Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, bingers. Welcome back to my podcast. I want to start today's episode by saying thank you for tuning in each week. Storytelling and true crime are two of my passions, and it means so much to me to be able to share these stories with you.
This week's episode, I would argue, is as much a crime story as any other, as it involves deaths for which other human beings are, in my view and in the view of many others, obviously responsible. And it occurred to me to do this episode after the Titan submersible dominated the news cycle for a couple of weeks last month.
The Titan Submersible story is at its core the story of one man who possibly ignored repeated warnings, established safety guidelines,
silenced those who sounded the alarm and misled his passengers, people who trusted his expertise and his authority, believing that the submersible was safe. And Stockton Rush was a man who, like many men, wanted to leave his mark on the world, and for him, his legacy was more important than human lives. And as more details about the Titan have emerged, we've begun to see a troubling picture of a tragedy everyone kind of saw coming.
Experts voiced their opinions. And in this story, the one I'm telling today, I see echoes of another tragedy, one that happened four decades ago on the set of a Hollywood movie. Many of the story beats are the same: warnings unheeded, egos unchecked, and lives cut short. There's nothing more eerie than deaths that probably could have been prevented.
So as a young boy, John Landis ate, slept, and breathed movies. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s, his childhood was not an altogether happy one. Before Landis even turned 10, his father Marshall, despite being a successful interior decorator, was charged with grand theft for stealing a Picasso ink drawing from an art gallery.
Marshall acknowledged he had more than enough money to purchase the Picasso drawing if he'd wanted to, so he didn't understand why he had done it. Friends who advocated for him at his arraignment urged the court to consider the man's mental health.
He was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and a few years later, Marshall Landis died following a routine surgery, leaving John, the main character of our story, an only child and now fatherless. And when his mother remarried, his new stepfather didn't offer the same warmth and gentleness that his biological father had. So for young John Landis, you could say the TV and movie screens became his surrogate parents.
He was popular in high school, a prankster with a mischievous spirit, but he wasn't a good student, and he dropped out in the 10th grade to pursue his dream of working in pictures. At the age of 17, Landis got his first studio job in the mailroom at 20th Century Fox, and he used his new position, however low that position was,
on the entertainment industry totem pole, and indeed it was the lowest. He used his access to the studio lot as an opportunity to hobnob with industry veterans, the men he grew up admiring.
Men like famed director George Stevens, director of Shane and A Place in the Sun, who was so impressed by the young man's enthusiasm and film knowledge that he actually invited him to lunch. And before long, John Landis found himself hanging around movie sets in Hollywood.
Even movie sets like the set of Catch-22 down in Mexico, where Landis got his earliest glimpses at the workings of a movie production and the conflicts that sometimes arose behind the scenes. Like when he witnessed an argument between the film's director, Mike Nichols, who was fresh off directing The Graduate, the highest grossing movie of 1967,
and the second unit director Andrew Martin. Director Nichols had asked Martin to go up in a small plane to supervise some aerial photography. Martin thought the flight and the shots Nichols wanted sounded too dangerous and so he refused. And Nichols fired him. Martin's replacement was a man named John Jordan who had no qualms about going up in the plane to supervise those shots.
And while Jordan was up in the plane, a strong blast of wind suddenly knocked the plane off balance and Jordan, who had declined to wear a harness, got swept out into the open and fell 4,000 feet to his death. In its way, this incident portrays everything to come in this story.
The dividing lines between movie crew members who speak up and those who keep it to themselves and those who are recklessly blind to real dangers. And of course, that's the tragedy at the center of our story.
As you may recognize from recent stories in the news, like for example, the accident shooting death of the cinematographer on the movie "Rust" from a gun fired by an actor, Alec Baldwin, a gun that no one knew was loaded with live ammunition, deaths on movie productions do happen.
More often, in fact, than we may realize. Most often, when there's a death on a movie set, it's a stunt performer. Like the stuntman who died when the wheel fell off his chariot during the chariot race in the 1925 film version of Ben-Hur. Or when a movie pilot crashed his plane off the coast of San Diego while filming Top Gun in 1985. Now, we rarely hear about deaths like these.
Movie set deaths usually only become a new story when a star is involved. Like when Brandon Lee was fatally wounded by a prop gun on the set of The Crow. Or when the deaths are due to obvious criminal negligence or reckless endangerment, like what occurred on the set of Midnight Rider.
a 2014 production for a movie that was never finished after second assistant camera woman, Sarah Jones, was struck and killed by a freight train that injured seven other crew members. This resulted in the director and producer receiving prison sentences. So sometimes crap happens and sometimes crap is legitimately somebody else's fault. It's arguable who was at fault on the set of Catch-22.
But because the second unit director refused to wear a harness that would have saved his life, his death received minimal news coverage. So now back to our up and coming John Landis, who is just barely diving into the set world. He got his first real inroads to the industry the day he lied to his mother that he'd been offered a job on the set of a Clint Eastwood movie called Kelly's Heroes, which was shooting in Yugoslavia.
He then bought a ticket to London, hitchhiked to Yugoslavia, and showed up on set. For the producers of Kelly's Heroes, this kind of boldness was exactly the kind of gutsy pluck they admired in young self-styled up-and-comers like Landis. So they actually hired him as a gopher, and when the movie's assistant director fell ill and got sent home,
Landis was hired to step up into the role. While he was serving as the new assistant director on Kelly's Heroes, Landis made new friendships that would serve him later on in his career as a director. I mean, you have to almost admire this. He flew and hitchhiked out there on a whim and then somehow became assistant director.
