14 DAY TRIAL // There was a time when Dennis Quaid, a hot young star, would get money to feed his cocaine habit in the budget of the movie he was making, the actor himself says in a new article for Newsweek, from the “My Favorite Mistake” series.
Dennis doesn’t say that his longstanding cocaine addiction was his “favorite” mistake, but he holds nothing back when speaking about it – and how it led him to blow his career up his nose, literally.
It started in the ‘70s, when Dennis just moved to Los Angeles, and, he says, everybody was doing coke like they were smoking cigarettes socializing.
In fact, the whole thing was so casual that producers would even make sure they took care of him when getting him for new roles, by including the money for the drug in the budget.
“It was very casual at first. That’s what people were doing when they were at parties. Cocaine was even in the budgets of movies, thinly disguised. It was petty cash, you know?” the actor writes.
“It was supplied, basically, on movie sets because everyone was doing it. People would make deals. Instead of having a cocktail, you’d have a line. So it was insidious, the way it snuck up on everybody,” Quaid adds.
By the ‘80s, Dennis was an addict sleeping no more than an hour a night and acting like a rock star, as if he had the entire world in the palm of his hand.
In some ways, he had it, in the sense that he remained among the hottest commodities in Hollywood.
Until that changed too, and his acting started to be seriously affected by his killer habit.
“The lack of sleep made it so my focus wasn’t really there, which affected my acting. Addiction just keeps you from living; you’re basically hiding from life,” he explains.
One night, he had this epiphany, when he realized he’d be dead in 5 years (tops) if he continued living this way. The next day, he was in rehab.
Dennis Quaid has been sober ever since but, as he puts it, his acting career never quite recovered again.