Movie Solutions for Real Life Mishaps

What happens when the consequences of an actor’s tumultuous personal life threaten to show up on screen? You grab the nearest screenwriter…

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Real World Mishap: Between the wrap of the original Star Wars and the start of production on Empire, car enthusiast Mark Hamill got into a severe wreck that pock-marked his boyish Luke Skywalker face with some serious scar tissue.
Movie Fix: George Lucas quickly reworked the opening of Empire so that Luke would almost immediately get face-palmed by a giant snow monster (that’d be a Wampa, nerds) to explain the farm boy’s grittier new look.

The Warriors
Real World Mishap: Actor Thomas Waites was, apparently, a handful during the shooting of The Warriors, frequently butting heads with director Walter Hill.
Movie Fix: Already having to rework the script once to accommodate Waites (Waites’ character, Fox, was suppose to be the love interest of Deborah Van Valkenburgh’s Mercy, but he lacked chemistry with the actress), Hill quickly had to find a way to cover up Fox’s disappearance after Waites abruptly quit the movie. So Hill slapped a wig on a stuntman and threw “Fox” in front of a subway train. 


Raiders of the Lost Ark
Real World Mishap: While filming in Tunisia (which doubled for the streets of Cairo), star Harrison Ford apparently partook of a local delicacy called “parasite-infested water.” The results had an exhausted, dehydrated Ford running to the bathroom more frequently than running from Nazis. 
Movie Fix: Ford and director Steven Spielberg decided to scrap an extensively choreographed fight scene between Indiana Jones and a hulking Arabian swordsman. Ford’s weary suggestion that Indy just shoot the thug actually became one of the movie’s most iconic moments. 


Gladiator
Real World Mishap: Notoriously hard-drinking British actor Oliver Reed used his downtime on the set to see if he could out-drink a group of sailors in a Maltese bar. He couldn’t. 
Movie Fix: Director Ridley Scott had to take unused footage of Reed’s character—the former gladiator-turned-gladiator trainer Proximo—and CG-stitch together an impromptu death scene that wasn’t in the original script. 


Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Real World Mishap: Star Shia LaBeouf momentarily forgot that his SUV couldn’t sprout arms and legs and crashed and flipped it outside an L.A. hotspot. Two fingers on LaBeouf’s left hand were mashed into jelly.
Movie Fix: While fleeing Decepticons in ROTF’s climactic desert showdown, director Michael Bay inserted a quick shot of LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky injuring his hand and wrapping it in a makeshift bandage so that the actor’s visible cast could be explained away.

The Hangover
Real World Mishap: As a child, actor Ed Helms’ switchover from baby teeth to adult teeth went pretty smoothly—with the exception of one single adult tooth that never showed up. He had an implant installed in his teens.
Movie Fix: When the crappy results of make-up tests almost derailed director Todd Philips’ plan to have Helms tool around Vegas with a missing tooth, the actor simply went to the dentist and had the implant removed. Realism, achieved. 



The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
Real World Mishap: Having just started shooting Parnassus immediately after finishing The Dark Knight, star Heath Ledger accidentally took a fatal of mixture of painkillers.
Movie Fix: Given that director Terry Gilliam’s movie involves magic and fantasy, he simply reworked the script so that Ledger’s character—who was originally going to be played by Ledger throughout—would change his appearance at different points in the movie. The character would now be played by a succession of actors including Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.