After Kelly's Heroes wrapped, Landis remained in Europe for two years and found himself in a variety of jobs working on spaghetti westerns and other genre movies. And when he got back to the States, John Landis began production on his first feature film as a writer-director. A goofy tribute to the monster movies he grew up loving, and his first movie was called Schlock.
Made on a budget of $60,000, financed by friends and family, Schlock was released to theaters and drive-in screens around the country in 1973, when John Landis was still only 23 years old.
Making a feature film by that age is the dream of many aspiring filmmakers, and Landis achieved it, a feat that won him some notice in press coverage. John Landis was nothing if not driven, and in everything he had done up to this point, it was clear he had a singular, unstoppable ambition to achieve what he wanted to achieve and to make his mark in Hollywood.
Even if it meant taking huge risks, even if it meant placing others at risk. While making schlock for a scene requiring a window breaking, Landis shattered a real plate glass window rather than using candy glass, which is a type of prop glass made from sugar that breaks easily and poses little danger to performers.
Another scene in Schlock required a young boy to be thrown across a table, which fortunately resulted in only a few minor bruises.
John Landis liked to brag that he could convince his crew to do just about anything. And if a crew member didn't easily go along with his direction, he was known to sometimes just resort to bullying. That's how directors directed, Landis thought. For him, the image of a Hollywood director was an imposing authority, barking orders into a bullhorn. But over the next few years, John Landis' career didn't
take off the way he'd hoped after Schlock finished its run in theaters. He found himself living with his mother again, waiting tables at the Hamburger Hamlet, and eventually suing the distributor of his movie for box office revenue he claimed he was owed and never paid, which is not an uncommon thing in the entertainment industry. People sue and are sued all the time, usually on the down low, so it's not as though this was going to hurt his career. Now,
Now, during those follow years, Landis was trying to generate interest in a script he had written a few years earlier, actually before Schlock was made, a script titled An American Werewolf in London. But every studio that looked at John's script passed. It wasn't until 1976 that Landis connected with three writers named Jim Abrams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker.
the guys who'd go on to make Airplane and the Naked Gun movies. And they hired John Landis to direct their low-budget sketch comedy film called The Kentucky Fried Movie. Kentucky Fried Movie was made on a budget of just $650,000 and grossed over $7 million at the U.S. box office.
Landis proved his skill at directing broad comedy on a shoestring budget, and this made him a natural fit to direct an upcoming National Lampoon movie set in a college frat house in the early 1960s.
That movie was Animal House, and when it opened in the summer of 1978, no one at Universal Studios expected this grubby little gross-out comedy made on a $3 million budget to become the third highest-grossing movie of 1978 behind Grease and Superman.
Animal House went on to earn over $140 million at the box office, instantly catapulting John Landis into the stratosphere, the upper echelon of young Hollywood directors. Landis' deal with Universal awarded him 2.5% of the movie's profits.
And already Landis was bragging in interviews that the film had made him a millionaire. He was living the dream and highly aware of it. He bought a new house, moved into a lavish new office, and was now having dinner and chumming around with Steven Spielberg, who had just made two of the biggest, highest grossing movies of the 1970s with Jaws in 1975 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind two years later.
Both Spielberg and Landis, who were four years apart, shared a deep love of monster movies, science fiction, and the movies and television of the 1950s and 60s.
Incidentally, Spielberg's first directing job had been on the pilot episode of the TV series Night Gallery, which was created by Rod Serling, creator and host of TV's The Twilight Zone, which was a show that nearly everyone growing up in the late 50s and 60s who spent more than a few hours a week in front of their television set watched and loved.
And the idea of making a theatrical Twilight Zone movie was one that had been bouncing around Hollywood for years. In the meantime, John Landis was hired to direct a feature film version of a popular Saturday Night Live sketch. And that Saturday Night Live movie was the Blues Brothers. Perhaps you've heard of it. Unlike the SNL sketch, the scale of John Landis' Blues Brothers movie was gigantic.
encompassing car chases, explosions, elaborate dance numbers, thousands of extras, and a budget that just kept ballooning. What began as a $12 million movie swelled to nearly $30 million by the time production wrapped, making The Blue Brothers one of the most expensive comedies ever made. And you have to understand the context of the time period.
In the 1970s, directors were stars, and the concept of a blockbuster movie was an altogether new concept brought about by Jaws, which shattered box office records, becoming the first movie to earn over $100 million in its first theatrical run. And then a little movie called Star Wars came along and outgrossed even Jaws.
A new era in movie making was born and Hollywood directors were as high on power as many people in Hollywood were on cocaine in the 1970s.
John Landis and Steven Spielberg weren't cokeheads, but they were riding the wave of their power. And for Spielberg, it cost him when he, like Landis later did with the Blues Brothers, went millions over budget on his 1979 World War II comedy 1941, which didn't earn nearly as much as Jaws or Close Encounters and was considered a box office disappointment.
It was a near failure that was momentarily humbling for Steven Spielberg, who quickly rebounded with Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first Indiana Jones movie in 1981. So 1941 wasn't quite the cautionary tale it could have been had it flopped harder and lost the studio money. And neither was the Blues Brothers, which went on to earn about $57 million at the U.S. box office.
