Friday the 13th films: the 13 unluckiest movie shoots of all time
1: The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
Had the internet existed in the late Thirties, the Wizard Of Oz, would surely have been one of the most notorious films of all time. In the event, it would take years for rumours to emerge of miserable lead actress Judy Garland being force-fed barbiturates on set in order to keep pace with the exhausting shooting schedule.
Meanwhile, original Tin Man Buddy Ebsen was hospitalized after a near fatal allergic reaction to his toxic silver body-paint and Wicked Witch Of The West Margaret Hamilton suffered severe burns when a scene featuring explosives went awry (“I will return to work on one condition," she said from hospital. "No more fire work!). One piece of Oz urban mythology can be discounted, though – an actor playing a Munchkin did not hang himself during the making of the film. The "swinging body" supposedly visible in a notorious shot halfway through is actually the shadow of a bird.
2: American Graffiti (1973)
Remembered today for providing a teasing glimpse of the quirky filmmaker George Lucas might have become had he not instead created Star Wars, American Graffiti's gestation belies its idyllic evocation of Fifties America. A young Harrison Ford was arrested for participating in a bar-fight during the filming and another crew-member was detained for growing marijuana. Lucas's motel room was also set on fire and, on the eve of a crucial close-up, Richard Dreyfuss suffered a forehead gash when a fellow actor flung him into a pool. After all that, filming the raid on the Death Star must have been a breeze.
The Omen (1976)
You mess with the devil at your peril, as the producers of both this and The Exorcist, three years earlier, discovered. While the latter saw fires destroy sets and injuries to stars Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn, The Omen was if anything even less fortunate. Director Richard Donner's hotel was bombed by the IRA, tigers and rottweilers turned on their handlers and lightning struck planes carrying both star Gregory Peck and screenwriter David Seltzer. By contrast, the 2006 remake passed off relatively smoothly, but no one remembers it at all.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola's follow-up to The Godfather Part II was keenly anticipated. Five years later, it arrived in cinemas after an implausibly troubled production in the Philippines. Problems began with the casting, as Harvey Keitel was replaced at short notice by Martin Sheen, who later had a heart attack on set. Marlon Brando's truculence, meanwhile, was legendary, with his girth and lack of preparation creating unforeseen delays to filming.
And then there were the external factors, with helicopters loaned to the production by the Filipino government rapidly requisitioned to fight a civil war, and Typhoon Olga demolishing sets, camera equipment and, we'd wager, a fair amount of morale as well. If that wasn't bad enough, all this was documented by the director's wife in the home movie to end all home movies, Heart of Darkness: a Filmmaker's Apocalypse.
Quite how Coppola forged a masterpiece out of this chaos, albeit following a three-year edit, remains one of modern cinema's miracles.
3: The Shining (1980)
A Stanley Kubrick movie was no bundle of chuckles at the best of times. Even by his usually severe standards, however, the set of haunted hotel chiller The Shining was especially fraught, with relations between the despotic director and female lead Shelley Duvall rocky throughout. In order to strike the correct tone of hysterical terror, for instance, he required her to perform the film's iconic baseball bat scene 127 times. Star Jack Nicholson, for his part, grew so weary of daily script revisions by Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson that he gave up learning his lines, understanding they would inevitably be reworked at the last minute anyway anyway.
4: The Twilight Zone Movie (1983)
The tragedy that marred this reboot of the cult science fiction show had long-lasting consequences. As the cameras rolled a scene in which a helicopter crashed under gunfire went horribly awry, with the aircraft crushing and killing veteran actor Vic Morrow and child performers Renee Chen (six) and Myca Dinh Le (seven). The line Morrow was about to deliver acquired a chilling irony: "I'll keep you safe, kids. I promise. Nothing will hurt you, I swear to God". Director John Landis would go on to make other movies but never fully recovered from the tragedy. "I live with the Twilight Zone every day of my life," he said in 1991.
5: The Abyss (1989)
The official crew t-shirt for James Cameron's 1989 underwater sci-fi odyssey read "Life's Abyss,And Then You Die". The pun was in earnest, with Cameron pushing his charges to breaking point. Particularly notorious was Cameron's insistence that star Ed Harris swim from one part of the underwater "Deepcore" base to the another sans scuba gear. Without informing Harris, Cameron relocated the air-tubes the actor expected at the end of his ordeal (the director hoped to set up a better shot). When Harris swam around a corner and did not find his precious oxygen supply he panicked.
