Stroheim’s banquet set turned into a bacchanal on Merry-Go-Round — champagne buckets, drunken extras, and a naked punch‑bowl cameo

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Stroheim’s banquet set turned into a bacchanal on Merry-Go-Round — champagne buckets, drunken extras, and a naked punch‑bowl cameo

Merry-Go-Round (director Erich von Stroheim) / 1920s

During the production of Erich von Stroheim’s Merry-Go-Round (early 1920s), William H. Daniels — then a young camera operator who later became Greta Garbo’s personal cinematographer — left a vivid eyewitness account of one of the film’s infamous set scenes. Daniels recalled that in the big banquet sequence von Stroheim instructed extras playing Austrian officers to be genuinely drunk; the director supplied real champagne “by the bucketful” and whiskey as well. The result was chaotic and raucous to the point of embarrassment for the production: Daniels reported that, amid the staged debauchery, “a girl stepped naked out of a punchbowl.” Daniels later summed up the experience bluntly: “Merry-Go-Round was a disaster for Stroheim.” The anecdote stands as a contemporaneous account of on-set excesses in the silent era and underlines the laissez-faire, often hazardous methods some directors used to chase authenticity.