On Dec. 4, 1988, actor Gary Busey crashed his motorcycle in a highway guardrail and suffered serious head trauma, something compounded by the fact that he wasn't wearing a helmet. During the two hours of neurosurgery to repair Busey's damaged brain, the actor died on the operating table.
"I saw angels," Busey recalled during an interview with Larry King in 2005. "I was surrounded by angels. And they don't look like what they look like on Christmas cards. They're big balls of light that float and carry nothing but love and warmth."
If only the production designer on the long-forgotten film "Quigley" consulted with Busey. The 2003 feature starred Busey as a man who dies and comes back to Earth as a Pomeranian dog (it looks as bad as that description; watch above), and apparently featured some inaccurate depictions of heaven.
Recalled co-star Curtis Armstrong to A/V Club Toronto (via Vulture):
[Busey] showed up on a set made to look like heaven, and he looked around and said, "I can't play this scene." They were three days behind at this point. But Busey said, "It's nothing like this. I've been to heaven and it doesn't look like this. That sofa's all wrong. That mirror is ridiculous. They don't even have mirrors!" It was ridiculous. He was completely nuts about the design of heaven.
How nuts? According to Armstrong, Busey eventually got into a fist-fight with another actor who had a near-death experience over the heavenly look.
For more on Armstrong's career -- from "Revenge of the Nerds" to "Better Off Dead" -- head over to A/V Club to read the full interview. For your daily Busey fix, check out the gallery below.
PHOTOS: GARY BUSEY IN ACTION