But what was problematic about the Blues Brothers was John Landis' out-of-control production. It became one of those movies where it really showed Landis' true colors and maybe that his power had gone to his head. It became one of those movies whose makings were referred to as, quote, troubled productions in the trade papers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.
Landis, when he was interviewed, would always go on the defensive, saying, I will never apologize for spending money to entertain people. He told an interviewer to whom he described the Blues Brothers as one of the biggest films ever made. I've been under attack for a year, he complained in another interview. It's making me berserk.
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John Landis was a brash personality who liked to bark orders at people on set, and he relished in the final decisions always being his. If someone asked him to tone something down, he'd do the opposite. He'd crank it up.
And Landis, although he was making broad genre movies, had a taste for realism. He wanted his special effects shots to look as real as possible, and he wasn't interested in finding creative workarounds to expensive problems or potentially dangerous situations.
For instance, while filming one of the Blues Brothers' many chase scenes, Landis kept pressing the stunt drivers to drive faster. The movie's script supervisor suggested an alternative, which was undercranking the cameras so the footage would be sped up, creating the illusion of speed without having to put the drivers in danger. But for John Landis, this just wouldn't do. He wanted the drivers to drive faster in real time, for realism.
Another shot required a car to be dropped from a helicopter, and this was recognized as one of the most dangerous stunts ever attempted in a modern Hollywood production. The Federal Aviation Administration had to be called in to evaluate this and give their approval before the shot could be executed. In another sequence in the film, an entire shopping mall is destroyed. This scene was shot in a real underground mall that had recently gone belly up and was abandoned.
The problem was that the shopping mall's windows were made of actual glass, as shopping mall's windows are. And although Landis now had the budget to replace the windows with candy glass, he wanted to keep the real glass. He liked the realism of the way it looked and sounded when real glass blew out. And during the filming of this sequence, at least one stuntwoman ended up being injured by the flying glass.
Luckily for everyone involved, the injuries weren't severe. But this still wasn't the most dangerous sequence in the film directed by Landis.
That distinction belonged to a scene that ended up being cut out of the finished movie, in which the titular Blues brothers are leaving a gas station with a trail of gasoline in their wake. One of them drops a match and the gas station blows up. The movie's cinematographer, Stephen Katz, described the resulting special effects explosion as one of the most terrifying explosions he'd ever seen.
That was because John Landis had insisted that the gas station be blown up with real dynamite at an astronomical cost of $150,000.
That explosion ended up blowing out the stained glass windows of a nearby church in the Chicago neighborhood where they were filming, leaving many of the residents in the community pretty peeved. But Landis was unapologetic, and he felt the end result justified the means.
Before the release of The Blues Brothers, John Landis insisted upon appearing on screen for interviews, even when it generally wasn't standard for a movie director to upstage the stars when promoting the movie.
John Landis, in what many perceived to be his arrogance, believed that he was the only one who could sell the movie properly. The movie's star's manager butted heads with Landis over this and tried to get TV producers to keep Landis off camera by giving them the ultimatum of choosing between either the two stars or Landis.
The manager felt that Landis' voice and blowhard personality were off-putting and would more likely deter people from buying tickets than entice them. At one of the press conferences for the Blues Brothers, Landis was so front and center that one of the reporters got frustrated and eventually chimed in asking if he would kindly let the other guys, meaning the stars of the movie, do more talking.
Landis was obviously full of himself and this was still an early point in his career. But he was going around comparing the Blues Brothers to The Wizard of Oz and Singing in the Rain. And although the movie was successful at the box office, it wasn't the resounding success that Animal House had been. The super expensive Blues Brothers had turned a $20 million profit, which was just a fraction of the $100 million profit that the micro-budgeted Animal House had earned.
And so for his next movie, Landis returned to his old script for An American Werewolf in London and convinced Universal, which had passed on it years before he made two successful movies for the studio, to
to produce it, and the new film was made on a budget of just under $6 million. American Werewolf was a tongue-in-cheek horror movie, and it featured groundbreaking werewolf transformation effects by Rick Baker, who had first worked with John Landis on Schlock, the director's first movie, and had since become an in-demand craftsman in his own right, working on movies like The Exorcist, King Kong, and Star Wars.
American Werewolf was also quite profitable, turning a domestic profit of about 25 million and another 30 million overseas.
So John Landis was again riding high. After struggling to gain traction the first half of his 20s, he had now made three highly profitable movies for Universal, establishing himself as an authoritative director who could work with the budgets both large and small and make movies that the people wanted to see. Like Steven Spielberg, who by this point had become a close friend, John Landis was a director no one would say no to, and he knew it.
He didn't like to compromise, and with the clout he now had, he didn't feel he had to. And in 1982, while the 31-year-old John Landis was a director at the peak of his career, Vic Morrow was a middle-aged actor whose career was in decline. Or at least that's how it felt to Morrow.
Morrow and Landis, though they were born 21 years apart, had a few things in common. Both had been born to middle-class Jewish families, Landis in Los Angeles and Morrow in the Bronx. And both were high school dropouts who embarked on adventures instead of going to college. And while Landis' adventures involved going to Europe and working on spaghetti westerns, Morrow enlisted in the Navy.
