Hellraisers: Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Reed.

Entertainment: Bow down to old school awesomeness when men were men, get drunk, end up in Mexico and still be able to win awards and acclaim.

Richard Burton had no doubt that "God put me on this earth to raise hell." For Peter O'Toole "Booze is the most outrageous of drugs which is why I chose it." Richard Harris "loved the excitement of my drinking days. Life is made from memories which is a pity as I don't remember much." Oliver Reed readily admitted "I do not live in the world of sobriety." Critics might argue that this quartet of larger-than-life actors squandered their talent in far too many appalling movies because they were too busy chasing their drinking demons. Not so says author Robert Sellers in "Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole and Oliver Reed." "They got away with the kind of behavior that today's vapid bunch of film stars could scarcely dream of because of their mercurial acting talent and because the press and public loved them," he writes in the book, being published on May 29. ....Richard Harris, star of "Camelot" and "This Sporting Life" along with some real stinkers, reveled like the others in living life to the full. "Look at a photograph of me from the old days and I'm going to one of my film premieres with a bottle of vodka in my hand. Tom Cruise has a bottle of Evian water. That's the difference," the outlandish Irishman once recalled. ....So that just leaves O'Toole as the last one standing -- without an ounce of regret. "I loved the drinking and the waking up in the morning and finding I was in Mexico. It was part and parcel of being an idiot," he concluded.