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  • Film & TV Moderators: ghostfreak

Heroin/Opiate addicts on the Screen

K

Khadijah

Bluelight Crew
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I am interested in makin up a big ol comperhensive list of heroin/opiate addict , or heroin/opiate using characters from all american TV shows past n present. (shit, sorry to be a hater but, i cant get access to all this crazy uk and aussie upsidedownland shit! ;) )

I would also expand it into movies too I guess, since IDK if tv is a wide enough category considerin that the american public dont deal wit that type of shit too well and dont want it on their tv , well, at least not the kind that you dont pay extra for. (we all get our rocks off on skinemax n hoetime n such it seems like) anyways tho, my point was, if i kept it to TV, there wouldnt prolly be a very long list.

I definately cant do this on my own. I would ask for a name of the character, the show they are in and the channel its aired on, or the movie title, as well as a lil description of the person and their use. wat they use, if they are a addict, if they just mess with it a lil, if it was a one time thing, etc.

Anyways, I will start off with

Christopher Moltisanti - The Sopranos. A on and off heroin addict. the show frames his struggle with his addiction pretty realistically n with a certain level of understandin. Not to mention its set in NJ so i relate 100%.

I kno that Dr House on that show House is supposedly a vicodin addict, i just cant stand to watch it tho becuz he hardly takes any pills, and even if he did, vicodin is such a shitty drug that i tend to get a kinda elite attitude about it like it "dont count" but, I am gonna play by my own guidelines here. So nmber 2 is dr house, pill poppin doc.

So theres 2 to start, I got a feelin this thread might sit with 0 replies for a minute but on some real shit id really like if yall could give it a shot if you felt like you had some info to share. :)
 
lacey k said:
...from all american TV shows past n present.

I would also expand it into movies too I guess,
Click to expand...
a few american movies off top.
Requiem for a Dream
Drugstore Cowboy,
The Basketball Diaries
Party Monster
Sherrybaby
Gia
Things We Lost in the Fire
Less Than Zero
Permanent Midnight

characters off top.
skip (chris tucker) dead presidents
t.k. (jeremy sisto) suicide kings
jeff "fats" portnoy (jack black) tropic thunder
vincent vega (john travolta) pulp fiction.
lacey k said:
(shit, sorry to be a hater but, i cant get access to all this crazy uk and aussie upsidedownland shit! ;) )
Click to expand...
non american movies (had to get it out of my system, couldn't resist :\) u can rent em all from netflix, just sayin.
Sid and Nancy
Trainspotting
Christiane F
Candy

all over the "Pusher" flicks involve heroin in some way, but Pusher 3 the most with the main character trying to juggle staying clean, dealing drugs and family business.
 
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The Wire (hbo)

bubbles (recovering heroin addict with a vast knowledge of surviving on baltimore's streets)

d'angelo ( uses heroin to deal with a 20 year prison sentence )

wallace ( corner boy, wants to go back to school but uses money from d'angelo on heroin and stays at home )

duquan ( outcast kid, turns to heroin at the end of the show, similar story as bubbles )

The Corner (hbo, from same people behind The Wire)

Francine "Fran" Boyd (Khandi Alexander) A drug-addict. Mother of DeAndre and DeRodd. Lives in the "Dew Drop Inn" with her sisters, Bunchie and Sharry, and brother Stevie and his son.

Gary McCullough (T.K. Carter) A drug-addict. Father of DeAndre and ex-husband of Fran. He dropped out of college when Fran became pregnant and became addicted to drugs after their marriage ended.

one more movie: Liquid Sky The story takes place in the early 1980s New York dance/art scene. Space aliens land to feed off of endorphins released during heroin use. (far out huh)
 
Well, not characters but several actor and actress.

Back in the 1920's (during the days of silent film), heroin ran rampant through Hollywood and killed off a ton of huge stars. Now, not all of them overdosed per se but nutrition and medical care not what they are today. Heavy drug use could make you suseptible to tuberculosis which back then was a death sentence.

Wallace Reid
WallaceReid.jpg

Wallace Reid is considered the first male sex symbol of the movies preceding Valentino by several years. He was called "the screen's most perfect lover".
Apparently, he got injured performing a stunt and was put on morphine to ease the pain enough to get him to complete the movie. When the movie was finished, he was thoroughly hooked. At that point, they could have sent him to rehab for a few months but he was too bankable of a star to have him out of work that long. So the studio heads pumped him full of more drugs and kept him churning out movies until he died at age 31.
His wifey went on to make a cautionary movie about heroin called Human Wreckage. Possibly the first ever movie about heroin addiction. Sadly, it is now lost.

Mabel Normand
page1_1.jpg

Mabel Normand was a popular comedienne in the teens She starred in movies with Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. She appeared in Tillie's Punctured Romance which was the first ever feature length comedy. Her film Mickey was the largest grossing movie of 1918.
Mabel Normand loooooooooooved shooting speedballs.
She was involved in a series of scandals in the early 1920's that caused her drug use to become public knowledge. Unlike today, scandals actually hurt your career back then. Theaters would stop showing your picture. The supreme court had recently ruled that movies were not protected by the first amendment so cities could actually ban your movies.
(strangely, a lot of these laws are still on the books around the country cause no one has bothered to repeal hem. Here in St. Louis, it is technically illegal to watch the movie Freaks).
Her career never recovered. When she died at 37 of drug complications, she hadn't made a movie in 3 years.

Jack Pickford
PickfordJ.jpg

By 1920, Mary Pickford was the 2nd biggest movie star in the world next to Chaplin. She had a brother, Jack Pickford. Not as big of a star as his sister, he is probably best known for a scandal where his wife died from accidentally injesting is syphillis medication.
Jack Pickford loved his smack. Dead at 36.