But Mauro left the Navy and obtained his high school diploma and then briefly went to college and that's where he caught the acting bug in a campus production of I Remember Mama. Pretty soon after, he moved to Mexico and enrolled in Mexico City College where he performed in productions of plays by Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Upon returning to New York, Mauro joined an actor's workshop and continued performing in plays.
driving a taxi in his spare time to make enough money to support himself. And it was in 1954, while playing the lead in an off-Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, that Vic Morrow caught his big break. He auditioned for a role in a new MGM production, a movie called Blackboard Jungle, about juvenile delinquency, a hot topic at the time.
and he won a meaty part in the film to play the teenaged leader of a schoolyard gang who goes toe-to-toe with his non-nonsense, tough-love-doling teacher, played by Glenn Ford. The movie made a big splash, not least because of its pioneering use of rock and roll music. The song Rock Around the Clock played over the opening credits, and it's that song that's usually regarded as the first rock and roll hit, ushering a new age in popular music.
Vic then moved to Hollywood and signed a deal with MGM where he was cast in movies featuring Hollywood legends. But his career didn't gain the kind of scene he'd hoped for, and he found himself playing mostly supporting and secondary roles. But when he was cast as the lead in the TV series "Combat,"
He entered one of the roles for which he'd be best remembered, and the series ran for five years, from 1962 to 1967. Now, Morrow was disappointed with much of the work that followed combat, and by 1982, while the now 53-year-old Morrow was appearing in random movies, his youngest daughter, known professionally as Jennifer Jason Leigh, was herself a rising star.
She had won praise as a teenager with an eating disorder in a TV movie called The Best Little Girl in the World and had played a blind deaf mute in a thriller called Eyes of a Stranger. And while Vic felt some degree of pride, the contrast between his daughter's rising star and his own waning star surely flavored those celebratory instincts bittersweet.
He was now having to show up at casting call auditions, which established actors usually don't need to do. But one director producer who knew who Vic Mara was, was John Landis.
And Morrow was the first actor that came to mind when Landis was casting the lead role in his segment for the planned Twilight Zone movie, a project that, after years of limbo as a theoretical thing, was finally being made. When Steven Spielberg first approached John Landis and proposed collaborating on a Twilight Zone movie, Landis' enthusiasm was through the roof, as the TV series had been a childhood staple for both of them.
The idea was to create a feature-length film with four stories adapted from or inspired by episodes of the original TV series, where each segment would be directed by a different director. Spielberg and Landis would serve as the film's producers, and each would direct one of the four segments.
The third segment would be directed by a young up-and-comer named Joe Dante, who would later go on to direct Gremlins in 1984. And then the fourth segment was to be directed by the Australian director George Miller. The Twilight Zone movie was going to be modest in its budget, and the studio that would be financially backing the movie was Warner Brothers. And although they agreed to back it, most of the decisions were made by Landis and Spielberg. They had complete creative control.
They allowed the production to be independent, and by allowing this, Warners could reduce the overhead costs typically associated with studio pictures, but it also meant they'd have less oversight and control over the entire production.
The man who would serve as executive producer of the Twilight Zone movie was Frank Marshall. Frank Marshall, who was born into the industry, his father was a Hollywood composer, would partner with Spielberg many more times and would serve as a producer on movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the Jason Bourne series, and many others.
and also E.T., which was about to be released into theaters when the Twilight Zone, the movie, was in the midst of pre-production. So both Spielberg and Marshall had a lot on their plates, and the Twilight Zone movie was never a priority for either of them.
But Landis tackled the gig with unrestrained enthusiasm, and he wrote a short script for the prologue that would open the movie and a segment script that was only loosely based on one of the old TV episodes, so it was more or less an original idea. In Landis' script, the main character is a middle-aged bigot named Bill, a sour Korean war veteran who gets passed over for a promotion, which instead goes to a Jewish colleague.
When Bill joins his coworkers at a bar, he launches into a racist rant against Jewish people, black people, and Asian people, much to the discomfort of everyone else at the bar and to the embarrassment of his coworkers. Bill then stalks out of the bar and suddenly he's found himself transported in time and space.
He looks around and finds himself in Nazi-occupied France, where he's pursued through a city square by armed SS officers who believe he's Jewish and want to detain him. After being wounded by Nazi gunfire, he stumbles and finds himself teleported yet again into a Klan rally in mid-century Alabama, where he's about to be lynched.
And after once again narrowly escaping with his life, he finds himself in the jungle during the Vietnam War being shot at by American soldiers. Afterwards, he flees and again finds himself in Nazi territory where he's thrown into a cattle car and carted off to the camps. Basically, the crux of this episode was a racist gets a taste of his own medicine.
Landis submitted his script to Warner Brothers executives who looked it over and had some concerns about the tone. It was relentlessly downbeat, they thought, and the lead character had no redemptive facets. Landis was called in for a series of script meetings where it was made clear to him that the script was lacking something. It needed more humanity, they told him, and the lead character, the bigot, should be redeemed in some way to make him a bit more sympathetic.
Landis understood where they were coming from and he returned to the script to crank out a new draft. And in this draft, Landis added a sequence he felt would redeem his central character. The new sequence took place in a Vietnamese village where Bill is being pursued by American soldiers. In the village, he comes upon two Vietnamese orphaned children huddled together in a hut while the village is under attack.
