- When the new Hollywood came about,
your Scorseses and your Coppolas and your De Palmas,
and your Friedkins, and your Ciminos,
they really kinda bought into their own press,
this kind of swinging dick, auteur theory,
two-fisted filmmaking.
- The '70s were kind of the wild west.
People love hearing stories about William Friedkin
firing a gun on the set of "The Exorcist".
It would just take one tweet to come out of a production
of someone just firing a gun
to get a reaction from somebody else
and then that director's career would be over.
- They were pushing boundaries.
They were pioneers of cinema.
- There was a lot of belief when these auteurs
were creating beautiful art, but at what cost?
- Certainly, there's a culture that's happening in the '70s
that is letting these guys run wild
and we got a lot of great films out of it,
but you also get a lot of... mishaps.
- The incident on the set of "The Twilight Zone"
always stuck with me.
Film sets are controlled chaos.
I've been here at Blumhouse for about four years now
and I've been on a fair share of sets
and it is really interesting to see,
you know, how many precautions are made.
Someone's gotta take a slight step backwards down a staircase
and we've gotta do a bunch of safety meetings,
and for good reason.
- For all the coincidences that have to be connected
to give life to these cursed legends,
The Twilight Zone accident
sort of lays that all bare,
it's... it's just something horrible that happened.
- I'm Stephen Farber, a film critic
and co-author of the book "Outrageous Conduct:
Art, Ego, and The Twilight Zone Case".
John Landis and Stephen Spielberg,
came up with the idea of this anthology film
inspired by The Twilight Zone TV series,
which had a real cult following.
Narrator: You unlock this door with the key of imagination.
Beyond it is another dimension,
a dimension of sound.
The Twilight Zone.
- The basic idea of Landis' segment
was just for this bigot to experience prejudice
in these different settings
and to get a sense of what the people that he had maligned
would go through.
Vic Morrow who was the leading actor in this segment,
he wasn't that impressed with John Landis,
but he was impressed
that Spielberg was involved with the movie,
and he needed a job, frankly.
His career had not been going that well at that time.
John Landis had had a very big box office success
with "Animal House".
He had a somewhat less but still success
with the "Blues Brothers".
This was the auteur era,
where, uh, directors were really granted carte blanche.
There was not much oversight by the studios.
- I met Frank Marshall years and years ago.
I built a relationship with Frank
and he called me up and he says, you know,
I like you to be involved in more of my pictures
and Frank had offered me "The Twilight Zone,"
which introduced me to John Landis.
I sat down with John and we started to discuss
how we can create those worlds
and it was very important to be as real,
as realistic as possible.
We found the backlot at Universal
for the European street.
Also, for the, uh, cattle car
and creating that scene.
- The studio felt it would be better
if you learned something from this experience
that would redeem the character,
so Landis came up with the idea
of the Vietnam sequence
where he would save the lives
of two Vietnamese orphans
who were in danger.
I think Landis was considered to be...
talented but erratic
and not the most mature in judgment,
or the most responsible in terms of filmmaking,
and several of the crew people
were concerned about his cavalier attitude
towards safety.
- One of the scenes is Vic Morrow
is running through the jungle,
coming through the greenery of Vietnam,
which I filled in...
- Help me!
- ...and he is being shot at.
- No!
- To get the realistic feel of them being shot at,
before the bullets go off,
he is pulled off out of scene
and the bullets shoot,
and they rip the shit out of the greenery,
the palm fronds and the whole thing.
Well, they used real bullets that night.
That was something that John insisted on doing.
John called me into his office and said,
we're gonna go to Valencia,
and we drove through this area
that did have aspects of a jungle.
So I was walking by myself
and there was a stream,
and a large cliff on the other side of the stream.
I went over to John and I brought him over to the,
to the stream and I said,
John, I see a village over there.
He says, what are you talking about?
So I said to him, if you agree with me,
that we shoot the set in one direction only,
I will build you a village -
if we always angle the camera in one direction
as we dolly back.
He said, he said, yes.
And uh...
