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Tales from New Hollywood

Tales from Old Hollywood

Scandal

Television

Hollywood and Race

Weird Facts About Old Hollywood

The Secrets of Harry Potter

Murder

References

Photo Credit

TALES FROM NEW HOLLYWOOD

Kathleen Turner said that when she became famous (and a sex symbol) through the film Body Heat, she discovered that a number of famous actors in Hollywood had a wager on who would sleep with her first. Turner made sure that none of them won the bet. Turner said the worst person she ever worked with was Burt Reynolds. She said Reynolds was a sexist bully who liked to be in charge of the set. As for the strangest person she ever worked with, Turner named Anthony Perkins. She said that before each take Perkins would sniff a mysterious drug and suddenly take on a wild eyed crazed appearance.

Eddie Murphy had an embarrassing time in the mid-nineties when he was caught in a red light district notorious for transsexual prostitutes. Murphy claimed that he had been out for a drive and stopped to help someone who seemed to be in trouble - who, to his great surprise, turned out to be a transsexual prostitute. It's safe to say that Murphy's claim of innocence was taken with a rather large grain of salt. After the story hit the headlines, a number of transsexual prostitutes came forward to say that Murphy was a regular visitor to the red light district and had sex with most of them. This was a PR disaster for Murphy because he'd recently refloated his flagging career by making a move into family films. To quash the scandal, Murphy's lawyer allegedly employed a Hollywood 'hustler' to bribe the prostitutes into changing their stories.

Hugh Grant was arrested in Los Angeles in 1994 after police officers saw a prostitute named Divine Brown (Estella Marie Thompson) get into his car. The police officers said that Grant was engaged in 'lewd' conduct with Brown when he was arrested. This was a highly embarrassing incident for Grant because he was in Los Angeles to promote his new film New Months. In what must have been an excruciating experience for Grant, he had to complete press obligations and appear on chat shows after his arrest. He was fined $1,180 and had to attend an offender education course on AIDS. Divine Brown made the most of her brief window of fame and appeared in porn films and radio interviews. She is said to have made over a million dollars. Though very embarrassing at the time, the incident had no great effect on Grant's career and was forgotten fairly quickly.

It is said that Jack Nicholson's cocaine habit was so out of control by the time he made The Shining for Stanley Kubrick that his drugs were part of the production budget. There was simply no way he would get through the film without them. In an interview at the time, Nicholson said that on average he spent about four days a week completely high. Dennis Quaid has also said that cocaine was allowed on the set of some early films he worked on and included in the budget.

Heidi Fleiss became infamous for being Hollywood's best known brothel keeper. Fleiss was tight-lipped on her clients but the usual suspects (Charlie Sheen) have been mentioned and Fleiss later had an obstreperous affair with the actor Tom Sizemore - who was arrested for making threatening phone calls to her and generally being aggressive and drug addled. It is alleged that George Lucas and Johnny Depp were among the names in the 'little black book' of Fleiss clients. Fleiss was given seven years in prison in 1994 for tax evasion but got a fresh wave of fame in 1995 when Nick Broomfield made a documentary film about her. These days, Fleiss runs a bird sanctuary and lives out of the limelight.

Jenny McCarthy said that when she auditioned for a part in the film Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, Steven Seagal asked her to remove her dress and do a nude scene. McCarthy decided to leave there and then. Portia de Rossi is another actress who found auditioning for Steven Seagal to be a creepy experience. "My final audition for a Steven Seagal movie took place in his office. He told me how important it was to have chemistry off-screen as he sat me down and unzipped his leather pants. I ran out and called my agent."

Julianna Margulies said she fled from an audition with Steven Seagal when she was 23. Margulies said that when she turned up for her audition, alarm bells began to ring when she deduced that Seagal was the only person there.

Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Gilbert said that when she auditioned to be in the Oliver Stone film The Doors in the early 1990s, she fled the audition in tears after Stone wrote a humiliating sex scene for her to play as part of the audition. Gilbert accused Stone of sexual misconduct and said he was exploiting actresses as part of the audition process. The part that Gilbert was auditioning for went to Meg Ryan in the end. On the production of the 2003 film Born Killers, Tom Sizemore was accused of inappropriately touching an eleven year-old child actress on the set. Sizemore was dropped from the film and dumped by his management company. The family of the girl did not press charges though and Sizemore, believe it or not, actually returned to do some reshoots.

Oscarexia is a term for how Hollywood actresses have to literally starve themselves before the Oscars so they can get into the slinky or revealing dresses they plan to wear. This would probably explain why, after she won an Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, a ravenous Hilary Swank was seen on Oscar night in a branch of Astro Burger wolfing down a vegetarian burger and fries as if she hadn't eaten for weeks.

Asia Argento was one of the first actresses to be vocal in regard to the sexual abuse that the disgraced Harvey Weinstein was responsible for. Argento said she was raped by Weinstein when she was 21. However, Argento got caught up in her own scandal when it came to light that she paid former child actor Jimmy Bennett $380,000 to try and stop him accusing her of sexual misconduct. Bennett was 17 and below the age of consent in California when he alleges that Argento gave him alcohol and had sex with him. What made the alleged relationship extra weird was that Bennett had previously appeared in a film with Argento as her son when he was seven years old. Bennett said he decided to speak out because he felt that Argento was a hypocrite for casting herself as a leader of the MeToo movement.

A man named John Rutter did a topless photo shoot with Cameron Diaz when she was a nineteen year-old aspiring model. In 2003, he approached Diaz (who was by now of course a Hollywood star) and told her that if she wanted the topless photographs to remain private she would have to pay him $3.5 million. Diaz refused to hand over the money and sued him for attempted blackmail. She had the last laugh when Rutter was sent to prison.

Jeffrey Jones is a familiar face on the big screen. He has appeared in films like Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Amadeus, Sleepy Hollow, The Hunt for Red October, and Beetlejuice.

In 2002 he was arrested for taking nude photographs of a teenage boy and also for possession of child pornography. The boy was 14 when Jones first photographed him. The punishment was five years' probation and counseling. Jones also became a registered sex offender. When he tried to return to work on the 2007 film Who's Your Caddy?, local people in South Carolina where the film was shot complained that the status of Jones as a sex offender was not communicated to the families who visited the set.

Brat Packer Rob Lowe was one of the first stars to suffer the indignity of a sex tape floating around. There were actually two Rob Lowe sex tapes in the late eighties. Lowe picked up two young women at a Democratic convention and then filmed himself having sex with them. The big problem for Lowe was that one of the women turned out to be underage. A second sex tape featuring Lowe and a young woman named Jennifer also surfaced. While he might have feared for his career, Lowe emerged from the sex tape infamy surprisingly well and avoided serious charges. The scandal was forgotten fairly quickly and Lowe was self-deprecating (and media savvy) enough to lampoon himself on television. One of the advantages for Lowe was that his sex tapes emerged at a time before the internet and so were seen by relatively few people.

In 1982, the Golden Globes gave the New Star of The Year award to Pia Zadora for her role in Butterfly. Zadora beat Kathleen Turner (Body Heat) and Elizabeth McGovern (Ragtime) to win this award. The decision baffled just about everyone. Zadora was a notoriously terrible actress and Butterfly had been completely panned. Zadora's surprise win made no sense whatsoever. No one had the faintest idea how she got nominated let alone won. The answer to this perplexing mystery soon became evident when it transpired that Zadora’s husband, a billionaire named Meshulam Riklis, had flown members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association to Las Vegas for a vacation and a meeting with Pia Zadora. Riklis had basically bribed and manipulated the press into giving Pia Zadora the award. Zadora's bizarre win was such an embarrassment that the Golden Globes scrapped the New Star of The Year award.

James Woods had an affair with Sean Young when they made the 1988 drama film The Boost. After the affair ended, Woods had to take out a restraining order on Young when he alleged she kept harassing him. Young even sent photographs of corpses and a disfigured doll to the home of Woods. Young claimed that Woods took out the restraining order because of spite that she had rejected him and that his claims were not true. The end result of the rumpus was that producers knew it wasn't a very good idea to cast Woods and Young in the same film again!