He offers his hand to the two children and leads them out of the village into safety as explosions go off behind them. Warner Brothers execs received a copy of the new draft, and although the sequence would add significantly to the movie's budget, they approved it.
After this approval, Landis got to thinking more about the segment and an inspired new ending came to mind. An ending that would really play things out with a climatic bang. So he sat down and revised his script for the segment again.
In the new revision, the segment in Vietnam now ended with Bill risking his own life, leading the two children through the river as huts exploded behind them and an enemy helicopter hovers overhead, firing down on Bill and two children as landmines on the village continue to blow up.
After this new draft was complete, Landis sent the revisions to his typist and gave her strict orders to keep his revised script under lock and key. Absolutely no one was to see it without his approval.
And one person who wanted to see it was Ed Mori, the vice president of production at Warner's, because it was his responsibility to keep track of everyone who was hired for the production and to keep tabs on how the studio's money was being spent. So he tries to get a hold of it. And of course, Landis' typist says, no, he says no one can look at it. The typist starts to feel like, what's the deal? Why is this script on lockdown?
So she goes to her boss and she figures it out. The real reason for this was that Landis had written two children into the script and they were going to have to work the kids without permits illegally. And they didn't want that information to leak.
Apparently Landis had a meeting with the casting directors two days earlier on June 16th, 1982 and told them what the scene would entail and what he needed. He need an East Asian little girl and an East Asian little boy to play the Vietnamese children. There would be explosions and a helicopter hovering over the village as it's blown to bits and it would have to be shot at night.
Now, some film directors will shoot night scenes during the day and they'll underexpose the shot or use filters to simulate the appearance of nighttime. This technique is called day for night. But Landis wasn't interested in shooting day for night. He wanted realism. He only wanted to shoot night for night. One of the casting directors stopped Landis in the middle of his spiel,
Working children at night is illegal, she told him. What do you mean? He asked. She explained to Landis that it wasn't permitted for children to work on a movie set past 6.30 p.m. That would be a violation of California labor laws and her office wouldn't do it. Also, she told him, the scene sounded extremely dangerous. There are guidelines around what level of danger child actors can be exposed to on a movie set. The other casting director asked if either of the children had a speaking part, to which Landis replied they didn't.
neither child had any lines. Then they're extras, the casting director said. Our office doesn't hire extras. Landis was thoroughly irritated by this meeting and decided he'd just hire them off the street himself.
The following day, one of those casting directors called executive producer Frank Marshall for Warner Brothers to make sure he knew about this meeting. I've cast lots of kids, she said, and I've never been asked to do anything like that. We'll take care of it, Marshall told her. Marshall then phoned the Labor Commission to ask if the production could obtain waivers that might allow the children to work at night.
The Labor Commission explained that while sometimes waivers were granted, there would be no way that children of the age Landis wanted to cast, children of six or seven years of age, would ever be granted permission to work past 8 p.m. When Landis received word of this, he likely had one thought. Don't compromise. Anything for the shot. He wanted two child actors and he wanted night for night and he was going to get what he wanted.
So Landis decided to find the children, keep the arrangement secret, and pay them out of petty cash so there would be no record of them on the payroll. They knew this was illegal from the jump, but that's how movies were made. At any cost, break the rules and get what you need and then apologize later.
So no one was ignorant about what they were doing. A lot of people were in on this. So after this, Landis meets with everyone on the team and they actually joke about how they're probably going to be thrown in jail for doing this, for finding these kids on their own and paying them under the table.
But finding two Asian children, one boy and girl between six and seven actually turned out to be a more difficult process than what they were originally thinking, especially when shooting was set to begin only weeks later. And they still hadn't even cast the lead role, the role of the bigot.
It had already been decided that the Twilight Zone movie would not feature any major stars. The Twilight Zone was itself the star, its recognizable brand, its pedigree. And the movie's modest budget would go entirely to special effects. So the producers were looking mainly to cast TV actors and unknowns.
John Landis had remembered Vic Morrow from TV's Combat and envisioned him for the role even as he was writing it. And when Morrow got the call, he obviously jumped at the opportunity. After one meeting with Landis, Morrow was offered the part and he accepted. For Vic Morrow, this was a chance to breathe new life into his career. And he knew he had the acting chops to pull off a standout performance in this role, and it was a major studio movie with major young talent behind the camera.
including Steven Spielberg, whose E.T. had just opened and was shattering box office records, just as Jaws had done seven years earlier. For Vic Morrow, the 1980s were now looking a little bit brighter. For the Twilight Zone producers, the pressure was on to secure the crew they needed for their shoot, the most difficult part of which would be the nighttime shoot for their Vietnam sequence.
Dan Allingham was the unit production manager and he was doing double duty, also filling the role of first assistant director. Allingham was responsible for finding the locations and hiring the crew with the director's approval, obviously. For the position of special effects supervisor, Allingham rounded up a number of candidates, each of whom Landis individually interviewed. Landis let each of them know emphatically that he wanted big explosions, huge explosions.
And the special effects man who seemed the most on Landis' wavelength was Paul Stewart, a veteran FX coordinator with two decades of credits under his belt. Landis ultimately chose him to be the head of special effects for the segment.
And then they needed an experienced helicopter pilot as they knew the scene would involve navigating fireballs on a controlled outdoor set with actors in close proximity on the ground below. But they didn't want to pay the pilot a lot and so they ended up moving down their list until they connected with John Gamble, who was the chief pilot for the local CBS News affiliate in LA.
