Sandbox / Writing Under The Influence

(Trivia)

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Examples:

Anime

• Madlax: The director stated that he came up with many of the plot twists while drunk. Surprisingly, they still make sense if you watch it while sober.

Art

• The Korean painter Ohwon, whose life was the topic of Drunk on Women and Poetry, was a notorious drunk. Much of his oeuvre was allegedly done while under the influence of alcohol.

Comic books

• Bad Planet: The premise was literally conceived on drugs as Thomas Jane was hopped on Vicodin following a car accident, where he dreamed about horrible alien deathspiders.
• Grant Morrison is known as "that comic writer who does lots of drugs". He has admitted that drugs were a big part of his creative process he wrote The Invisibles.

Comedy

• A lot of Mitch Hedberg were written while high (or at least about his extensive drug use), but he himself debunked the idea that he was high while performing, in true Mitch-ian fashion.
  "Some people think I'm high when I'm on stage. I would never get high before a show, because when I'm high, I don't want to stand in front of a bunch of people that I don't know. That does not sound comfortable. Like, when you're high and a joke doesn't work, it's extra scary! It's like 'woah, what the hell happened there? I am retreating within myself! Why have all these people gathered? And why am I elevated? Why am I not facing the same way as everyone else? And what is this electric stick in my hand?'"

Fan Works

• Subverted with this My Little Pony fanfic. The author and his friends were "high on painkillers" when he wrote it.
• A Clash of NEETs was, according to Word of God, devised while on a painkiller high. Considering that it involves sending the main characters of KonoSuba into the gritty world of A Song of Ice and Fire, it actually makes sense.

Films — Animation

• Both Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have stated that they came up with the story for Sausage Party during marijuana-smoking sessions.

Films — Live-Action

• A large number of the cast and crew of Apocalypse Now were on drugs (and/or large amounts of alcohol) during filming. This, and much more, is shown in the making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Martin Sheen was very intoxicated when shooting the scene in Willard's hotel room, and Sam Bottoms freely admits to using cannabis and speed (among other drugs) during production.
• The Beatles willingly admitted that Help! was filmed "in a haze of marijuana smoke." If you want evidence of how checked-out they were, just watch John's awkward laugh when Ringo's finger is magnetized to the ceiling of the elevator.
• Alejandro Jodorowsky has stated that his goal was usually to produce a film which impacts its audience like a psychedelic or hallucinogenic drug, and he often took an Art Imitates Life approach to this goal. Stories abound of him taking LSD during film productions, and it's known that he used Enforced Method Acting in at least one case: The peyote/mescal trip in The Holy Mountain was filmed by dosing the cast with psilocybin mushrooms.
• Richard O'Brien and Patricia Quinn admitted during the commentary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that they were stoned whilst filming the wedding scenes. Also, Christopher Biggins said there were a lot of drugs on set and that he and the other Transylvanians were stoned every day.
• Bruce Vilanch has admitted that he was heavily using cocaine while helping to write The Star Wars Holiday Special. He wasn't the only one, Carrie Fisher was high during the filming. Watch for yourself.
• Reportedly, Clifford Odets Odets languished for four months with writers block when he was writing the script for Sweet Smell of Success. When the deadline was coming soon, he locked himself in his hotel room and finished the script more than a little high on Benzedrine.
• Lars von Trier has stated that his films came from drug and alcohol abuse, and that he may have to stop since he is a recovering addict.