Steven Spielberg is famously mild mannered but one person who did visibly irritate him was Julia Roberts when she starred in his Peter Pan film Hook. At the time, Roberts had just cancelled her wedding to Kiefer Sutherland and moved in with Sutherland's best friend Jason Patric. It would be fair to say that Roberts was rather frazzled by all the turmoil in her private life. Roberts kept turning up to the set of Hook late and at one point irritated Spielberg no end when she called Action! (which is for the director to say - NOT the actor) on a take before he was ready. When he did a television interview for Hook, a brutally honest Spielberg simply said "no" when asked if he would like to work with Julia Roberts again.

Another person who made Spielberg angry was Megan Fox. Fox was one of the stars of the Transformers films that Spielberg produced for director Michael Bay. But when Fox, who is clearly neither a diplomat nor a rocket scientist, somehow contrived to liken Michael Bay to Hitler in an interview, an infuriated Spielberg had Fox immediately axed from the Transformers franchise. The loss of Megan Fox was not something that the Transformers crew shed too many tears over. It was reported that Fox was secretly mocked on the Transformers set for her limited 'porn star' acting range.

In 1987, Marlee Matlin won an Oscar for Best actress. She was the first deaf actress to win an Oscar. The award was for her performance in the film Children of a Lesser God - which also starred her real life partner at the time William Hurt. In her memoir years later, Matlin said that after the Oscars ceremony a jealous Hurt screamed abuse at her and said she didn't deserve the award. In the book she also accused him of rape and said he was a violent and angry man who hit her on occasion. Matlin said in her memoir that if you watch Children of a Lesser God you can see bruises on her legs in one scene. She said these were caused by fights with William Hurt.

In 1987, the actor Matthew Broderick took a vacation in Europe with his girlfriend (and actress) Jennifer Grey. While driving in Northern Ireland, Broderick dove straight into a car that contained Anna Gallagher, 28, and her mother Margaret Doherty, 63. Anna and Margaret were both killed in the accident. Is it believed that Broderick might have unwittingly been driving on the wrong side of the road while in the British Isles. Broderick was also injured in the crash and spent three weeks in hospital. Broderick could (and arguably should) have faced a prison sentence for dangerous driving but somehow got off with a light fine. The family of the victims were outraged by this. Martin Doherty, who is the brother of Margaret and the sister of Anna, said that he was supposed to meet Broderick in 2003 to get 'closure' but that Brodrick never turned up. In 2012 the surviving relatives of Margaret and Anna were rather appalled when Matthew Broderick featured in a car commercial for Honda.

The director Brett Ratner, who was responsible for films like the Rush Hour series with Jackie Chan, Red Dragon, and X-Men 3, is pretty disgraced in Hollywood these days. In 2018, Warner Brothers severed their deal with Ratner because of sexual misconduct allegations against him. The actresses Natasha Henstridge and Olivia Munn both said that Ratner indecently exposed himself to them. Another actress, Katharine Towne, said she was left shaken after Ratner made aggressive and unsolicited sexual advances towards her. Jaime Ray Newman, another actress, said she sat next to Ratner on a plane once and he was crude and obnoxious and showed her pornographic pictures. Eri Sasaki, who was 21 when she appeared as a bikini clad extra in Rush Hour 2, said that Ratner touched her without consent and implied that he would make her famous if she slept with him.

During production of the 1997 film Pleasantville, camera assistant Brent Lon Hershman died after falling asleep at the wheel of his car. Hershman had just completed an exhausting nineteen hour shift on the film. His widow took legal action against New Line Cinema and claimed that the crew were forced to work these punishing shifts simply so that the film could be finished more quickly to save the studio money. A number of Hollywood stars supported the legal action's suggestion that crews should not be allowed to work any shift that surpassed fourteen hours.

