Cocaine the Barbarian

40 years ago, the unlikely acting career of then-bodybuilding champion Arnold Schwarzenegger went off with a bang in Conan the Barbarian (1982). Based on Robert E. Howard’s character of the same name from 1930s pulp magazines, Arnold’s epic sword and sorcery film was helmed by writer-director John Milius, the militant filmmaker best known for writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay Apocalypse Now (1979) for fellow “Movie Brat” Francis Ford Coppola. But in the end, Milius would share a co-screenwriting credit on Conan the Barbarian with Oliver Stone.
Stone penned an earlier draft in 1978 as the first of several studio assignments that would one day feel out of step with the politically-charged writer-director the world would soon celebrate for films like Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and JFK (1991). At the time, his Conan the Barbarian script was titled simply as Conan. But the title is just about the only thing simple about this early draft.
Stone’s Conan was a studio executive’s worst nightmare. The script called for a nearly four hour runtime, epic battle sequences, countless extras, live animals, excessive costumes and props, and one expensive set piece after another. His vision was doomed to be rewritten for budgetary constraints. However, seemingly none of this entered into Stone’s thinking at the time, as he wrote his Conan script while under the influence of cocaine and downers. And it shows.
Cocaine the Barbarian: Oliver Stone's Drug-Fueled, Four-Hour Conan Epic That Never Was