Literature

• Wilkie Collins admitted that some of his novels were written on drugs.
• Philip K. Dick was known for finishing many of his novels in maybe three weeks, a feat he usually achieved by taking amphetamines and writing non-stop. A Scanner Darkly, however, which is about drug addicts, was written after he became sober, and as a result it's a good deal less rushed and more moving than some of his other works. According to a Rolling Stones 1975 interview, he wrote all of his books published before 1970 while on amphetamines.
  • Fictional drugs play significant roles in several other stories, such as Can-D (which transfers your mind into a Barbie-like doll named Perky Pat) and Chew-Z (an afterlife-simulating hallucinogen that allows the title character to control your perception) from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
  • "Faith of our Fathers" was written on LSD. A man sees the national leader as an alien monster after taking an anti hallucinogenic drug.
• Stephen King was on drugs while writing Cujo (to the point that he has no memory of writing it), but despite this, it isn't surreal or incomprehensible.^note  Understandable, considering his drug of choice at the time was cocaine, which doesn't generally result in an altered or impaired perception of reality. This also put him in the unusual position of being able to read one of his own books just like an unspoiled fan, and he ended up saying he really likes it and wishes he could remember the writing process.
• William S. Burroughs admitted that everything he wrote was in at least in some part autobiographical of his drug episodes and the times in between. He's the main character of Junkie, after all.
  • Parts of Naked Lunch, probably, were written while Burroughs was still an opiate addict (not by design, but as a matter of need). His preferred creative tool was majoun (highly-concentrated cannabis cooked into a sort of candy; think of it as pot brownies). Even this drug use was primarily for imagination- and imagery-producing-enhancement; during sessions geared more toward production and editing, he was sober (mostly).
  • Burroughs and his biographers created a myth of the young outlaw junkie-poet gathering experiences (both mind-blowing and degrading) to be committed to paper during his later, more sensible years. In fact Burroughs—like so many "ex-junkies"—never entirely lost his desire for narcotics. Only now—after his death—are more complex truths becoming apparent: he had significant relapses into opiate use. Which was not an impairment to the degree one might expect.
• According to Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey wrote several passages of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on LSD and/or peyote.
• Robert Rankin has said publicly that he wrote Dance of the Voodoo Handbag with a high drug consumption.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge admitted that some of his poems were' written on drugs.The poem "Kubla Khan" might have been a lot longer had Samuel Coleridge not been interrupted from his writing of it by the infamous "person from Porlock". He had taken two grains of opium before he put pen to paper, and the vision faded while he was desperately trying to get said Porlock resident to leave. Of course, since he was on opium at the time, the person may not have ever been there in the first place.
• Gravity's Rainbow: Thomas Pynchon apparently once commented that he himself couldn't understand some bits of the book, which was, in fact, (at least partially) written on drugs.

Live-Action TV

• The Brady Bunch: This is why a climactic scene featuring Robert Reed and Barry Williams was shot a day after production was to have ended. Reed – already disgusted with the script as a whole – was particularly annoyed at a scene where Mike and Greg talk to Greg's pet mouse to get it to run through a maze. When Reed lost his argument with Sherwood Schwartz over the script and was told he wasn't being written out, Reed promptly went out, got very drunk and returned to film his scene with Williams. Lloyd Schwartz, who was also on the set, realized that if the scene was filmed, someone – most likely, at ABC or in the very least Paramount Studios – would easily figure out that Reed was highly intoxicated, a media frenzy would ensue and it would ruin the integrity of the show ... prompting Lloyd to knock over a flood light onto the set and cause an overnight stopdown ... and time for Reed to sober up. To the Schwartzes, a day late with production and related costs were worth the price of saving the show. Both Williams and the Schwartzes have related this incident in their respective autobiographies. Of course, Barry Williams did famously shoot a scene of the episode "Law and Disorder" while visibly high.
• The Eric Andre Show:According to some sources, at least one of the guests had allegedly been given Salvia to smoke before appearing and cast members doing acid before going on is apparently fairly regular.
  • Tyler, the Creator refused the weed and acid they offered him backstage. Doesn't make his antics during the show any less weirder.