Leaked Sony emails revealed that director David O Russell was so demanding and rude to Amy Adams on the set of American Hustle that she fled the set in tears more than once. Her co-star Christian Bale had to intervene and warn Russell about his conduct. Russell had form when it came to this sort of thing. When he directed Three Kings, George Clooney got so annoyed at the disrespectful way that Russell treated the crew and extras that they came to blows at one point. "I would not stand for him humiliating and yelling and screaming at crew members, who weren't allowed to defend themselves," said Clooney of the Three Kings production. "I don't believe in it and it makes me crazy. So my job was then to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating."

The leaked Sony emails on American Hustle were especially embarrassing for the studio because the leaks revealed that Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were both paid less on the movie than their male co-stars. Bradley Cooper, Christian Bale, and Jeremy Renner all earned more than Adams and Lawrence on the movie's back-end compensation. Even the director David O Russell had a bigger profit sharing deal than Adams and Lawrence.

Corey Haim was a big child/teen star in the mid to late 1980s (his films included The Lost Boys and Silver Bullet) but found life in Hollywood much tougher when he got a few years older and aged out of the teen roles. Haim was addicted to drugs and ended up threatening his manager with a gun. He was then handed a past-due tax bill and sued by his insurance company for not disclosing his drug addiction. The money Haim had earned from his movies was all gone and he end up shuttling in and out of rehab. On March 10, 2010, he died at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center of an apparent overdose. He was 38 years-old. A lot of people thought it was pretty shabby that Haim didn't feature in the 'In Memoriam' section of the Oscars when he died. It was a classic example of how you can be really famous in Hollywood for a time and then completely forgotten.

While making the classic film Chinatown, lead actress Faye Dunaway and director Roman Polanski quickly grew to loathe one another and argue all the time. Things became very tense and bitter between them in the end. Polanski eventually refused to give Dunaway any direction and simply told her to say the words in the script. They had reached the point where they couldn't even talk to each other in a civil fashion. The feud reached its apex when Dunaway peed in a plastic cup and then threw it at Polanski. Production of the film Wall Street was made a nightmare for Oliver Stone thanks to Sean Young. Young spent half the production complaining that her part wasn't big enough and lobbying to be switched to the role played by Daryl Hannah. Stone got so fed up with Sean Young that in the end he simply cut most of her scenes from the film and left her with a very minor part in the movie.

It is quite rare for an actor from the world of porn to make the 'crossover' and become a successful Hollywood actor. One person who did manage to do this was Traci Lords. Lords appeared in hundreds of porn films as a teenager but forged a new career as a 'straight' actor and won parts in high profile shows and films like Gilmore Girls, Roseanne, Married... With Children, Melrose Place, Tales from the Crypt, Will & Grace, Blade, Serial Mom, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and Cry Baby. David Cronenberg cast porn star Marilyn Chambers in his horror film Rabid but it did not lead to a mainstream career for Chambers. Chambers, who desperately wanted to be a mainstream actress, said she met Jack Nicholson to discuss a part in Goin' South (a comedy western Nicholson was directing) but that Nicholson simply asked her if she had any cocaine and kept grilling her for information about her porn career.

Someone who has been more successful than Chambers in moving from porn to mainstream entertainment is Sasha Grey. Grey played the lead role in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience. One of the most bizarre and surprising career changes of any actor concerned Stephen Geoffreys. You may recall Geoffreys as William Ragsdale's eccentric spiky haired friend Edward "Evil Ed" Thompson in the cult 1985 horror film Fright Night. Geoffreys went on to appear in At Close Range with Sean Penn and also Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories. In the 1990s though, Geoffreys began a new career as a gay porn actor and appeared in numerous porn films under the name Sam Ritter. Geoffreys has made a return to 'straight' acting but only in a very minor capacity in low-budget horror films. It is believed that Geofreys became disheartened with Hollywood because he was never cast as the lead and always had to play the eccentric supporting role.