I went back,
did a little research,
and I built that village.
The set was unbelievable.
It was Vietnam.
That evening I was approached
by many of the top people in Hollywood,
putting them-- their hands around me
and saying, this is remarkable,
how does it feel to be in the big time?
The scene, basically, to lay it out for you,
was Vic is coming into the village,
a helicopter comes in,
he picks up the children,
comes up to the water's edge
and then runs towards the camera,
saving the children.
Excuse me.
- It was illegal to work children
after, I think, like eight o'clock at night.
They wanted it to be done much later
to have an authentic night scene,
and when the casting directors heard
what the scene entailed
with children...
in the vicinity of explosions
underneath a helicopter,
the casting director said
this sounds like a dangerous scene.
So Landis said,
we'll get them off the street ourselves.
A number of people made remarks
that if they were hiring the children illegally
and if they found out about the explosions,
we're gonna be sent to jail.
- We did a lot of tests
where the helicopter comes down,
how high it is, where it is positioned.
- They had done an earlier scene
without the actors and the children,
just kind of testing some of the things out
with the explosions and the helicopter,
and the helicopter was rocked violently
by these explosions
and the people in the helicopter said,
Gee, that seemed kinda rough.
And John Landis is reported to have said,
you think that was big?
You ain't seen nothing yet.
My name is Kane Hodder. Uh...
Among other things, I've been a stuntman for 40,
almost 42 years,
and played Jason in several of the "Friday the 13th" films.
Sometimes things just happen on sets.
I can tell you any number of times I've done a stunt
where something happened
that I really didn't expect. Like uh...
I did a, a, what's called a pipe ramp.
It's a where you take a car and you hit a pipe like this
and it makes the car go like that -
fly in the air.
I did one of those on "Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3".
As the stunt coordinator,
I placed where the camera would be safe
and just so happened, when I hit the ramp,
it just happened to hit so it kinda flipped like that
and went quite a bit further than I anticipated.
You know, unfortunately things, at times, just happen.
So 1977,
a local reporter wanted to do a story on me
for the Reno Newspaper.
And I said, you know, if you want,
I could do a fire stunt for you live.
I still don't know exactly what went wrong,
but I suddenly burst into way more flames
than I was expecting,
uh, I panicked.
I ended up having
what they said was 45% third degree,
which is a lot.
The next five and a half months was spent in the hospital
going through tremendous amounts of pain
and uh...
psychological stuff, I would say.
Later in my career, I started doing fire stunts again
and became kind of known for it.
What you do as best you can as a stunt coordinator
is try to avoid anything that you can think of
that could possibly go wrong
but knowing there's no guarantee of anything.
- Here's what's happening right now.
We are locked down with camera,
the stuntman is prepping,
and then we're gonna light him on fire.
- Action, Friedrick!
- Nothing could be that good.
I think it'd be that unbelievable.
Not since the Vietnam Buddhist priest
was there such a flame out.
- I think that large-scale productions
are kind of a breeding ground for these stories
because there's so many more opportunities
for these weird little things to happen,
these mishaps that take on a life of their own,
or these big accidents, again, that we have to sort of
get our heads around.
The other end of that spectrum is a guy like Lloyd Kaufman
and Troma Studios.
One of these mishaps would end Troma forever.
- I don't want women with tiny babies coming through here,
tripping over wires, bumping into people, right?
You don't want people falling on cables, right,
especially little tiny babies.
Hello, hello, I'm Lloyd Kaufman,
President of Troma Entertainment,
creator of "The Toxic Avenger".
And believe it or not,
Troma Entertainment is the oldest independent movie studio
in the world.
44 years of making movies of the future,
like "The Toxic Avenger", "Class of Nuke 'Em High",
"Tromeo and Juliet".
- Ahhh!
- And now "Shakespeare's Shitstorm",
our version of "The Tempest".
There's nothing more ego oriented or narcissistic
than making an ode to a movie...
Christ Almighty.
I'm sorry, start over.
Uh, that didn't, yeah, acting there's not right.
