![]() Into this maelstrom strode Bill Murray, a Saturday Night Live regular at the time who was only penciled in for a small role in the movie. If the call to show up on set was for 7 a.m., Ted was there at 6:45. “People were trying to make a good movie, and that was just the culture at the time. “Nobody was trying to rip off the studio and get high,” says O’Keefe. And Cindy Morgan recalls one afternoon when she saw Doug Kenney running down the hallway of the motel yelling, “The eagle has landed the eagle has landed! Get your per diems in cash, the dealer’s here!” By the time you think you have a problem, you’re half dead.”īrian McConnachie, a National Lampoon mainstay who’d been cast in a small role in the film, remembers how nervous certain people would get when their dealers didn’t arrive on time. … At that time, I was taking it and I didn’t feel that I had a problem. “It always seemed that I could drink more and do more drugs than anybody else and still appear straight. We just knew that we had money to spend and it was a great high,” Chase said later. “At the time we didn’t know it was addictive. Those of us that did it got sucked into the whole bacchanalian rave of it, and believe me when I tell you we went as mad as any of the ancient Greeks.”Ĭhevy Chase, who has talked openly in the past about his own addiction and recovery, said that cocaine just always seemed to materialize on the set of Caddyshack. No one thought anything was wrong about it. People would come into your dressing room with salt shakers and it would be lunch and someone would say, ‘Do you want to do a line?’ ‘Yeah, sure!’ It was no big deal. Michael O’Keefe calls his eleven weeks in Florida “a permanent party.” “Cocaine was everywhere,” he says. PODCAST: Caddyshack book author Chris Nashawaty explains how he got Bill Murray to talk. Pure, like they had just beaten it out of a leaf in Colombia and somebody had carried the leaf to us and turned it into powder in front of us just so we knew how pure it was.” “I would never recommend drugs to anyone,” says Mitchell. And because of the shoot’s Florida location, the coke that was being delivered was of the highest quality. Hamilton Mitchell, who played the caddie named Motormouth, says he was initially shocked to see that cocaine use on the set of Caddyshack was so brazen and public. It seemed to be the fuel that kept the film running. Recreational use that started by the gram turned into binges indulged by the ounce. As the three-months shoot went on, coke use on the film would escalate. Although he stuck mostly to drinking and smoking pot, Berkrot says that the sight of coke was hard to ignore at the Rolling Hills motel, where the cast was staying. “I had never seen cocaine before I got to the set of Caddyshack,” he says. He wasn’t sheltered, exactly, but he certainly had never been exposed to the sort of Hollywood decadence he was about to discover in Florida. Or, in this case, a perfect blizzard.īefore he would find himself on the business end of a rusty pitchfork courtesy of Bill Murray in the film’s indelible Dalai Lama scene, Peter Berkrot, cast as caddie Angie D’Annunzio, was a 19-year-old wannabe theater actor from Queens. That, combined with the studio’s hands-off, go-make-your-movie-without-interference ethos, made the film a perfect storm. ![]() But the fact that coke fiend Doug Kenney was the producer of Caddyshack turned those checks and balances into a joke. On most movie sets, the open consumption of hard drugs would be prevented by layers of responsible and experienced middle-aged producers and representatives from the studio on the set. Excerpted from Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella, by Chris Nashawaty.
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