Robert Evans and Popeye (1980): A High-Noon Hollywood Gamble That Spiraled into Carnival Chaos

I. Old-Hollywood Ambition Meets Comic-Strip Oddity

After breathing new life into Paramount with The Godfather and Chinatown, Robert Evans set his sights on Popeye — not the rubbery cartoon, but E.C. Segar’s darkly quirky comic strip. He commissioned Jules Feiffer to adapt it, enlisted Robert Altman to direct, and cast Robin Williams in his first starring role. Evans envisioned a bold, musical comedy unlike anything audiences had seen.

Evans originally wanted Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin to play Popeye and Olive Oyl, but Hoffman exited after script disputes. When producer Michael Eisner suggested Robin Williams — then a rising TV star — Evans later admitted breezily, “I didn’t really know who he was… I think I had seen his name on a magazine earlier that day.”

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II. Building an Entire Village… in Malta

In one of his signature moves, Evans erected an entire seaside town — Sweethaven — on Malta’s Anchor Bay: crooked houses, fishing docks, docks belching steam, painted wood, and movie magic built from scratch. That set survives today as the tourist attraction Popeye Village.

Altman embraced the physicality: his ensemble cast wandered cluttered streets, sang live on-set, and improvised amid ramshackle realism. But that improvisational style collided with Evans’s insistence on comic-strip fidelity. Feiffer’s script went through revisions as Evans defended minor eccentric characters that animated cartoons had long sidelined.

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III. Creative Clashes & Mechanical Mishaps

Altman and Evans reportedly came to blows—or near blows—during the shoot, as the two battled over tone, pacing, and script control.

Feiffer, the screenwriter, disliked Harry Nilsson’s songs — believing they didn’t fit the film — and felt the screenplay was overstuffed with minor characters. Meanwhile technical issues abounded: Popeye’s rubber muscle arms were hard to manipulate, prompting two Italian artisans to remake them on-set. Altman broke convention by having actors sing live during filming, complicating sound capture. Robin Williams would redub much of his dialogue later — his character’s mumbling, pipe-in-mouth style and ad-libs proving difficult to record cleanly.

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IV. The Most “Coked-Up Film Set” in Hollywood

Here’s where legend meets wild truth. Barry Diller, then CEO of Paramount, later called the Popeye shoot “the most coked-up film set” he’d ever seen. He revealed attendees “couldn’t escape it” — and even said that film cans shipped for processing were used to smuggle cocaine back and forth between Malta and Los Angeles. “Everyone was stoned,” he said, observing the movie’s final cut plays at an unhinged pace — “like a record spinning at 78 rpm instead of 33.”

Composer Van Dyke Parks recalled a surreal moment: “I was the hero of the regiment for opening up a walkie-talkie to change the battery and finding a bag of cocaine … I recoiled, because I knew that it would be a component in the way people behaved, and the difficulties of the production right up to the top.”

SlashFilm adds that Evans himself was “partial to cocaine,” and nearly caused a diplomatic incident when luggage “full of cocaine” went missing at the airport. He was arrested on trafficking charges during post-production — charges later dropped — and quipped in a 1994 interview: “Bob ‘Cocaine’ Evans is how I’ll be known to my grave.”

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V. Robin Williams, Addiction, and an Early Exit

Williams, fresh off Mork & Mindy, was battling addiction during filming. As he later confessed in 1988, “Cocaine for me was a place to hide… Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down.” Director Howard Storm quipped, “He was snorting coke, and if you snort coke, in order to come down you drink booze… He was out all night and screwing everybody in town.”

The chaotic environment overshadowed Williams’s talents. Although the film grossed about $60 million globally on a $20 million budget, it bombed critically and failed to cement his film career — that resurgence came later with Good Merrying, Vietnam.

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VI. Fallout & Cult Reappraisal

For Evans, Popeye marked the end of an era. He’d gambled on spectacle and vision — and paid for it. The film’s audacious oddness alienated critics and damaged Altman’s career momentum. Altman didn’t helm another major studio film for nearly a decade.

Yet, over time, Popeye found a cult audience. Nilsson’s whimsical songs, Altman’s improvisational style, Williams’s elastic performance, and that weird, built-from-scratch village remain bizarrely captivating today. For cinephiles, it stands as a late New Hollywood relic, luxurious in risk but unstable in execution.

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VII. Epilogue: A Movie That Embodies Excess and Ambition

Robert Evans’s Popeye is a case study in Hollywood gambit — a film where visionary faithfulness collided with creative chaos, and where excess wasn’t just thematic but tangible. Sweethaven still stands in Malta; the set endures as a tourist oddity and a monument to bombast. Robin Williams’s debut, brimming with fledgling star energy, emerged from an era when drug and ambition marched hand in hand.

For Movies of the 80s readers, it is a strange artifact: part Altman fever dream, part methodological implosion. It’s a story of sets built real, improvisation unchecked, drug-fueled frenzy, legal scandals, and enduring strangeness. Robert Evans, for all his hubris, delivered a film that lives on — as a caution, a curiosity, and a flickering testament to the risks of Hollywood’s bravest bets.

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