This led to a bitter verbal altercation with Cameron and prompted Harris to boycott The Abyss's promotional campaign. Similar hiccups attended another ocean-bound Cameron epic, Titanic, with three stuntmen injured in accidents and a catering meal mysteriously spiked with hallucinogenics, causing 50 people to be hospitalized. Following the example of Harris, star Kate Winslet reportedly said she'd never work with the director again.
6: The Marrying Man (1991)
Released as Too Hot To Handle in the UK and Australia, this excruciatingly unfunny Neil Simon romantic comedy is largely forgotten today. At the time, however, it was notorious for marking the beginning of the downfall of Alec Baldwin as a movie star and the subsequent caricaturing of the actor as a cartoonish hot-head. Having hooked up romantically with his co-star Kim Basinger early in the shoot, Baldwin and his leading lady became, from the studio's perspective at least, the power couple from hell.
She clashed with Simon over her dialogue and was habitually late, he threw chairs, punched walls and ripped a phone from the hand of a Disney executive and smashed it on the floor. With endless delays, the film's budget ballooned from $15 million to $26 million. It earned only $11 million on release and, amid jeering reviews, was pulled from cinemas within the month. From that moment on, Baldwin was a marked man in Hollywood.
7: Alien 3 (1992)
In 1987, "cyberpunk" author William Gibson was hired to write a script for a third Alien movie. He placed HR Giger's freudian Xenomorphs in the middle of a conflict between "space communists" and intergalactic capitalists –a premise that was never going to wash in Hollywood. Multiple rewrites followed, with action director Renny Harlin signing on and departing and Sigourney Weaver agreeing to reprise the role of Ripley for a reported $5 million salary and share of the box office. By the time David Fincher – a 29-year-old rookie best known for overseeing Paula Abdul pop promos – came on board, $7 million had been lavished on a gothic-future set, even though the final story had yet to materialize.
With the infrastructure largely in place, Fincher was pressured into overseeing a limp retread of the Ridley Scott's original movie, with Ripley and a line-up interchangeably shaven-headed secondary characters battling a ceiling-hugging Alien. Fincher has consistently disowned the film. "No one hated it more than me; to this day no one hates it more than me."
Waterworld (1995)
So bad were the stories coming from the set of Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic epic Waterworld that the project was virtually written off before it had even opened. The script had gone through 36 different drafts (one of the six writers employed on it, Joss Whedon, described it as "seven weeks of hell"). At the height of his megalomania after the Oscar-gobbling triumph of Dances with Wolves, Costner fell out angrily with the director he had championed, Kevin Reynolds, while the $100m budget ballooned to $175m, in part because a portion of the floating set sank during a hurricane. Remarkably, the most expensive film ever made at that time wasn't the flop of legend and turned a profit, despite its dismal reputation. But then, Costner went and made The Postman...
8: Blade: Trinity (2004)
The first two Blade movies were efficient vampire romps. By part three, however, the real horror was unfolding off screen. Bad blood between star Wesley Snipes and director David Goyer boiled over as Snipes attempt to strangle Goyer in full view of the rest of the cast. Surreally, the row was sparked by a t-shirt worn by an actor that read 'Garbage'. Because the actor happened to be black, Snipes accused Goyer of racism and decided it was smarter to let his twitchy fingers to do the talking. Soon leading man and director were communicating by post-it note. "Wesley was just f_____g crazy in a hilarious way," co-star Patton Oswalt later told the AV Club. "He wouldn’t come out of his trailer, and he would smoke weed all day."
9: World War Z (2013)
In hindsight, it was probably inevitable this Brad Pitt-produced adaptation of the cult zombie novel would run aground. The script was a mess – overloaded with exposition and with a muddled ending. Pitt's pick as director, Marc Forster, had no experience of FX -heavy blockbusters. Glasgow was chosen as an unlikely stand-in for Philadelphia. “They just couldn’t get it right,” a crew member told the Hollywood Reporter. “There was a lot of spinning of plates, a lot of talking. [But] they did not have a plan.”
A blitz of behind-the-scenes hirings and firings deepened the havoc, the situation gaining an element of farce as a Hungarian anti-terrorism unit raided a production warehouse and confiscated 85 fully functioning automatic assault rifles (it was an offense to transport the guns, which were supposed to have been rendered unusable, into the country).