Mia Farrow was tearfully on the brink of quitting the film Rosemary's Baby at one point to save her marriage to Frank Sinatra. With Rosemary's Baby falling behind schedule, Sinatra wanted her to quit to make a film called The Detective with him and warned the producer Robert Evans in phone calls that he better deliver her on time. To keep his star, Evans showed Farrow an hour of Rosemary's Baby and told her she was on course for an Oscar. A furious Sinatra then had divorce papers delivered on the set but Farrow had her revenge when Rosemary's Baby was a much bigger hit than Sinatra's film. Farrow even suggested to Evans they take out an ad contrasting the box-office figures.

Victor Salva is best known for directing the first three films in the Jeepers Creepers horror franchise. During the production of his 1988 film Clownhouse, Salva sexually abused 12 year-old child actor Nathan Winters. Salva even filmed one of their sexual encounters. He was convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison. The police also found child pornography in Salva's home. However, Salva was released from prison after fifteen months in 1992 and a few years later directed a $10 million Disney movie called Powder.

When protesters (including Nathan Winters) pointed out that Salva was a paedophile and called for a boycott of his films, Disney claimed that they had no knowledge of his past when they hired him. This was taken with a huge grain of salt.

Salva is a protege of Francis Ford Coppola and it is speculated that Coppola might have pulled a few strings to get Salva some work again. Coppola would later serve as executive producer on Salva's Jeepers Creepers 2. Salva continues to direct films and while none of these have been a huge hit he has worked with some fairly famous names like Nick Nolte, Rose McGowan, and Tobin Bell. When Salva's Jeepers Creepers III was released in 2017, a despairing Nathan Winters said "To be honest with you, I feel like everything I’ve done to raise awareness and remind people of his crime and the abuse that I’ve been through has been suppressed all along. It’s been a constant uphill battle."

In 2014, a film called Midnight Rider was shooting in Georgia. The film required a scene where William Hurt's character has a dream that he is in bed on some railroad tracks. Despite not securing permission, the director Randall Miller decided to shoot this scene on a real rural railway bridge. William Hurt had severe misgivings about the scene but was told it would be fine. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the scene was being shot, a real train suddenly appeared and thundered towards Hurt and the crew on the tracks. They all scrambled for safety but - tragically - camera assistant Sarah Jones was struck by the train and lost her life. Randall Miller later pleaded guilty to felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass and spent a year in prison.

Woody Allen seems to be an outcast in America these days thanks to allegations that have dogged him on and off since 1992. At the start of the 1990s, Allen was in a relationship with Mia Farrow. Farrow had replaced Diane Keaton as Allen's muse and leading lady. Allen and Farrow were not married and did not live together. They both had apartments in Manhattan. Allen lived alone while Farrow lived with a large group of children she had adopted. These children included Dylan (a four year-old girl Allen and Farrow had adopted), Satchel (Mia's son and Allen's only biological child), and Soon-Yi Previn (Farrow's 21 year-old adopted daughter from her former marriage to the composer Andre Previn). Satchel Farrow would later change his name to Ronan Farrow and become a famous journalist. Woody Allen was a regular visitor to the Farrow apartment and would often go there to have breakfast with the children.

The relationship between Woody Allen and Mia Farrow was shattered in 1992 when it came to light that Allen had been having a secret relationship with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi. It is this part of the Woody Allen scandal that is still inaccurately reported. Soon-Yi was not Allen's daughter. He had not adopted Soon-Yi. Woody Allen barely knew Soon-Yi until she was a teenager. Soon-Yi was not an innocent or underage victim. She was a ferociously intelligent 21 year-old student who spoke several languages. Mia Farrow, nonetheless, was understandably furious to learn that Allen and Soon-Yi had been in a romantic relationship.

A custody battle over Satchel and Dylan began and the custody battle went nuclear when Mia Farrow accused Allen of sexually molesting Dylan. The molestation is alleged to have taken place at Mia Farrow's country home. Allen supposedly took Dylan up into the attic and fondled her private parts while she watched an electric train set go round and round. Two separate state authorities investigated the claim and neither collected sufficient evidence to take the matter any further. They noted that Dylan showed signs of 'coaching' in her taped testimony as if someone was instructing her on what to say. It was also reported that Woody Allen had passed a lie detector test.

