Harrison Ford Raised Plenty Of Hell Behind The Scenes Of American Graffiti
Had all gone according to a very vague plan, Jacques Demy's "Model Shop" would've turned Harrison Ford into a movie star — or, at the very least, it would've given him his first lead role. Columbia Pictures had zero faith in the unknown Ford, so they insisted on Gary Lockwood, who'd just played Frank Poole in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Opera." Needing to make a living to support his young family, Ford became a carpenter.
Being a carpenter in Hollywood brought Ford into the homes of several prominent artists (e.g. Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne). Producer Fred Roos, a Francis Ford Coppola associate, was especially taken with Ford, and introduced him to Coppola's friend and filmmaking protege George Lucas. Maybe this charming, ruggedly handsome handyman could bring Bob Falfa, the street-racing rival to Paul Le Mat's John Milner, to rakish life in "American Graffiti."
Ford delivered, but, in doing so, caused more than a little bit of havoc behind the scenes.
Harrison the hellion
At 30 years old, Ford was something of an elder statesman on the set of "American Graffiti." An experienced director might look to a man of Ford's stature to keep the kids in line while shooting a risky studio movie, but, according to Brad Duke's "Harrison Ford: The Films," the future megastar was an incorrigible instigator.
While Ford called himself the "unofficial den daddy" of the shoot, he couldn't curtail the cast's worst impulses, which were largely inflicted on the Holiday Inn that served as their holding cell when they were waiting to get called to the set. Per Ford:
"It was fun. It was like a party, but not a Hollywood party. It was a real low-budget movie, even for those days. I only got a couple hundred dollars a week. There were no dressing rooms. The actors sat in the same trailer as the costumes."
Harrison scores the Howard Johnson's upgrade
To blow off steam, the actors would race to the top of the Holiday Inn sign. Nothing naughty about that, right? Well, they also had a penchant for urinating in the hotel's ice machines. Per Duke's book, Ford claims to have not participated in this activity, but Lucas does remember the actor knocking back beers in his character's 1955 Chevy, which he would then race up and down the strip (the local police threatened to impound his car). That ain't so good.
Eventually, Ford's wild behavior, which also entailed hurling co-star off a balcony and into the shallow end of the hotel pool (leaving the young star with a noticeable scrape on his forehead), got himself ejected from the Holiday Inn. He wound up at a Howard Johnson's, which, to me, is quite the upgrade if only because their restaurants made killer cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes.
In retrospect, Ford has no regrets. "I was a bit of a carouser in those days," he said. "And I was in the company of other hell-raisers. If I'd been in the company of priests, I would have behaved differently." He did, however, learn an important lesson: if you want a production to put you up at a Howard Johnson's, throw Richard Dreyfuss in a swimming pool.