3. Rip Torn Hammered Norman Mailer Over The Head On Maidstone
This one isn't up for debate, because the footage is available for all to see. Whilst filming a scripted fight scene for Norman Mailer's 1969 film Maidstone, which Torn was apparently also co-director of (though the shoot, evidently, was chaos, so God knows who was really marshalling what), Torn came at Mailer with a real hammer, the script was out the window and all bets were rightly off. As can be seen in the footage, Torn strikes Mailer in the head (it was Torn's intention, apparently, to "kill his character"), opening Mailer's scalp and leading to a brutal smackdown that ended in blood, tears (those of Mailer's wife and children, who can be heard crying in the background) and a portion of Torn's ear bitten off and spat out for the birds. Inexplicably, though Torn and Mailer refer to each other by their real names in the clip, Mailer included it as a scene in his film.