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Gamble already knew that the budget of the Twilight Zone movie was relatively low, so he was apprehensive about even taking a meeting because he didn't expect to be paid his usual fee. And over several meetings, he, you know, talks began to break down. The production's budget for the helicopter kept shrinking and so did the number of days to both prepare and to shoot the scene. And when he learned that the scene entailed a sequence of explosions near a hovering helicopter, Gamble got cold feet.
The most dangerous position for a helicopter to be, he explained, is in a hover. There's only one way to go, and that's straight down. And what about all this wood and debris, he asked, referring to the debris that would be sent flying by the explosions. He was worried this could easily damage the helicopter. Gamble tried to reason that there were safer ways to achieve the same effect Landis wanted.
Allingham tried contacting Landis to bring him into the meeting with Gamble so they could discuss the matter further, but Landis wasn't available and so Gamble was out. After further attempts to find a helicopter pilot who would work for their below average rate and under their risky conditions, they finally settled on Dorsey Wingo, who was a Vietnam veteran with thousands of hours of flight to his credit, although he never actually worked on a movie set before.
But unlike all the others Allingham had interviewed, Dorsey seemed hungry for the job. Dorsey's whole reason for moving to Southern California in the first place was to be part of the motion picture industry to become a helicopter pilot on Hollywood productions. So this is exactly what he's doing.
And although Dorsey didn't necessarily know who John Landis was or his reputation, he was a huge fan of The Blues Brothers, a movie he'd seen several times, so with great enthusiasm he took the job. And with much of the crew now in place, Dan Allingham now needed to find the locations that would be used in Landis' segment.
For Nazi-occupied France, a set was built on the studio lot. For the Ku Klux Klan rally, an area near Hollywood called Franklin Canyon was selected. And for the Vietnam scenes, Allingham secured Indian Dunes Park in northern Los Angeles County.
This was pretty much the only place in Los Angeles where they could film this sequence because it was private property in a largely rural part of the county where the producers felt they could get permission for a shoot that contained both helicopters and explosions. With locations, crew and cast, with the exception of the children, now secured, the production officers were now scrambling to nail down everything with the shoot and get everything down before shooting began in just a couple of weeks.
Everything was chaotic and disorganized as well as underfunded. There wasn't even a proper pre-production meeting for the cast and crew who began to sense that everything was being done in a slapdash hurried manner. Case in point being that Dan Allingham was serving as both the unit production manager and first assistant director which are two hats typically not worn by the same person and
And once they actually started shooting, it was very clear to Landis that Allingham could not effectively fill both roles. So a new assistant director named Eli Cohen was hired. And as Vic Morrow started filming, he had reservations about some of the stunts and actually asked for a stunt double. But Landis told him to just man up and do it. And for fear of losing the role, he did.
There was also other employees who came forward expressing concern about some of the scenes, but then they were basically told, "Deal with it or you're going to get fired." And so they just shut up and put their reservations aside. Now, while all of this is going on, associate producer George Folsey was still having trouble finding two East Asian children for the Vietnam segment.
People had even offered up maybe just hiring dwarfs to be the children, but that wouldn't work for Landis. He wanted actual children. So George Folsey reached out to a family friend, Dr. Harold Schumann. Dr. Schumann was a psychiatrist with contacts in the Asian community in LA. Folsey explained the segment and that they had to work the children without permits because labor laws wouldn't allow minors that age to work past 6.30 p.m. and the shoot was planned for around midnight.
Dr. Schumann was more than happy to try and help, and on July 12th, roughly a week before this segment was even supposed to begin shooting, he phoned a former associate of his named Dr. Peter Chen, whom he had supervised when they worked together at a county mental health agency that served Asian immigrants.
Schumann told him he was looking for two Asian children, around six or seven, failing to mention that they'd be working without permits, of course. And he told his former colleague that each child would be paid $500 per night for up to two nights of work. Dr. Chen had a six-year-old niece who fit the bill, and so he called his brother Mark to discuss the matter.
Mark was a Pasadena accountant who, with his wife, Cheyenne Huchen, had only one child, a six-year-old daughter named Renee. The couple talked it over and felt like it would be a cool experience for Renee to have. I mean, she gets to act in a movie, something she could reflect back on as she got older and show her friends and family when she had a family of her own someday.
She could show them that she got to be in a movie and become part of film history. Mark called his brother Peter back and gave him the okay, and Peter passed it along to Dr. Schumann, who relayed the information back to Dan Folsey. Peter Chen then reached out to a friend of his named Dr. Daniel Lee, a Vietnamese social worker working with Vietnamese immigrants.
Peter had fled Vietnam in 1975, boarding one of the last flights, leaving the country with his wife, Kim, and his newborn son, Micah. They ended up in L.A. County and established themselves where they then had a second child. Now, Micah was now seven years old and loved movies. Peter knew Micah would love to participate, and when he asked the little boy if he wanted to be in a movie, he got so excited that he began jumping up and down.
So on the evening of July 16th, both of the children were brought up to Franklin Canyon, where John Landis was in the middle of filming the Ku Klux Klan segment for the movie. The families were introduced to associate producer George Fulcey, and then during a lull in shooting to the director, John Landis.
