Star In A Reasonably Trashed Car

The Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman was due to leave hospital today after undergoing surgery to repair damage he sustained in a serious car crash near his home in Mississippi, in which he broke his arm and elbow, and damaged nerves in his shoulder.

Freeman spent much of yesterday chatting, joking and asking doctors why his arm hurt so much.

“In the E.R. he was asking for a variety of guns so he could try to pick them up,” said a hospital spokesman. “We tried to reason with him, but he wouldn’t listen. In the end one of the orderlies went out to his car, unlocked the glovebox and brought in his Colt .357. We unloaded it first, of course – after all, this is a hospital. Mr Freeman managed to wrap three fingers round the handgrip, but when he tried to lift the piece his hand went into spasm and he was screaming in agony. We keep telling him about this concept of pain, and indeed about real life, but he seemed to be having difficulty grasping the idea that people don’t generally leap out of a car that’s rolled several times at high speed with a Magnum in each hand and start sprinting down the freeway, rolling across the hoods of the oncoming traffic as they go.”

When he was being prepared for surgery, Mr Freeman refused any form of anaesthetic, saying he lived life on a knife-edge and didn’t want anything to slow down his reactions.

“The head of surgery had to sneak up behind him and batter him senseless with a shoe, or you’d have heard the screams halfway across the state,” explained the spokesman.

Morgan Freeman’s agent said the 71-year-old star may well go underground after discharging himself from hospital, appearing unexpectedly in low-budget arthouse movies in his efforts to track down the sinister figures responsible for his ‘accident’.

Industry insiders believe the actor may have been on the verge of exposing a shadowy cabal of corrupt (or possibly psychopathic) stars at the very heart of the Hollywood system who are prepared to kill to cover up their activities, and have suggested that Shia leBoeuf – himself injured in a car crash a few days previously - may have been Freeman’s keen-but-naïve rookie sidekick.