How Much Cocaine Did They Do on the Set of 'Popeye'?

Look, old Hollywood knew how to party. Before you had to test everything for fentanyl, white mounds of blow descended on Hollywood like snow on Aspen. They fueled many a raucous event and even got some actors through some hard times.

But apparently the most cocaine was done on the set of Robert Altman's Popeye.

At least, that's true according to Barry Diller.

The former studio executive has a newly published memoir, “Who Knew,” in which he gossips all about Hollywood and all the productions he oversaw.

In doing his book tour, he spoke to Entertainment Weekly, where he was asked about the most coked-up film set, to which he replied, “Coked-up film set? Oh, Popeye.”

Diller continued, “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.”

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

He elaborated, “You couldn’t escape it,” Diller said about the coke on set. “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.”

The movie starred Robin Williams as the titular character and Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl.

Despite everyone moving fast and going nuts, according to Diller, the movie was a box office success, although it was not with critics, though I'm not sure they knew how they should appreciate the extra artistic effort at the time.

This is another one of those cool filmmaking legends that will go down in history, like the LSD on the Titanic set.

Let me know what you think in the comments.