16 Fascinating And Bizarre Events In Entertainment History That Actually Happened
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1.Long before either of them were famous, Carey Mulligan and Marcus Mumford (lead singer of Mumford & Sons) met at camp as children and decided to become pen pals.
In a twist that's as delightful as it is improbable, years later — after both of them became famous in their respective fields — the two reconnected as adults. The erstwhile pen pals tied the knot in 2012 and now have two children.
2.Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose can be heard having sex with Adriana Smith — the girlfriend of the band's drummer Steven Adler — on 1987's landmark album Appetite for Destruction.
Adler had just told Smith he didn't consider her his girlfriend, so she went to the studio to hang with the band's other members in hopes of making the drummer jealous. That's when Axl Rose approached her with his idea to record them having sex for the track "Rocket Queen."
Smith told VH1, "Axl came and he laid his head in my lap and became all serious. And he looked at me and said, 'Adriana, I want to talk to you about something that’s very serious and very special and important to me, and nobody else will do this.'" Smith said she replied, "For the band, sure, no problem, for the band! And a bottle of Jack Daniels.”
Once microphones were laid on the floor of the vocal booth, the lights were dimmed, and Rose and Smith commenced having sex...the sounds of which were recorded and inserted into the track's audio.
The song became notorious in the wake of the album's massive success, and Smith later regretted taking part in it. “I ended up drinking and using drugs over this for a really long time, because I had this extreme shame and guilt and stuff.”
3.Saturday Night Live star Ellen Cleghorne was paid a shockingly low $245 an episode for the 1991/1992 season, her first on the show. That added up to just $4,900 for the entire season (or less than $11,000 in 2023 dollars).
Cleghorne revealed this surprising information to her former costars on the podcast Fly on the Wall With Dana Carvey and David Spade, adding that, despite being the show's only woman of color and the originator of the classic characters Zoraida the NBC Page and Queen Shenequa, she still made less than $1,000 an episode in her third season. She finally received a bump to $4,500 per episode for her fourth and final season.
This news appeared to shock Carvey and Spade. "Good lord, Ellen. Damn it! Goddamnit, I'm fucking pissed!" Carvey shouted. "Wow, that's tough to hear," added Spade. "You were doing as much as anyone."
Carvey, by comparison, said he was paid $4,500 per episode for his first year on the show in 1985...five years before Cleghorne joined the cast.
4.Gary Busey once refused to perform a scene set in heaven because he said the set design looked nothing like the real heaven he visited during a near-death experience.
In 1988, the Academy Award nominee crashed his motorcycle while not wearing a helmet and hit his head on the curb, punching a half-dollar sized hole into the side of his head. Luckily for Busey, he landed at the foot of a police officer who rushed him to the hospital. Still, he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury, and spent over four weeks in a coma. It was during this time Busey believes he entered a spiritual realm and visited heaven.
Fifteen years later, Busey was on the set of Quigley, a critically reviled box-office bomb about a ruthless billionaire (Busey) who dies and comes back to earth as a Pomeranian. Filming of the movie was already three days behind schedule when Busey arrived to film the scene where his character goes to heaven.
Busey’s co-star Curtis Armstrong (yes, Booger from Revenge of the Nerds), told the AVClub, “He showed up on this set made to look like heaven, and he looked around and said, 'It’s nothing like this. I’ve been to heaven, and it doesn’t look like this. That sofa’s all wrong. That mirror is ridiculous. They don’t even have mirrors!' It was ridiculous. He was completely nuts about the design of heaven.”
Things only got more absurd when another actor who claimed he, too, had visited heaven took issue with Busey’s description of the place. Armstrong said, “This guy got into an argument with Busey about the way heaven looked! The two of them wound up coming to blows, and they had to send everybody home.”
5.Jenna Ortega had COVID-19 while filming her now iconic dance at Nevermore's Rave'N Dance in Wednesday.
Ortega told NME it was awful to film because of how she felt, adding, “I woke up and — it’s weird, I never get sick, and when I do, it’s not very bad — I had the body aches. I felt like I’d been hit by a car and that a little goblin had been let loose in my throat and was scratching the walls of my esophagus.”
Nevertheless, Ortega forged on, performing the dance which she choreographed herself.
“They were giving me medicine between takes because we were waiting on the positive result,” Jenna added. "I asked to redo it, but we didn’t have time. I think I probably could have done it a bit better."
Netflix responded to Jenna's story by saying, “Strict COVID protocols were followed, and once the positive test was confirmed, production removed Jenna from the set.” Still, many people criticized the production studio (MGM, not Netflix) for allowing her to film sick, and to expose all of her costars in the dance scene to possible infection.