It's about the art, it's about the movie.
I'm a total narcissist,
but I'm motivated by film.
Yes.
Why are you calling me?
You've got assistant directors to talk to, no joke,
'cause we're in the middle of a shot, I'm sorry.
I never was for the money.
After Yale University, I had a job in California,
I would have taken that.
Instead, I took acid and I decided to stay in New York
and work for a shitty little company called Troma.
Brendon, you know, we're gonna do the car crashing
through the, uh, garage tomorrow?
No, you cannot be there, nor can Caleb,
or that guy, whatever his name is.
This guy's over on a big ladder here, right now.
- Everybody ready?
And action car.
- You all right, Erin? - Yeah, dude.
- Holy shit. - Yes, sir.
- Can I get your view on how that stunt went?
- Um...
The three rules of production -
Troma rules of production - we're not posted.
Troma has three rules of production:
safety to humans, safety to peoples' property,
and make a good film.
We put up signs around the set. Action!
And the words make a good movie
are smaller than safety to humans
and safety to peoples' property
because a movie is only a movie.
Cut! Let's go back and get the close-ups.
Don't run, don't run.
- Don't run, please walk.
- When you think about it,
effects or stunts,
or even film people in general,
we do things that are inherently dangerous
and our safety record would put GM to shame,
or any other industry.
So what I'm doing here is I'm gonna make a fireball.
That's a one-pound propane tank that goes in
and we put a small, uh,
black powder charge in the end
that'll shoot that knife through there,
a spark will go off and uh...
we'll get, uh, some magic happening.
You can never get used to the amount of power you have
as far as the, uh, the explosions
and uh, uh, fireballs, or, you know, bullet hits
and things like uh... of that nature,
or even, you know, air and hydraulics and stuff like that,
'cause it is a lot of power, and if you get too used to it
or you just, you don't respect it enough,
then, uh, generally the, uh, effects God comes down
and has an unusual bowel movement in your Cheerios.
- I was very worried about the kind of explosions
that were gonna be used in this picture.
All of the positions of the explosions
are very, very well laid out
and communicated with everybody,
especially to myself.
- So this is a fairly big lifting charge
for a very small mortar,
but we'll put some debris on top
so we can, you know, throw it up in the air
and put some dust so we get some trails.
- John asked me if I could move one of the huts
more to the center of the village.
I said, fine. So I had my team bring it over.
Things are being said and I'm walking around
and I find that there's an explosion underneath this hut
and I said, get special effects on the phone.
I want him here now.
I was pissed.
So he came over to me and he said,
what's up Rich and I said,
what the hell is this doing here
and why wasn't I told?
So it's just da, da, da, da, da and it's just,
it's, it's angled back at the, uh, hill
and it's, it's okay.
I said, that's not how it works.
If I don't like it, it's not gonna be here, okay?
I'm the man.
So if anything else is on this set
that I don't know about,
you better fuckin' tell me.
It's important for people to know
how much work goes into trying to figure out
and look at every possibility that could come into play
before a big shot like this.
- It was the last night of shooting.
It was the final scene
with the rescue of the two children.
- The decision was made
that we needed all five cameras shooting
to get all five shots.
And I looked-- and I sat there looking at this...
the huey coming in,
the smell of gasoline filling the air,
it was amazing.
John Landis and I...
chose an area upstream,
not too far from where Vic was gonna walk by us.
- The parents of the children asked,
is this dangerous?
And they were told by the producer
who had hired them,
Oh no, it's just like a Disneyland ride.
Vic Morrow felt it was physically demanding
and a little bit overwhelming,
but he felt that
he couldn't afford to be too vociferous
in challenging this powerful, uh...
film director,
so he did it against his better judgment.
- All I can say, what I remember that night, is...
how big the explosions were.
Looking over at Vic coming across the water,
the bombs going off around him,
and, and I said, it's okay,
we all planned this.
We know where the helicopters are gonna be.
The huey comes into play.
And I realize that...
things are getting too close to the helicopter.
