I yam what I yam – and what I yam is coked out! That may or may not be something that Robin Williams said on the set of Robert Altman’s disastrous 1980 movie Popeye, but according to Barry Diller – the iconic suit who served as CEO of Paramount Pictures at the time – the locales had far more powder than you’d expect on an island nation.
Diller recently sat down with Anderson Cooper for a lengthy interview (via EW), and Cooper couldn’t help but work in a salacious question about the most coked-up set he had visited during his run. That answer came in Popeye, which was released in the middle of his tenure. “By the way, you can watch it. If you watch Popeye, you’re watching a movie that — you think of it in the thing that they used to do about record speeds, 33 [RPM], whatever. This is a movie that runs at 78 RPM and 33 speed.” So we can probably add that to yet another reason why Robin Williams had to re-record his dialogue…
Diller would give yet another wild factoid from the set of Popeye, citing the film’s location. “They were actually shipping in film cans at the time. Film cans would be sent back to L.A. for daily processing film. This was shot in Malta. And we found out that the film cans were actually being used to ship cocaine back and forth to this set. Everyone was stoned.”
Really, none of this should be surprising. It was the 1980s – everybody was snorting coke. Popeye was also a notoriously difficult production, with the movie hitting bad weather, delays that brought it in weeks behind schedule and clashes between Robin Williams and Robert Altman – and now that we’ve heard that booger sugar was present on the set, we can absolutely believe this would have led to even more troubles than the production needed.
Today, those who a part of the cult following of Popeye can visit the portions of the original set that are still standing, having been partly converted into an attraction for fans who happen to find themselves in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Italy and looking for some fun…