6.In the '80s, there was a widespread urban legend about the comedy hit Three Men and a Baby — rumors were it was filmed at a home that was haunted by a boy who died there years before, and his specter can clearly be seen in the background of a scene.
It wasn't true, of course. First, as RogerEbert.com pointed out, no boy died in the home because the scene wasn't filmed in a home...it was filmed at a Toronto soundstage.
As for the boy in the window, it turns out it was a cardboard cutout of Ted Danson's actor character, Jack. In fact, the cutout can be seen later in the film. Most likely, the cutout was placed in the window, and no one thought to move it before they filmed this scene. Nowadays, it would have been removed with CGI, but they didn't have that option back in 1987!
7.Another massively viral (pre-internet, spread by word of mouth) rumor back in the '80s claimed that a mischievous extra on the set of 1985's Teen Wolf, starring Michael J. Fox, pulled out his penis during the filming of the film's final scene, and it made its way into the released film, unnoticed.
Was it true? Probably not, at least according to Kris Hagerty, another extra on the film. Hagarty told Movie Vigilante the much-buzzed-about moment most likely had to do with the super-tight pants girls wore at the time:
"When you are sitting on hardwood bleachers for hours upon hours, they (the pants) get uncomfortable, and anyone having been in the movie business knows it's a *hurry up and wait* gig. I had seen a few girl extras unzipping their pants in between takes and then zipping up when we were about to shoot. I believe that was what happened. Her pants were uncomfortable; she unzipped them. It was about 3-4 a.m. that night the scene was shot, and we were all pretty tired — some were even falling asleep between takes — so, she was probably not quite awake and coherent, not realizing they had yelled action."
So, sorry, '80s kids. There's (probably) no penis in Teen Wolf.
8.In the mid-'90s, James Raymond was a professional musician (he backed the Spice Girls, for example, on some of their US tour appearances) when he decided — approaching his 30th birthday — to finally find out who his biological parents were. To his shock, upon looking at his adoption records, he learned his biological father was none other than Rock and Roll Hall of Famer David Crosby!
Unfortunately for Raymond (and Crosby), it didn't seem the two would ever meet. "When he found out — not to put too fine a point on it — I was dying," Crosby told the San Francisco Chronicle. Thankfully, Crosby had a successful liver transplant, and the two were able to meet.
Crosby was initially nervous, and later said about their first encounter, "I was on the verge of tears because I felt like I went AWOL on this kid, and I'd been beating myself up about it for 30 years." Raymond quickly put Crosby at ease, explaining he'd had a wonderful life with fantastic adoptive parents. Soon, the conversation turned to their shared passion of music, and not long after that, a musical collaboration with a new band called CPR.
Crosby later told the L.A. Times, “It was amazing not just because [Raymond] was a great guy and very kind and let me into his life, but he’s also this incredible, jazz-level, Steely Dan-level player.”
Raymond was thrilled, too, saying, "I'm getting to make music with one of the greatest songwriters of our time." He also got to introduce Crosby to his then 3-year-old granddaughter. “He’s the perfect granddad,” Raymond said. “He’s got the perfect mustache to pull on.”
They remained in each other's lives — musically and personally — until Crosby's death this year.
9.Mathew Perry doesn't remember filming multiple years of Friends because he was dealing with addiction issues at the time.
"I don't remember three years of it," Perry told BBC radio host Chris Evans. "I was a little out of it at the time. Somewhere between Seasons 3 and 6." (Sadly, that means Perry has no memory of filming the immortal "Could I be wearing any more clothes?" scene.)
Perry, who is now sober and dedicates time to helping others with alcohol addiction, told the Hollywood Reporter it was an unusual experience going through addiction issues while filming the biggest show in the world. “When I was in big trouble, it was so public because I was on a TV show that 30 million people were watching.”
10.Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford partied all night with the Rolling Stones and then showed up to film The Empire Strikes Back still drunk.
Episode 5 was filming in England when, the day before an early call time, Monty Python's Eric Idle invited Fisher over to hang out with the Rolling Stones. As she told the Daily Beast, “I called Harrison and said, ‘Get over here! This is ridiculous!’ I wonder how he remembers it. I remember that we never went to sleep, so we weren’t hungover — we were still drunk when we arrived in Cloud City the next day. We don’t really smile a lot in the movie, but there we’re smiling.”
11.Daniel Johns and Ben Gillies of Silverchair were just 14 years old in 1994 when they wrote "Tomorrow," which they then entered into a nationwide band competition in their native Australia — and beat out over 800 other acts to win! The song became a phenomenon, reaching number one in Australia and then becoming the most played song on modern rock radio in the United States the following year.
The school-aged boys' success was remarkable considering they had no contacts or fancy instruments/recording equipment when they made "Tomorrow." Johns said at the time, we "recorded that at a really cheap studio. It cost about $75. We weren't in there for more than an hour."