And I turned around, I said, run.
- The explosions were too close to the helicopter,
damaged it,
brought it down into the river,
killing Vic Morrow and the two children
while their parents were standing watching this.
- I turn,
and there's the helicopter
on the ground.
Silence.
And then there's the words,
where's Vic? Where's the kids?
I don't really remember what I did after that.
All I remember was seeing the children's parents,
one hugging a tree,
realizing that the children and Vic were cut in half.
Newsreel: Five companies involved in the filming
of "The Twilight Zone" have been fined a total of $62,000
for what a California safety board termed
"willful and serious safety violations
in the helicopter crash that claimed three lives".
- And there's still one more question to be considered.
The children who were killed were working without permits.
State labor officials may file criminal charges
against the producers for illegally working the children
at 2:30 in the morning.
- Our office would never have approved children,
six and seven years of age,
to be in that area.
- Well, Landis went to all three of the funerals actually.
He went to the children's funerals
and he went to Vic Morrow's funeral.
And he very much wanted to speak
at Vic Morrow's funeral
and said something to the effect that,
uh, film lives forever, Vic is immortal.
- The trial is just beginning.
At issue, who's responsible for three deaths
on "The Twilight Zone" movie set.
Lawyers for the film's director blame an explosives expert,
but Sandy Kenyon reports prosecutors disagree.
Sandy: The trial got underway with two different accounts
of how the tragedy occurred.
The defense claimed a bazaar accident
led to three deaths.
The prosecution laid the blame on the filmmakers,
accusing them of staging a dangerous stunt.
- You have to use your own common sense.
You cannot mix explosions, a helicopter,
and human beings, let alone children,
and not realize that there's a potential for danger.
- The jury ultimately felt that the prosecutor
had not proved that high standard
of criminal negligence.
- You don't prosecute people for unfore-
foreseeable accidents.
- We, the jury, in the above-entitled action,
find the defendant, John Landis,
not guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
- Outside the courtroom the director's victory statement
was tempered with remorse.
- Almost five years ago an accident happened on the set
of one of my films that killed three people
and that nothing, none of this changes that.
- They had had to pay fines already
for hiring the children illegally,
but they were not convicted of crimes.
- This is a terrible, terrible accident that,
obviously, will cause pain and anguish to all of us
for the rest of our lives.
- They found him innocent.
And I was married, two young kids,
working hard in my career -
at the, at the prime of...
of one of the biggest producers in Hollywood
putting his, his hand around me and says,
how does it feel to be in the big time -
and my career was over in a blink of an eye.
- I wasn't there at "The Twilight Zone" incident
but sometimes it's nobody's fault in particular.
Everybody wants to point a finger at,
at whose fault it was,
but there's not always an obvious person to blame.
Things happen. That's the nature of doing stunts.
- If I was responsible for somebody
getting seriously injured...
It's just a fuckin' movie,
that's why you don't... you don't do those things,
you don't... it's just not worth it.
I would stop making movies.
I would be selling shoes, or hot dogs, or whatever,
or maybe blowing my fuckin' brains out.
I couldn't live with it.
So I'm, I'm, it's a dangerous profession moviemaking.
- We're making a movie here,
we're not, uh, you know,
saving the world, or splitting the atom or, you know,
taking a, a, a shot at the moon or something, you know.
- I think that Landis can't be held fully accountable
for everything happening on that set,
but you have to blame somebody, right?
There has to be a reason for something terrible happening.
That's the crux of all this cursed thinking.
I think that the age of curses is ending
because of the way our lives are recorded 24/7.
We are moving away from this sort of urban legend,
word-of-mouth stories
because too of our lives is word-of-mouth anymore.
I think seeing these things changes
how our minds process them.
So it seems like an accident like on the set
of "The Twilight Zone" is not the result of a curse
but maybe that accident is a curse.
It's something that the effects guy has to live with;
it's something that the casting director
who hired those kids has to live with.
Everybody on that set has been given a life sentence
of having that accident in their brain pan
for the rest of their lives.