Music

• Members of alt-J have admitted to doing drugs and even to finding songwriting inspiration while under the influence.
• Parodied by Aphrodite's Child: The Mind Screw album 666 contains the disclaimer "This work was recorded under the influence of "SAHLEP"^note Sahlep in Arabic, salepi in Greek, is an oriental hot, sweet and healthy drink. It is basically a sort of herbal tea with a calming, relaxing effect. It has nothing to do with alcohol or any other drugs, but it is usually drunk by poor people early in the morning, instead of coffee or tea.
• The Beatles were often high during or in the near vicinity of creative endeavors. They used stimulants while they were in Hamburg so they could stay awake during ridiculously long sets, and occasionally dabbled in other substances (including a couple of brushes with pot). After Bob Dylan offered the four of them pot under the mistaken notion that they were regular users (due to a miscommunication of all things...), they started smoking it incessantly. By all accounts, they were constantly stoned while filming Help!. In the spring of 1965 John Lennon and George Harrison were introduced to acid by their dentist, who spiked their coffee with the stuff one night, an incident memorialized in the song "Doctor Robert"; Ringo Starr followed shortly thereafter. By their second trip to America, they were fairly regular trippers (there's a famous story about how Peter Fonda ruined their trip at a party they were throwing at their rental house in Los Angeles, which got turned into "She Said She Said" on Revolver). Paul McCartney also took it up, but not until around Sgt. Pepper, and he gave it up right before telling the press he used to take it... <sigh> John in particular loved LSD (he admitted to having written "I Am The Walrus" at least partially on two separate acid trips). At least two of Paul's songs ("Got To Get You Into My Life" and "Fixing a Hole") are most definitely about pot — the former by Paul's admission, the latter because it's obvious; and odds are, any song from that era by Paul that looks like it's about pot is.
  • John Lennon was addicted to heroin for a while; he wrote the song "Cold Turkey" about his withdrawal symptoms. It was released as a solo work because Paul McCartney didn't want to touch or get credit for it. (Pity, it's one of John's better works.)
  • And ONLY the first two lines of "I Am The Walrus" were written on acid, according to Lennon. Not 100%, but a rather insignificant portion of the actual song. (And if anything, those lines prove the explanation in this trope right; something repetitive like "I am he as you are he as you are me" is as far as you are going to get if writing lyrics while on acid.) The weirdness in the rest of the song was intentional. John Lennon wanted it to sound druggy and incomprehensible; it was his way of messing with people who were looking for "deeper meanings" in Beatles songs. As he said, "Let them figure that one out!"^note "Let's stick that in there, we say, that'll start them puzzling. I'm sure all the artists do, when they realize it's a con. I bet Picasso sticks things in. I bet he's been laughing his balls off for the last eighty years." Parts that seem to be drug-inspired could have been written in the style of The Goon Show, but not all.
  • The Beatles have been fairly consistent that they were rarely high while recording, with one memorable exception being during Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, when John accidentally took a tab of acid thinking it was an "upper." (The fact that the Beatles considered amphetamines as a different class of drugs than marijuana or psychedelics is a subject for another day)
  • Speaking of Sgt. Pepper, Paul McCartney was experimenting with a decidedly Un-psychedelic drug during the recording. Paul had recently been introduced to cocaine by his friends in the avante-garde art scene in London.
• David Bowie was a notoriously heavy cocaine user during the first half of the 1970s, with much of his work during that period being born out of it. Station to Station in particular came directly from his addiction hitting a tipping point, explicitly referencing his and Iggy Pop's drug trips on at least two songs. In the years since its release, he openly and repeatedly admitted that he remembered almost nothing about the album's production, describing the record as "a piece of work by an entirely different person."
  • The musicians on this record admitted to consuming cocaine while creating this album. Earl Slick remarked how he casually used it for getting inspiration for the album's guitar work. Bowie himself couldn't even remember recording the album.
• Eric Clapton was becoming addicted to heroin when he recorded what is generally regarded as his best album, Derek & the Dominos' Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
• Having mentioned Bob Dylan, we would be remiss not to mention that when he wrote "Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35," he was not talking about an ancient form of capital punishment.
  • Flip-Flop of God seems to indicate that it actually might, as in a couple of interviews, Dylan recalls reading about Islamic stoning of women in a paper just before writing the song. On the other hand, he was stoned during the recording of the song (that giggle!), and of course Dylan is notorious for not exactly being forthright about his creative process, so who knows?
  • Dylan has always been a bit cagey about his intoxicant use. As one writer put it, his main drug of choice has always been alcohol. He claimed in an interview that he briefly was addicted to heroin after arriving in New York, but he may have been making that up (in the same interview he claimed he also worked as a hustler in that period). We know he was an enthusiastic pot smoker during his folk years, and one reporter swears to God that Dylan once barged into Willie Nelson's tour bus with a gigantic blunt while the reporter was interviewing Nelson sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s. Reliable reports have him trying LSD a few times when it was still legal (around 1964), but comments he's made over the years indicate he wasn't all that impressed with it. He used amphetamines a lot in the 1965-66 period. Beyond that, it's all conjecture.
• Dave Brock of space-rock band Hawkwind once claimed that he always mixed the band's albums while he was stoned. Given the results, it's entirely plausible.
  • Hawkwind also spawned the Heavy Metal icons Motörhead. Motorhead being a slang term for an amphetamine addict.
    • It's also worth mentioning Lemmy left Hawkwind to start Motorhead because he was arrested when customs mistook his speed for crystal meth.
    • In Lemmy's own words, he was kicked out for "using the wrong drugs".
• The Rolling Stones (Band): Mick Jagger has admitted that the band was on acid throughout the entire recording of Their Satanic Majesties Request. Keith Richards claims he has no memory of the sessions at all.

