It’s been 40 years since the release of the film, but questions of what risks are permissible in the making of art have persisted.
When the anthology film Twilight Zone: The Movie opened June 24, 1983, reviews were mixed; The New York Times’ Vincent Canby deemed it “a flabby, mini-minded behemoth,” and that was a fairly representative view. A middling box office performer, the film may well have been forgotten entirely were it not for another news event, related to the picture, reported that same day: the unsealing of the grand jury indictments against five of the filmmakers, including director John Landis, for their responsibility in a stunt gone horrifyingly awry, killing three people during the picture’s production.
It happened at 2:20am on Friday, July 23, 1982. Landis’ segment — which concerned a loudmouthed bigot (Vic Morrow) who gets a taste of his own medicine when he steps into the Ku Klux Klan-era South, Nazi Germany and a Vietnam War battle, and is mistaken for the very people he had previously derided — was to culminate in a spectacular display of stunts and firepower. Chased by a military helicopter, Morrow’s character was to carry two Vietnamese children across a river to safety as a village exploded behind them. But the sequence was poorly planned and barely rehearsed, and the explosions damaged the rotor blades of the chopper, causing the pilot to lose control. The helicopter crashed into the river, dismembering Morrow and the two children: Myca Dinh Le, age 7, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, 6 (spelled Renee Shinn Chen in the Times’ early reporting).
As investigators examined the crash, they discovered that the children’s mere presence on the set had been illegal. Child labour law regulations prohibited children from working at that late hour; further, no on-set child-welfare worker would have permitted them to work in such proximity to explosions or a helicopter. So, Landis and one of the producers, George Folsey Jr., went outside regulations, casting children of mutual acquaintances, keeping their names out of the production’s official paperwork and paying them in petty cash. A production secretary recalled Landis joking about the scheme, “We’re all going to jail!”
That cavalier attitude carried over onto the Twilight Zone set. Landis was described as a “screamer,” prone to temper tantrums and abusive invective, and thus resistant to concerns raised by crew members about the safety of that sequence — or an earlier scene, in which Landis, unsatisfied with the effects achieved by fake gunfire, ordered the use of live ammunition.
