10 Things You Didn't Know About Hollywood
4. A High-Glamour, High-Profile, High-Income Business Takes its Toll
A common ailment in the movie industry is the effect of money, power and celebrity. Sentenced to 90 days in jail following a party brawl (and ordered to spend 3 months in rehab), Christian Slater said: “I have been acting since the age of 8, and I have been a celebrity a long time. And when you’re a celebrity you start believing you can act off the screen any way you want without consequence.”
The king of all Hollywood horror stories, though, is Robert Downey Jr who, a decade before his Iron Man comeback, was struggling with a drug habit. Not content with being arrested for driving while naked, he once woke up in a stranger’s house, in a child’s bed, with medics standing over him.
As inmate no P50522 in Cell 17 of the F-1 building at a California prison, he slept on a three-inch thick mattress and worked in the kitchen, where he earned 8 cents an hour. During one such stay, Downey encountered a guard who attempted to interest him in a unicorn movie he was writing, claiming it wasn’t your typical movie about unicorns.