Director Mike Nichols did not mess around, as Melanie Griffith learned the hard way when she drunkenly stumbled onto the set of their 1988 comedy “Working Girl” after the actress had one too many.
In an interview for a new book, Griffith revealed that the legendary director, who died in 2014 at age 83, made her pay $80,000 for wasting a night of shooting due to her intoxication.
As People reports, Griffith opened up about the “humbling, embarrassing experience” in an interview for Life Isn’t Everything, a new oral history of the director of such hits as “The Graduate” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
“There were a lot of things that happened on ‘Working Girl’ that I did that were not right,” Griffith, 62, recalled of the incident, in which she went out for a few drinks with sober co-star Alec Baldwin and then kept drinking when she returned to the set.
“When we got back to the set, I had vodka in my motor home, so I had a slug of vodka, and it mixed and made me so drunk, which I thought was really funny,” she said. “But it wasn’t, and it was cold, and I had to walk down the stairs with Alec, and I couldn’t do it.”
Nichols was not amused by his film’s star messing up all her shots.
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“Mike got so mad at me, he wouldn’t talk to me,” Griffith revealed. “Mike Haley, the first AD, just came up and said, ‘We’re shutting down. Go home,’ and I knew I was in so much trouble.”
The following day, she experienced the repercussions. “The next morning he took me to breakfast and said, ‘Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to pay for last night out of your pocket. We’re not going to report you to the studio, but you have to pay for what it cost,’ and it was $80,000,” she said. “They wanted to get my attention and they really did. It was a very humbling, embarrassing experience, but I learned a lot from it.”
