In Sharon Stone's new memoir, "The Beauty of Living Twice," the actress recounts the difficult casting of "The Quick and the Dead," revealing that she paid Leonardo DiCaprio's salary because the studio didn't want to hire him.
In the 1995 western, DiCaprio plays a freewheeling character named The Kid who befriends Stone's Ellen after she moves to a rural town in the Old West.
Stone, who was also a coproducer on the film, wrote in her memoir, published Tuesday, that she and the producers auditioned many teens for the role.
"This kid named Leonardo DiCaprio was the only one who nailed the audition, in my opinion: he was the only one who came in and cried, begging his father to love him as he died in the scene," she recalled in the book.
However, Stone said TriStar Pictures, the studio that produced the film, wasn't keen on hiring DiCaprio, who was starting his career and had yet to star in "Titanic" or "Romeo and Juliet."
"'Why an unknown, Sharon, why are you always shooting yourself in the foot?'" Stone said of the studio's reply. "The studio said if I wanted him so much, I could pay him out of my own salary. So I did."
Stone wrote that she also had to fight for the studio to hire Sam Raimi to direct the movie. At the time, she said, the studio thought of Raimi as a "D-movie director" because of his films "The Evil Dead I" and "Army of Darkness," both of which were low-budget, experimental horrors.
In the end, Stone said, she told the studio that Raimi would "would work nearly for free as an enticement," and he was hired.
Later in the book, Stone speaks at greater length about the difficulties actresses face as producers in the movie business.
"Getting a producer credit as an actress is often thought of in my business as a 'vanity deal,' meaning they pay you for the job but shut the f— up and stay out of the way," Stone wrote.
"I won't accept a vanity deal and let them know that upfront. This is illegal, I say, and I like to work within the law. That gets a lot of silence and not a lot of joy on the other end."