You don’t expect many surprises on a memoir book tour—unless, of course, you’re Barry Diller and you drop a nuclear-grade anecdote about Robert Altman’s “Popeye” being less a film shoot and more a Mediterranean coke-fueled fever dream (via Entertainment Weekly)
During a Q&A at New York’s 92Y, where Diller was promoting his new memoir “Who Knew,” Anderson Cooper asked the former Paramount CEO to name the most coked-up film set he ever visited. Diller didn’t even blink: “Popeye.”
Yes, that “Popeye” —the deranged 1980 musical oddity where Robin Williams muttered into his prosthetic chin as Shelley Duvall gave perhaps the most Olive Oyl performance in the history of Olive Oyls. A movie that plays like it was directed by someone who’d just crushed a Scarface-sized mound of blow
“By the way, you can watch it,” Diller added, suggesting we treat “Popeye” less like a movie and more like forensic evidence. “If you watch Popeye, you’re watching a movie that… runs at 78 RPM and 33 speed.” Translation: the energy of a squirrel on meth filtered through the brain fog of a NyQuil overdose.
According to Diller, who ran Paramount during its glory years (’Raiders,’ “Grease,” “Saturday Night Fever,” etc.), the production in Malta was so drug-soaked that actual film cans were being used to smuggle cocaine back and forth. Imagine Cartel Airlines, but with dailies.
“You couldn’t escape it,” he said. “Everyone was stoned.” And suddenly, the baffling tone of the final product makes a lot more sense.
Barry Diller calling this the most coked-up film set says a lot—especially coming from the guy who ran Paramount and Fox at the height of Hollywood’s Cocaine Cinema era.
Altman, famously anti-Hollywood and perpetually half-aloof, was the unlikely director for what was supposed to be a family-friendly musical. Instead, he delivered a murky, off-kilter oddity that felt like it had been made inside a hallucination. And while “Popeye” managed to double its budget at the box office, it was met with the kind of baffled critical response usually reserved for experimental puppet theater.
So, next time you’re trying to make sense of “Popeye,” just remember: it wasn’t you. It was the coke. Speaking of, it’s time for a rewatch.