In the aftermath of the case, Woody Allen lost contact with Satchel and Dylan (this would be a lifelong estrangement). Allen went back to making films and the scandal passed. This all changed in the wake of MeToo when (the now adult) Dylan resurfaced and repeated the claim that Woody Allen had molested her when she was a child. Dylan enjoyed the considerable support of Ronan Farrow. Ronan had been important in exposing Harvey Weinstein and now had his estranged father in his sights. Just to add another bizarre note to this story, the adult Ronan looked uncannily like Frank Sinatra did as a young man. Sinatra was Mia Farrow's former husband and it seems incredibly likely that Sinatra and not Woody Allen is Ronan's biological father. In an article for the New York Times, Allen, only half in jest, wondered aloud why he had paid all that child support to Ronan if the kid's father was Frank Sinatra.

In the wake of Dylan and Ronan's reactivation of the 1992 claims, a raft of actors distanced themselves from Woody Allen and said they would never work with him again. Amazon terminated their contract with Allen and he was forced to make his new film in Spain. Woody Allen is now lumped in with the likes of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein and yet (unlike Cosby and Weinstein) has never been convicted of anything. Cosby and Weinstein had dozens of people come forward to accuse them of abuse but the one solitary accusation aimed at Woody Allen derived from an embittered partner who he was in a custody battle with.

Moses Farrow, another of Mia's children, was in the house when Woody Allen was alleged to have molested Dylan. Moses thinks the allegation is ludicrous and points out that the attic never even had a train set up there (the train set is always mentioned by Dylan when she recalls her molestation). According to Moses Farrow, the attic was so small you couldn't even get up there let alone set up a train set and still have room to molest someone. Moses has called Mia Farrow an abusive mother and thinks that Dylan was coached into the abuse allegation as Mia's revenge on Allen.

Dylan, for her part, genuinely seems to believe she was abused. But is she telling the truth or the victim of a false memory implanted by her mother? The Farrow family was deathly silent when Mia's brother was convicted of child abuse and there was also the curious public support that Mia Farrow has always offered Roman Polanski. Unlike Woody Allen, Polanski is a proven child sex abuser. If the molestation of Dylan really happened, why on earth would Mia be supporting Roman Polanski? And yet, despite the lack of clarity and surplus of doubt in this case, Woody Allen remains guilty in the great court of tittle tattle and gossip. The internet is still full of speculative and inaccurate articles which depict him as a prolific child abuser who married his own daughter.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has a love child named Joseph Baena as a result of an affair with his former housekeeper Mildred Baena. Joseph looks remarkably like his famous father. Arnold had to tell his wife about the affair during the time that he left acting for politics. In 2013, The Big Bang Theory star Kaley Cuoco was photographed holding hands with Henry Cavill. The media smelt a rat because both of these actors had the same PR firm. Sure enough, it was all a publicity stunt to boost the profile of the duo. The perplexing thing about the PR stunt is that one wouldn't have thought these two needed a boost. Cavill was the new Superman and Cuoco was in one of the most popular TV shows in America.

The Irish actor Stuart Townsend was once a rapidly rising star set to become a big name in Hollywood. His biggest break came when he was cast as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings for Peter Jackson. The three Lord of the Rings films were huge hits and would have made Townsend a big star. However, he never got to appear in them. As the production of the first film was about to begin, Peter Jackson suddenly decided that Townsend was too young to play Aragorn and replaced him with Viggo Mortensen. Townsend was absolutely furious. Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker, who played C-3PO and R2D2 in the Star Wars films, hated each other in real life. The late Kenny Baker said that Daniels was always rude and condescending to him. The actress Amy Hill said that Mike Myers was the worst person she had ever worked with. Hill had the misfortune to appear in the megabomb The Cat in the Hat. Hill said that Myers was weird and reclusive and had flunkies who would race onto the set to feed him chocolate.

James Remar was originally cast as Corporal Hicks in the

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Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 16.10.2022
ISBN: 978-3-7554-2334-8

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