Exasperated by script issues and reportedly furious about the Hungary SNAFU, Pitt aggressively took charge, bringing in Lost screenwriter Damon Lindelof to tweak the conclusion and strong-arming Paramount into coughing up an additional $20 million for reshoots (bringing the budget north of $170 million). Remarkably, Pitt's hasty field surgery stanched the flow of negative publicity – World War Z is nobody's idea of a masterpiece, but it's a fun genre excursion that recouped its overheads on release.
10: 47 Ronin (2013)
When the suits at Universal Pictures sat down to a rough cut of this $175 million Keanu Reeves kung-fu fandango they were discommoded by the lack of free-wheeling mayhem. Rather than putting the star front and centre of a slap-happy fight-fest, first time director Carl Rinsch had delivered a contemplative melodrama with a sprawling array of protagonists.
Sensing trouble, Universal ordered endless reshoots aimed at beefing up the action sequences and giving greater prominence to Keanu's character. But all the touch-ups in the world couldn't stave off looming disaster – factoring in marketing costs and other overheads, 47 Ronin needed to earn over $300 million to break even. Though a box office take of $151 million was by no means a humiliation it wasn't sufficient to save the movie from qualifying as one of the biggest bombs in cinema history.
11: The Canyons (2013)
Bringing together notorious party-girl Lindsay Lohan, cult porn star James Deen and literary provocateur Bret Easton Ellis, The Canyons screamed calamity from the outset. Predictably, Lohan missed her first script read through, then balked at the four-way sex scene that served as the film's emotional centre-piece. Director Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver) fired Lohan on multiple occasions only to relent when she broke down and pleaded for one more chance to redeem herself (on just $100 per day, she was hardly in it for the money). At one point Schrader, 67, stripped in an attempt to persuade a reluctant Lohan to disrobe.
With the movie duly flopping Easton Ellis, who wrote the script, admitted hiring Hollywood's most infamous former movie star probably wasn't the canniest tactic. "Lindsay’s reputation follows her everywhere," he said. "And the moment that we cast Lindsay Lohan, the movie became something else. It stopped becoming the DIY movie that could make it into part of the train-wreck of the Lindsay Lohan narrative."
12: Mad Max Fury Road (2015)
A reminder not every troubled movie is a sure-fire flop, Fury Road is one of 2015's most acclaimed and highest grossing blockbusters. You'd have received hefty odds on the film going down so well just a few years ago, when rumors abounded that stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron were not speaking to one another (she apparently found him distressingly weird) and the studio felt it necessary to dispatch an executive to oversee director George Miller (amid concerns over the budget spiraling past $150 million).
These were merely the latest upheavals in a soap opera dating back to the early 2000s, when the shoot was disrupted by the Iraq War (the conflict playing havoc with Miller's attempts to ship tons of heavy machinery across the globe). From this cauldron of turmoil emerged one of the smartest action endeavors of recent years – proof that cinematic gold can be spun from singularly unpromising ingredients.
13: The Fantastic Four (2015)
As origin stories go, Josh Trank's takes a lot of trumping. Shot on a shoe-string $12 million budget – roughly what it costs to have Robert Downey Jr turn up for an Iron Man costume fitting – the director's 2012 debut movie Chronicle generated $120 million at the box office and earned swooning reviews. Just 28, Trank's future seemed brighter than a glowing chunk of Kryptonite.
But Chronicle would prove a daunting act to follow, with Trank's reboot of the Fantastic Four franchise mired in contentiousness practically from the outset. Trank is said to have been aloof and indecisive on set while tensions quickly escalated over the director's vision of a darker superhero mythology (the suits at Fox were eager for something shiny and Avengers-esque). As the controversy metastasized, Fantastic Four was elevated to the rank of "troubled production" : that notorious club of movies ruinously riven with conflict.
The producers were rumoured to have wrested control from an allegedly out-of-his-depth Trank, with X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn drafted in for last minute re-shoots (an assertion denied by all sides). More bizarrely, dogs belonging to Trank were said to have caused $100,000 in damage to a house he was renting during filming in New Orleans.
Anticipating the a deluge of overwhelmingly unfavourable reviews, Trank got his retaliation in first by blaming Fox in a (swiftly deleted) Tweet. “A year ago I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.”
Such are the ways of Hollywood. "My first movie, it's fairly well known, was a disaster," recalled David Fincher of Alien 3. "When the s___ hits the fan, all of a sudden everyone scatters and you're the guy saying 'Wait? Who has a suggestion now?"
Friday the 13th?? live: why is it the unluckiest day of the year?
