Walking in on a 120-gram pile of Colombia’s finest, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d strolled in on Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel bagging up another shipment heading for the US, or onto the set of director Brian De Palma’s Scarface as Tony Montana, coked-up to the gills, racks up another line. However, you’d be wrong on both counts, as this was actually a real-life haul found on the set of the third Equalizer film, and no, Robert McCall hasn’t randomly decided to become a drug baron…
Movie sets are sometimes home to the weird, wonderful, and downright illegal; at times, what goes on during production can be more interesting than the film itself. With two people from The Equalizer 3 crew currently in custody, let’s take a look at just some of the most controversial events to ever occur on a film set…
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The Equalizer 3
Filming on Antoine Fuqua’s Equalizer trilogy commenced last month, and Denzel Washington’s reprisal of ex-spy and vigilante Robert McCall was confirmed. The movie is set to follow on from 2018’s Equalizer 2, which grossed over $190 million at the box office. It recently came to light that, after an impromptu police raid, 120 grams of cocaine was uncovered, a stash believed to belong to two members of the catering staff working on the set. With the movie being shot in Italy, suspicion was aroused among local authorities when the head of the catering staff tragically passed away suddenly from a heart attack.
Rust
Josh Hopkins/Instagram
In October 2021, actor Alec Baldwin was working on his new film, Rust, in the deserts of New Mexico. While using a prop gun, that Baldwin claims he was unaware was loaded, shot and killed cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, whilst injuring the director, Joel Souza in the process. Criminal charges could still be brought to Baldwin, who has protested his innocence following the fateful shooting.
Subsequently, he came to a settlement with Halyna Hutchins’ family. An inquiry found that improper safety procedures were in place during and after filming. It was also revealed that a crew member was bitten by a highly-poisonous spider, and was consequently hospitalized. Remarkably, despite the movie being shrouded in controversy, the production of Rust is scheduled to reconvene as of January 2023.
The Conqueror
RKO Radio Pictures
In 1954, director Dick Powell teamed up with Western icon John Wayne to make The Conqueror. Released in 1956, the weirdly racist film would go on to become a critical flop and subject to much ridicule, listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. Yet, the film’s critical status was the least of its worries.
Having filmed perilously close to a nuclear testing site while shooting in the Escalante Desert, 91 of the 220-strong film crew would later go on to develop cancer, with John Wayne himself succumbing to stomach cancer in 1979. Though these deaths, and diagnoses have naturally been linked to the nuclear fallout in 1954, it has since been pointed out that statistically, the number of those afflicted with cancer roughly equates to the average number of people that will contract, and die of cancer in the states from that sample size.
The Wizard of Oz
MGM
The 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz featuring Judy Garland remains one of, if not the best musicals of all time. It follows the story of Dorothy and her dog Toto, who are transported to the mythical world of Oz following a devastating tornado, where they embark on a quest down the yellow brick road recruiting the help of a Lion, tin-man, and scarecrow on the way to meet the “wonderful wizard of Oz."
Director Victor Fleming’s film is commonly associated with being family-friendly, and while that is undoubtedly the case, behind the scenes it was anything but. It has been well-documented Garland’s strict regime of pills, cigarettes, and extreme diet was nothing short of child-abuse. In her husband, Sidney Luft’s posthumous memoir, he revealed that Garland had fallen victim to sexual assault at the hands of the actors playing the movie’s munchkins.
The Revenant
New Regency Productions
Alejandro G. Inarritu’s Academy Award-winning film The Revenant was a nightmarish revenge flick, whereby Hugh Glass (Leonardo Di Caprio) is severely injured during a bear attack, and is left for dead by his hunting team. After his son is killed by his crew, Glass goes out to exact revenge. The movie was nightmarish in narrative, but also in production according to reports.
Crew members described the experience as a ‘living hell,’ stating that the film was not only subject to extreme delays due to cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki’s demands that they only shoot in limited natural light, but that they were forced to work in temperatures of -25c while shooting in Canada.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Bryanston Distributing Company
This was the original movie which gave way to over 40-years of leatherfaced maniacs wielding chainsaws on our cinema screens. The first ever edition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 was very nearly a massacre, when director Tobe Hooper and producers dished out weed brownies to the cast and crew to congratulate everyone on the end of filming.
However, with one final scene still to shoot, Gunnar Hansen, who played the infamous Leatherface, had never dabbled in the drug before, and afterwards claimed he was so dizzy that he wouldn’t have even been able to operate a can opener. Unfortunately, while he was high out of his mind, he was tasked with operating a real chainsaw and sawing through a door. That could’ve been very bad.
