How Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger fell in love 30 years ago, and other wild stories

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...from their 'production from hell'

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...194938688.html

Ethan Alter·Senior Writer, Yahoo Entertainment
Wed, April 7, 2021, 12:49 PM·15 min read

Forget Liz and Dick: Thirty years ago, Alec and Kim reigned as Hollywood’s most scandalous couple. Fresh off the respective successes of The Hunt for Red October and Batman, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger were cast as on-again, off-again lovers in The Marrying Man, a period romantic comedy penned by celebrated playwright and screenwriter, Neil Simon, and produced by Walt Disney Studios. But what happened off-screen during production was no laughing matter… at least for those involved in making the movie.

Months before The Marrying Man’s theatrical release on April 5, 1991, a blistering article in Premiere magazine labeled it a “production from hell” and laid much of the blame at the feet of its two stars — who famously sparked an on-set romance that burned for nearly a decade before flaming out in 2000. That story, penned by John H. Richardson and published in the February 1991 issue, was the opening salvo in a media frenzy that overshadowed the film itself, which came and went from theaters with little fanfare and even less box office.



“The Marrying Man was the biggest mistake of my career,” Baldwin told Entertainment Weekly a month after the movie flopped in epic fashion, firing back at the same sources that had portrayed him and Basinger as the root cause of its failure. (Fun fact: The EW article was written by Ryan Murphy, who would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most profitable creators and later directed Baldwin in 2006's Running with Scissors.)

The Marrying Man hasn’t gotten especially better with age: Watched again today, it’s a mostly stilted attempt to marry a Hepburn/Grant screwball premise to a Hepburn/Tracy battle of the sexes narrative arc. Baldwin plays Charley Pearl, the soon-to-be married scion of a toothpaste empire who ditches his fiancée (Elisabeth Shue) when he lays eyes on Basinger's Las Vegas lounge singer, Vicki Anderson, who is currently attached to famed gangster, Bugsy Siegel (Armand Assante). But when Bugsy catches them in the act, he doesn't order Charley killed: Instead, he orchestrates the first of many weddings that Charley and Vicki have over the course of their tumultuous relationship. While the film itself is forgettable at best, the behind-the-scenes accounts of its production remain the stuff of classic Hollywood horror stories. Here’s a look back at some of the craziest on-set tales from Baldwin and Basinger’s hellish shoot.