He then added, sounding very much like a teenager, "The first time we heard 'Tomorrow' on the radio, it was really embarrassing. We were in a car with a whole heap of our friends, and it came on. We turned it off as quick as we could."
12.Another 14-year-old songwriting phenom was Taylor Swift, who was just a freshman in high school when she cowrote the song "Tim McGraw," which reached No. 6 on the country charts and became her first-ever Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 (she's, uh, had a few more since then).
"I got the idea in math class," Swift told CMT in 2006. "I was just sitting there, and I started humming this melody. I kind of related it to this situation I was in. I was dating a guy who was about to go off to college. I knew we were going to break up. So, I started thinking about all the things that I knew would remind him of me. Surprisingly, the first thing that came to mind was that my favorite country artist is Tim McGraw."
Swift had started writing songs two years earlier. In fact, one of the first songs she wrote, as a 12-year-old, was "The Outside," which appeared on her debut album.
13.Channing Tatum recently announced he's developing a remake of the 1990 classic Ghost with plans to play the role of Sam Wheat made famous by Patrick Swayze. Interestingly, Swayze almost didn't play the role — it was first offered to Bruce Willis to star opposite his then-wife Demi Moore. Even weirder, the production originally didn't want Whoopi Goldberg in her iconic role as Oda Mae Brown.
Bruce called himself a "knucklehead" for turning down the role that eventually went to Patrick Swayze, but said he didn't understand how a romance with a ghost could work. Whoopi, meanwhile, was originally told they wanted an unknown for the role, but they circled back to her six months later. Good thing, too, as she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.
14.Just 18 days before the release of 1995's Nine Months — a big summer comedy that 20th Century Fox had a lot riding on — its star, Hugh Grant, was arrested in Hollywood for receiving oral sex in a public place from a sex worker named Divine Brown.
Grant, who was dating fellow actor Elizabeth Hurley at the time, quickly released a statement: "Last night, I did something completely insane. I have hurt people I love and embarrassed people I work with. For both things I am more sorry than I can ever possibly say."
In an attempt to salvage their big summer movie, Fox decided Grant should keep his already scheduled media appearances, the first of which — on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno — became must-see TV. So many people tuned in, in fact, that The Tonight Show beat The Late Show with David Letterman in the ratings for the first time in a year. Leno got right to it, asking Grant, “What the hell were you thinking?”
Grant, to his credit, didn't get angry or make excuses, saying, "I think you know in life what's a good thing to do and what's a bad thing, and I did a bad thing. And there you have it." He had a similarly even-keeled response on Larry King Live, saying, "In the end you have to come clean and say, 'I did something dishonorable, shabby, and goatish.'"
Grant's public apology and lack of excuses played well with the general public. Nine Months became the biggest comedy of the summer, grossing $138 million worldwide.
15.Here's something totally different but nevertheless absolutely wild: One of the signature sounds in Billie Eilish's smash hit “Bury a Friend” was recorded by Eilish herself...while at the dentist getting her Invisalign attachments drilled off.
Eilish told the New York Times, "I was in the dentist’s chair, and they were shaving off my Invisalign attachments, and it was this loud RRRRRRR sound, and I thought it was so dope. I pulled out my phone immediately and pressed record."
Eilish's brother, Finneas — who was cowriter and producer on the track — added, "I found it very horrible to listen to, but it worked great in the song."
16.And lastly, you probably know this one, but if not, you absolutely need to: Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly in Back to the Future for seven whole weeks before he was fired and replaced by Michael J. Fox.
Filmmakers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale originally wanted Michael J. Fox to play Marty but weren’t able to cast him because he was busy filming the hit sitcom Family Ties. So, Eric Stoltz, who the head of Universal Sid Sheinberg was a fan of after his dramatic turn in Mask, was cast as Marty. Sheinberg was so convinced Stoltz was the right guy that he told Zemeckis he could reshoot with someone else if it didn’t work out.
Stoltz filmed almost all of the classic scenes from the film, but eventually, there was no denying he wasn’t right. While Stoltz was a fine actor, his performance was too dramatic and lacked the comedic touch the role required. The filmmakers reached out to Fox again (was he really, really not available?), and arranged a deal where he would film Back to the Future at night after he wrapped that day’s shooting of Family Ties. Zemeckis broke the news to Stoltz himself and said it was “the hardest meeting I've ever had in my life, and it was all my fault. I broke his heart." Interestingly, the role of Jennifer — which had gone to Melora Hardin (later Jan from The Office) in the Stoltz version — was also recast (mainly because she was much too tall to play opposite Fox).
Stoltz probably doesn’t love missing out on a massive franchise, but he has had a long, successful career since famously appearing in Pulp Fiction.
