5. Buddy Ebsen - The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz may be a family classic, as light and joyous as a summer breeze, but the experience of making the film was anything but light
or joyous. "
Like hell it was fun!" Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man, said of the experience; "it was a lot of hard work!" Actors suffered in stifling costumes under piping hot lights; hours were long, special effects were tedious and had to be invented on the spot. At least two of the actors had near fatal encounters with their make-up. Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, was very nearly severely burned when her green skin make-up reacted badly to a pyrotechnic effect; luckily MGM's make-up artists were able to get it off before serious damage occurred. Buddy Ebsen wasn't quite so lucky. The actor, later to become famous as Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies, had
pre-recorded all his songs and was shooting the film when
strange things started happening: "I would breathe and exhale and then get the panicky feeling I hadn't breathed at all," Ebsen wrote in his autobiography. "My fingers began to cramp, and then my toes...One night in bed I woke up screaming. My arms were cramping from my fingers upward and curling simultaneously so that I could not use one arm to uncurl the other...The cramps in my arms advanced into my chest to the muscles that controlled my breathing. If this continued, I wouldn't even be able to take a breath. I was sure I was dying." This sounds like something out of a Michael Crichton book, or a science fiction movie where we find out humans have been infected with some bizarre alien virus. Turns out it was actually a severe allergic reaction to the aluminum dust in his Tin Man make-up. Ebsen spent two weeks in the hospital, and another month recuperating; MGM quietly fired him and replaced him with Jack Haley -- who, by the way, was given slightly different make-up to avoid, y'know,
killing him.