• The idea for the "Gantz Graf" music video by Autechre came to the director in an acid trip.
• Deftones' Around the Fur, White Pony (itself named after cocaine), and Deftones were made during their well-publicized battle with drug and alcohol addiction. Some have even said that Chino gave his best live performances while completely drunk and high.
• StatusQuo: A great deal of their famously no-frills music was made on drugs, especially in the '70s and '80s. Most notably, Parfitt came up with the riff for "Mystery Song" after taking an inordinate amount of amphetamines in a cup of tea.
• MGMT: The founding members admitted to using many psychedelics back in college, and intentionally played it up during their older interviews. How many of their songs were actually made on drugs is a mystery, though they did claim that out of MGMT's tracks, only "Your Life Is A Lie" was written on drugs.
• Cameron Boggs of Sanguisugabogg estimated that at least 90% of their material was written while high as shit on some combination of weed, psychedelics, and dissociatives, and their turn towards death metal first occurred when the basement that Boggs was living in at the time flooded while they were tripping balls, which inspired numerous heavy, chunky riffs.
• Pavement: Post Crooked Rain works (especially Wowee Zowee) were very weed-inspired.
• New Order: This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Averted; Stephen Morris admitted in a 2020 interview that he and possibly the rest of the band were on acid during the recording of.
• George Clinton admitted that the idea behind the album Free Your Mind was to see if they could make a whole album while tripping on acid.
• Goo Goo Dolls: Rzeznik and Takac have admitted they were so drunk and high during the recording of the first album that they hardly remember recording it.
• Kacey Musgraves fully admits that a lot of Golden Hour was written while on acid. Same thing with star-crossed, which she wrote while on a guided Mushroom Samba.

Video Games

• The creators of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn have admitted that they actually were drunk when they came up with the idea to make a new game in the series. Whereas previous games were about saving the world from dangerous magic returning to it, Dark Dawn is about the old heroes forcing their kids to go on a dangerous adventure to take the feather from a giant god-bird to fix a hang-glider they need to explore the volcano where God used to live. Somehow, the whole thing concludes on a cliffhanger.
• Legos in Space: LEGOS IN SPACE TREE was made on drugs. As explained in the credits, the drugs were "from hospital so it was ok".

Web Comics

• Ichabod The Optimistic Canine came into being when the author was drunk on wine.

Web Original

• Botchamania: While commenting on the video for Botchamania 92, Maffew explains what he was doing while editing the video and why he wasn't particularly fond of the video itself, and he basically admits that if anyone was guessing that he was on drugs while making it, their guess was correct.
  Maffew: This was made around the time I took E for the first and last time. This was made during the god-fucking-awful comedown and I don't tend to re-watch this one much. It explains why the ending is as strange as it is... Halloween 3, Full Metal Jacket, Akira and Street Fighter The Movie. And Phillip Glass. NOT EVERY IDEA IS A GOOD IDEA.

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