Landis took one look at the two children and knew immediately they were ideal for what he wanted, and he had Fulci make the necessary practical arrangements. Second Assistant Director Anderson House saw the children too, and this revived his concerns about the safety of the shoot they were being illegally hired to participate in. Later that night, House approached the first Assistant Director, Eli Cohen, and spoke loudly enough for Landis, who was in earshot, to hear.
Working the children illegally could not just cause John to lose his right to ever work with minors again, but the entire studio could have its license to work with children revoked. Landis heard this and turned around, gruffly asking, what did you say? House was so intimidated by the bullying tone of the man in charge that he began to stammer, and Eli jumped in to repeat what House had just said to him, and Landis brushed it off. Oh, he said flatly and walked away.
Solandus didn't care what the rules and the laws were. He wanted what he wanted. And after the Ku Klux Klan segment was done shooting, the crew moved to Indian Dunes Park. It was July 19th, 1982. Between a cliff and the banks of the muddy Santa Clara River, the set designer, Richard Sawyer, had erected a Vietnamese village with huts made from bamboo, grass thatching, and eucalyptus branches.
with roofs made out of cardboard. This was a village that was built to be destroyed in a series of special effects explosions, so they had only one chance to get the shot right, as it had taken two weeks to construct this set. The man responsible for those explosions was Paul Stewart, the special effects supervisor, and before filming could begin, he had to meet with an L.A. County fire inspector.
After being given the gist of the scene, the inspector issued a very explicit yet simple directive, which was that no explosives be placed directly under any of the huts. The fire inspector explained that this could send debris flying up into the air, which could damage the helicopter overhead and create a very dangerous situation.
So long as the explosives were all set off at a reasonable distance from any of the huts or other structures in the village, all they would send airborne is harmless sawdust. Stuart acknowledged this and agreed to it, but he knew that Landis wanted the huts to be blown up. Landis wanted the entire village to be blown to smithereens, as he had put it.
And Stewart had also already told Landis before even his consultation with the fire inspector that the way he wanted the special effects rigged would be unsafe for the shoot. So it seemed like this matter was settled and filming began.
The first two nights of shooting on July 19th and 20th didn't require the presence of the children. The scenes involved Vic Morrow's character slogging through the muddy river as he's suddenly surprised by a large water snake. And then a platoon of American GIs begin shooting at him just after the actor leaves the frame. So after this, Micah and Renee were picked up at their respective homes and driven up to the set at Indian Dunes.
Micah was accompanied by his parents and four-year-old brother, and Renee was also accompanied by her parents. As they entered the set, George Folsey Jr., who was also in the van, made the remark that he was glad they were now on private property so the county officials wouldn't be able to enter. This comment wasn't understood by anyone present because no one there knew that permits were needed for child actors and that this production didn't have them.
Once on set, the children and their families met Vic Morrow and the other crew members and waited around while other shots were filmed. There was some technical difficulties and so filming didn't actually begin until 2 a.m. This was for the scene where Morrow's character Bill first encounters the two children inside a hut asking them where their parents are. This scene took an hour and a half to film and at 3 30 a.m. shooting wrapped for the night. Full
Fulcy approached the families and handed them each an envelope containing $500 in cash. We'll need them for one more night, he explained. And for that night, they'd each be paid $500 again. Both sets of parents were absolutely exhausted and they had to go to work the next day.
Micah's mother explained that she may not be able to return the next night and Folsey told her this was no problem at all. If the parents couldn't make it, transportation to and from the set would still be provided and once they were on set, Folsey would treat the children as though they were his own.
Now, before the kids got there the next night, there was a whole bunch of chaos and fighting on the set because they were trying to shoot with the helicopters and the pilots were feeling unsafe. And even some of the crew members had to go up in the helicopter and they were worried about debris hitting the helicopter. There were also cameraman up on cliffs and they were nervous about it. They were using live ammo instead of fake ammo. So there was all of this chaos happening on set before the kids even arrived the next day.
And the kids didn't even get there until two in the morning. And when they were done for the night, they were ferried back home, prepared to return to set the following night. So he didn't even get around to shooting the kids until 2 a.m. And by that point, they really didn't get a lot done. So then the kids were asked to come back a third night. And keep in mind, this whole time, they're still doing everything under the radar, pretending that they're not filming children at all.
Micah and Renee arrived at Indian Dunes around 8 p.m. the third night. They were on set for about an hour and a half when they were called for their first scene. It was a scene in which Mauro's character escorts them from the hut where he finds them to the shore on the other side of the river.
As the three made it to the edge of the river, a special effects bomb exploded, sending mud and debris into the air and dust into little Renee's eyes. Renee began crying and Landis left his position to go comfort her. While Landis was calming the little girl, her mother asked George Fulcy if the scene was dangerous. In response to which Fulcy assured her that no, nothing they were shooting was dangerous. It's just special effects. It may look scary, he said, but it's safe.
After the scene was filmed, the children and their parents were driven back to the trailer where they were asked to wait until they were needed again for one final scene. Meanwhile, it was time to film an aerial establishing shot of just the helicopter approaching the village from the vantage point of the helicopter. Six men boarded the helicopter for this shot. Dorsey, the pilot, Dan Allingham, the cameraman, Roger Smith and his assistant, Randall Robinson, and two stuntmen.