Barbara La Marr
2121022961_04b39a210b.jpg

Barbara La Marr was known as The Girl Too Beautiful To Live. Legend has it that she was so gorgeous that audiences would gasp at her close-ups.
Like Mabel Normand, Babs was a hard partier and also liked to ride the Speedball Express. She died from TB at age 29. The studio blamed it on "too rigorous dieting". That's one way to put it...

Alma Rubens
1928-wills-film-favourites.jpg

Alma Ruben's became public knowledge in a most amusing way. One day Alma rubens was seen running down a L.A. street being chased be two men. She was screaming that the two men were trying to kidnap her. She sought refuge at a local gas station to hide. Eventually the men found her and grabbed her at which point Alma whipped out a knife that she hid in her dress and stabbed one of the men.
Well, it turned out that the two men were a doctor and an ambulance driver who had shown up to Ms. Rubens house to take her off to rehab. Oops.
The story gets sillier from here. But it's a long one and I'm not going to type it all out. Long story short. She eventually got out of rehab only to get busted with 40 cubes of morphine sewed into the seems of her dress.
She eventually got bailed out and died shortly afterwards. She was 33.

I'm tired of typing. If you're still reading, you can also check out Jeanne Eagels and Juanita Hansen.

As a epilog, film historians have actually managed to track down the source of all this fun. There was a guy who worked as an extra and bit part actor at Mack Sennet studios. His acting career went nowhere but he is significant role in film history due to his second job as a part-time drug dealer. Apparently this one guy got most of the people mentioned above started on heroin.

For more silent film scandals this a neat doc in 5 parts.
part 1
part 2
part 3
part 4
part 5
 
i just watched House MD tonight and he says he is a vicodin addict but they show him eating oxycodone. and it was actually quite funny because they show him trying to get a script at another hospital and he was refusing hydrocodone/acetomiaphin and fishing for oxycodone with the classic "makes me nauseous" bit

;)
 
Wow, EA-1475 - that was fantastic. Thanks for sharing. Also, props to you Ms Lacey for starting a really interesting thread. :)

I have a few to add.

Clean - The two main actors James Johnston and Maggie Cheung are both heroin addicts.
Pulp Fiction - Uma Thurman's character Mia Wallace is an addict.
Act of Worship - The main character Alix played by Ana Reeder is a young lady fighting her drug addiction.
 
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CHiLD-0F-THE-BEAT said:
Wow, EA-1475 - that was fantastic. Thanks for sharing.
Click to expand...

You're welcome.

Here's another interesting bit I read of why heroin died off in Hollywood during the 1930's. Some would have you believe that Will Hays came to town and cleaned up. But really it was down to technology.

Being a silent film actor was a kickass job. You could spend all night taking loads of drugs until 4 in the morning and then stumble into the studio the next day at 9 and get away with it. For a couple reasons.
One reason was that film quality and lighting was not that good. So even if you came in looking like total shit from a late-night drug binge, a good make-up artist and light man could cover this up reasonably well.
But as film quality and lighting improved, this became a lot harder to do. And audiences started to notice "Damn, John Gilbert kinda looks like hell."

But what really forced actors to clean up was the introduction of the talking picture.
In the silent picture days, they didn't have scripts. All the director would have is a scenario. Much of the time, the actors had no idea what they would they would be filming that day until they got to the studio.
The director would explain a scene and then would talk to them as the camera rolled. Kind of like a photographer might do with a model these days. So the camera would roll and the the director would talk to the actress "OK, look sad! Your fiancee just went off to war! You don't know if you will ever see him again! Now look out the window! You're wondering where he might be! You're hoping he's not dead! Now CUT!"
Any actor could pull that off with a hangover. Or high. But all that changed with the talking picture.
It was now necessary to learn your lines in advance. You had to have them down perfect when you walked through the door in the morning. So you worked, did your filming and at the end of the day you went home and you had to memorize all your lines for the next day. All-night coke binges just weren't gonna cut it anymore.
While there were a few serious alcoholic stars in the 1930's, for the most part, once sound pictures came around, holding down both an acting career and a hardcore drug habit was damn near impossible.
 
lacey k said:
I kno that Dr House on that show House is supposedly a vicodin addict, i just cant stand to watch it tho becuz he hardly takes any pills, and even if he did, vicodin is such a shitty drug that i tend to get a kinda elite attitude about it like it "dont count" but, I am gonna play by my own guidelines here. So nmber 2 is dr house, pill poppin doc.
Click to expand...

I think that it's a fairly accurate portrayal of what your typical, prescription Vicodin addict looks like. In the pilot episode of House, Dr. Cuddy states that he's on 40mg of hydrocodone daily, and that was the first ever episode. Fast forward to the episodes in season 3 where he is being confronted about his addiction, and I remember counting him popping at least 10 pills in one episode.

That's not including the parts of Dr. House's daily life that aren't written into the script.

100+mgs per day of Vicodin is more than enough to cause withdrawals. When he was abruptly taken off his pills, I thought they portrayed the withdrawal aspect pretty accurately as well.

My only complaint with how they portray his pill consumption is that sometimes they show him acting as if he's getting immediate relief from the pills right after swallowing them, when in reality that would take 10-30 minutes (they sometimes show him crushing/chewing them).

Sorry, I watch waaaaay too much House and had to comment, lol.
 
^ The one thing I've never understood about House is why he would be popping those pills as-is, even if his DOC did happen to be hydrocodone. Even if they're Norcos, 10 pills a day is 3250 mg of APAP. Surely a doctor could at least get some pure hydrocodone somewhere, or take something that wasn't so egregiously toxic.

My best friend since grade school is an anaesthesiologist... sometimes he calls me up from work to say "You'd literally fucking kill someone for what I have in my pocket right now." :D
 
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