10 Actors And Directors Who Had Violent Confrontations

10. Norman Mailer Vs. Rip Torn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AzmhorISf4 The 1970 film Maidstone centered on a famous film director who runs for President while working on his film project. Talk about some serious multi-tasking. In this film, director Norman Mailer took on the starring role as well and opposite him stars Rip Torn, who plays a lecherous brother that's constantly trying to get money from Mailer. Torn reportedly was outraged that Mailer was tricking people into thinking that this would be a film of novel significance. In fact he was so displeased with Mailer that while the cameras were rolling, Torn attacked Mailer in the middle of a field and hit him in the head with a hammer. Mailer responds quickly by launching himself at Torn and attempting to bite his ear off. This leads to the men falling to the ground and wrestling each other. The fight is broken up after Mailer's wife and children come running in and scream for the men to stop. Interestingly the camera crew didn't make any effort to break them up and instead they just filmed the fight. Maybe they reasoned that it was like filming a nature documentary where a lion attacks and kills an antelope. Because of their passivity, it's somewhat easy to believe that the camera crew was in on the whole thing. It's even possible that Mailer had been expecting Torn to attack him soon since he was able to respond very quickly to Torn's initial attack. So whether or not the fight was not staged, there's no denying that the emotions were real and both men truly hated each other.