Robin Williams’ ‘Popeye’ Had the ‘Most Coked-Up Film Set’ and ‘Everyone Was Stoned'

Was it all for that little baby who played Swee'pea? He looked like he had a problem.

It was 1980 for goodness sake.

It's also better to watch while all coked up.

I actually really loved that movie.

They did not bad, considering they were all coked up.

I thought that film was a fever dream?

Completely unwatchable. The Pepsi explains a great deal!

Robin Williams, coked up on the Dick Cavett show.

I suspect all that coke etc during the party years played a part in Williams' Parkinson's and Shelly Duvall's mental illness. Elon is now wearing a diaper and waving a chain saw around. I do love my cannabis but time and place people!

That's kind of an odd question to ask. What context did it come up in? Maybe Andy Cohen told Anderson to ask it.

R8 - He had Lewy's body dementia, which is much worse.

[quote] It was 1980 for goodness sake.

"Goodness" had nothing to do with it!

I think it was Pauline Kael who said something like, "Shelly Duvall seems woefully misast in the role she was born to play. "

I would say the same about Pauline Kael as a ”Film Critic”

i disagree r13. She could be spectacularly wrong but she had right more often than not.

Actually, you've misremembered: Pauline Kael absolutely loved Shelley Duvall in "Popeye," and started her New Yorker review of it by enthusing about how superb Duvall was in the part.

I just recently watched 3 Woman for the first time and was taken aback by how thin Shelley Duvall was in it. Cocaine might help explain that and I do agree that it might have played a part in her struggles with mental illness.

Grace Jones lauded the 1985 007 opus “A View to a Kill” as her favorite film set because of the constant, high quality coke with which the cast was catered.

R15: “Actually, you've misremembered: Pauline Kael absolutely loved Shelley Duvall”

Is anything dearer to the heart of a DLer than the opportunity to correct another DLer?

Someone said it r15

Makes sense. It WAS filmed in Malta after all.

One of the largest groups of accomplished character actors ever assembled in one project. In one of the worlds largest cocaine havens. Artists will be artists.

r12 That's a great quote. But it wasn't about her role in Popeye. Perhaps it's from her review of The Shining?

r12: Here's what Kael had to say about Duvall in 'The Shining."

[quote]Though at the start Shelley Duvall seems not quite there, as if her lines were being spoken by someone else in another room, she becomes much stronger. We can feel that she’s held down; she usually brings a more radiant eccentricity to her parts. But she looks more like a Modigliani than ever, and even in this role, which requires her to have tears welling in her Raggedy Ann eyes almost constantly, she has her amazing directness and her odd, flip gallantry. There’s a remarkable moment when Wendy picks up her child and screams at her husband. And in what is probably the most daringly sustained series of shots Wendy, who is carrying a baseball bat in case she needs it with Jack, backs away as he moves toward her; he keeps advancing, she brandishes the bat as she backs away across a room and up a staircase, finally swinging the bat in front of her to keep him at a distance. It’s a ghoulish parody of a courtship dance, staged with hairbreadth timing (though overextended), and Duvall is superbly simple even when Wendy is palsied with terror. Yet Duvall isn’t entirely convincing as a mother; she’s more like a very conscientious nurse.

A verified quote from Pauline Kael on Duvall's performance: "Shelley Duvall takes the funny-page drawing of Olive Oyl and breathes her own spirit in to it. Possibly she can do this so simply because she accepts herself as a cartoon to start with, and, working from that, goes way past it. So far past it that we begin to find chic in her soft, floppy white collars and her droopy, elongated skirts."

Was Pauline Kael a gay man?

I heard the most coked up set was Modern Problems. Chevy Chase, Nell Carter, Patti D'Arbenville, and Dabney Coleman were terrors. There was even a scene where Nell Carter, (playing a maid of course) created a powder border to ward off spirits. Chase proceeds to snort it as if it were coke. He even does the strange voice that the Ajax lady did in Up In Smoke.