WWW- ‘Shanghai Surprise” may be the worst movie Sean Penn ever made – but at least he escaped the 1986 shoot without having to stand trial for attempted murder.
In the new bio, “Sean Penn: His Life and Times,” the Oscar-winner ruefully recalls that he’d just arrived in his hotel room on the Chinese island of Macao when a strange man lunged at him. Aided by his personal assistant (who was also his kickboxing coach), Penn says, he “grabbed the guy, ran him through the room to the balcony and hung him over – on the ninth floor.”
The guy was dangling over the edge when Penn realized he was a paparazzo. Even though he spared the snapper, police were called.
“Five minutes later I’m in jail, sitting on a stone floor next to my friend, and everyone’s talking Portuguese,” Penn tells writer Richard Kelly.
As luck would have it, Penn noticed that “the cell door was ajar.” Making a dash for a dock, Penn and his assistant jumped in a jetfoil and fled the former Portuguese colony.
Though movie critics convicted him of one of Hollywood’s most heinous performances, Penn says he later received “a pardon from the Portuguese government” for the attempted-murder rap.
Elsewhere in the book, due out next month from Cannongate:
In 1998, a USC linebacker told Penn he wanted to “shake the hand of the man who [bleeped] Madonna.” Being surrounded by the rest of the burly football team didn’t stop Penn from putting his cigarette out in the linebacker’s palm.
Penn was more charmed by a Madonna-impersonating drag queen he met in Amsterdam. Penn’s friend Matt Palmieri recalls that the actor followed the transvestite and his friends to an apartment where they drank, smoked pot and “discuss sexual politics and Reaganomics.”
Penn remembers he wasn’t even 13 when his grandma offered him a sip from the bottle of bourbon she kept under the blanket of her wheelchair. “Take a swig of this and you won’t even know you have a head,” Penn fondly recalls her saying.
Among the many good times they’ve had together, Jack Nicholson remembers waking up one morning to find “Sean asleep under the piano. I thought, ‘Here’s another reason we get along. Another Irishman who don’t wanna get up in the morning.'”