before getting on set and when she rebuffed their initial advances they didn't care because they had hundreds of women who would gladly have sex with them. This is no exaggeration. It was like a buffet with these guys. They would go in any club or restaurant or even a grocery store and there would be choices for them. It was crazy. I had seen rock stars and groupies, but the groupies were going to the concert to see the rock stars. This was different. This was them just going out in public and instantly attracting women.
They did like MW though. They liked her a lot because she was not a shy wallflower. She would stay up with them and party with them. Not to their extent because no one could do that. This was a few years of tolerance they had established. They just kept going and going.
Tomorrow I will talk about the first time I went out with them.
