If there is one thing that the last few years have made clear about Hollywood, it is this, a lot of powerful people in the movie business got away with rotten behavior for far too long. While it has been great to see some of those people brought to justice in recent years, it is very clear that a lot of Hollywood big wigs have gotten away with poor behavior for years. This is why it's surprising when you hear stories of big celebrities, like Conan O'Brien, actually treating people well. It's not always the case.

Since Mike Myers starred in several beloved comedies over the years, a lot of his longtime fans tend to smile when they hear his name. However, that certainly doesn’t mean that everyone who has worked with Myers over the years were overjoyed to deal with him. For example, it has come out that at one point a studio head was so mad at Myers that they freaked out on the actor and even threatened to ruin him.

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Mike’s No Angel?

After several years of being an extremely bankable movie star, Mike Myers took a huge step back from the acting business throughout the 2010s. Given all of the money that Myers’ movies brought in over the years, you may have assumed that the powers that be in Hollywood were very upset to see him step away. However, there seems to be some evidence that a lot of people in the business didn’t shed a tear that he was gone.

When Mike Myers became a movie star with the release of 1992’s Wayne’s World, his services were in high demand. After going on to star in Wayne’s World 2 the following year, it should have been safe to assume that Myers was riding high in 1993. Instead, Myers was already fending off reports that he was hard to deal with.

During the early-90s, Wayne’s World director Penelope Spheeris said she “didn’t have a good experience with Mike”. If that wasn’t bad enough, So I Married An Axe Murderer director Thomas Schlamme said Myers has a “difficult personality”. During a 1993 interview, The Los Angeles Times asked Myers about reports of his bad behavior. After stating that he is “very passionate about (his) work”, Myers said that “some people misinterpreted my passion as insanity”. Considering that Myers would later become a lot more powerful after the success of Austin Powers and Shrek, it seems unlikely that he became easier to work with.

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A Big Problem

At some point in Mike Myers’ life, he saw a 1949 British comedy film called Passport to Pimlico. When it came time for him to begin work on Wayne’s World 2, Myers remembered the 1949 film and decided to base his script on the plot from the older movie. Many years later, Wayne’s World 2 producer Lorne Michaels would say that Myers likely believed that Paramount owned the rights to Passport to Pimlico so basing his script on that film wouldn’t be a problem.

Unfortunately, Paramount didn’t own the rights to Passport to Pimlico. Worse yet, the movie studio only realized that Myers based his original Wayne’s World 2 script on Passport to Pimlico weeks before filming was to begin.

Since it took Paramount so long to learn about the origins of Mike Myers’ original Wayne’s World 2 script, they found themselves in an awful situation. After all, if they made the movie based on Myers’ script without the permission of Passport to Pimlico’s rights owners, they were pretty much begging to be sued. Since movie studios get sued all of the time, everyone at Paramount knew how expensive lawsuits can be. On the other hand, if they went to the rights holder that likely would have cost a fortune too since filming was about to commence. As a result, the rights holders could ask for a ridiculous amount knowing full well that Paramount didn’t have the time to negotiate.

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An Extreme Threat

Instead of choosing between risking a lawsuit and paying a fortune for the rights to an old film, Paramount’s early-90s chairman Sherry Lansing opted for another option. Unfortunately for Mike Myers, Lansing decided to call the actor into her office where she made it clear that he had to write an all-new script immediately. Worse yet, according to a 2017 biography about Lansing, she made sure that Myers knew that she would financially ruin him if he didn’t make things right.

According to what someone else who was at the Lansing/Myers meeting told the writer of the aforementioned biography, Sherry was furious with the famed actor. As a result, she started by exclaiming “how dare you put us in this situation” before she began to threaten Myers. “We’ll sue you. We’ll take your f—ing house. You won’t even own a f—ing home.” From there, Lansing followed up by telling Myers that there was “a team figuring out how they can take every single thing away from (him)”.

After threatening to decimate Mike Myers financially, Sherry Lansing finished up by angrily telling the actor and writer how he should make fix things immediately. “If I were you, Mike, I’d go to Lorne’s office right now and stay there until you come up with a new script. We’ll slide food under the door.” Unsurprisingly, Myers did as he was told by immediately starting work on a new script that was finished quickly enough that the movie began filming on time.

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