Kenny Indoso and Gary McClartley, who was also the stunt coordinator. The stuntmen were dressed in battle fatigues and armed with machine guns, which their characters were supposed to shoot down toward the ground, igniting explosions. When the movie scene got started, there was a whole bunch of fireballs that blasted up and even the stuntmen didn't know what to do. Some of them dived to try to get away. Some of them were singed.
Again, it was straight chaos. There was nothing safe about anything they were doing. And it seemed like for everyone at Indian Dunes on this night, this was the most dangerous movie set they'd ever worked on. But whenever they brought up any concerns, everyone higher up just said, no, no, no, it's fine. We're professionals. We know what we're doing. During the midnight lunch break, the children's parents were approached by George Fulsey. And he said, listen, this is a
There are some firemen here who are just making sure everything's done by the book. And if they come up and ask you if you're working for us, I need you to say no. Tell them you're just my friend and you're just helping out. Again, this was because everything they were doing was illegal. So as Landis and his team were setting up the village for the final shot, Landis and his team were
Landis communicated that he wanted more explosives. He wanted this scene to be spectacular. Rehearsal flight was cut short because they were running out of time and so 20 minutes after 2 a.m. with the little kids feeling scared, everyone feeling unprepared, Landis donned his hip wader boots and entered the shallow Santa Clara River taking up position in the water with his megaphone.
Five cameras, all from different vantage points, began rolling at once as Landis barked orders through the megaphone. Vic Morrow took his position as lead actor with a child under each arm, Micah and Renee. The helicopter entered the frame much closer to the village than it had been during the rehearsal flight, which was ideal for Landis, who wanted everything in one frame. This was to create as dramatic as an effect as possible in the finished cut for the viewing audience.
Executive producer Frank Marshall stood on the shore of the river with his location manager watching the scene unfold. Dr. Daniel Lee also stood by watching the action unfold. Vic Morrow entered the river, flanked by the two children as he waded toward the opposite shore. Landis shouted through the megaphone toward the helicopter, lower, get lower. First assistant director Eli repeated Landis' directive into his walkie-talkie directly into pilot Dorsey's ear. The
The hovering chopper then descended to 24 feet above the water, which is the lowest it had flown all evening. Landis didn't even have to look at the monitor to know how incredible this shot looked. Now it was time for the pyrotechnics. "Fire! Fire!" Landis commanded. Up in the chopper, Randy Robinson heard the cue and he passed it along to the two stuntmen, tapping them on the shoulder, at which point they fired their prop machine guns into the water.
One of the special effects techs, Jerry Williams, then set off mock bullet hits into the water below, and James Camomile then began detonating the explosions, setting off the first three simultaneously, decimating half the mock village in a trio of amazing fireballs.
On the top of the cliff, cameraman Michael Scott unstrapped himself from the tree and along with his assistant Leslie Hill, ran for cover from the smoke and ash that was rushing their way, leaving their camera running. Up in the helicopter, production manager Dan Allingham was scared out of his mind. "Let's get out of here," he cried out. Pilot Dorsey tried to pivot the craft, but a hellish maze of fireballs surrounded him on all sides, impeding his navigation.
On the ground below, James Camomile couldn't see what was going on overhead as his welder's mask, which he was wearing to keep his vision uncompromised, ironically obscured the view of the sky. So he had no idea that the helicopter at that moment was positioned directly over the hut that was rigged with the fourth and final explosive. With his supervisor, Paul Stewart, crouching behind him, he set off the fourth blast, which obliterated the hut beneath which it had been placed.
cameraman Roger Smith was standing on the chopper's landing skid, filming Mauro and the kids when he felt the chopper's motion become unstable. The chopper tilted sideways as technicians on the ground below could hear the sound of the rotors change and they quickly ran for cover.
The chopper began to spin downward toward the river, directly toward Vic, Mauro, Micah and Renee, touching down in the shallow river where it landed with a resounding thud and stopped moving as multiple film cameras continued rolling. Crew members and firemen rushed toward the downed craft as water mist subsided and the six crew members aboard the craft were pulled out one by one and led to safety.
Around the same time, second assistant director Anderson House raced toward the water looking for Vic and the two children. House spotted Morrow who appeared to be face down in the water, not moving. Hoping he was just unconscious, House reached down toward Vic Morrow and pulled him up only to then realize it was just Vic Morrow's torso.
The actor had been decapitated by the helicopter's rotor blade. And so had little Micah, whose head, right shoulder, and right arm were sliced away from the rest of his body. Renee had broken free before the chopper came down, but had only made it far enough to escape decapitation. She was crushed beneath the craft's right skid and also died instantly.
John Landis was beside himself and didn't know what to do. He wandered through the shallow river, beating the water with his fist, crying, oh crap, oh crap.
Meanwhile, executive producer Frank Marshall was the first to recover Renee Chen's crushed body, which he scooped up and carried to shore. Mrs. Chen saw her daughter's dead body and began wailing. Marshall then re-entered the water and led a dazed John Landis back to the shore. At that point, Marshall told set designer Richard Sawyer to go home and then advised 2nd AD Anderson House to send the rest of the crew home and make sure the film was on the truck.
Marshall told Anderson House that he was now in charge of the set, and Frank Marshall hurriedly left the set and was gone by 2.45 a.m. when the first L.A. County Sheriff's deputy arrived at the scene. Around this same time, Dr. Daniel Lee saw his son's headless body and broke down in agonized grief. As he ran screaming toward the water, two crew members had to restrain him and escort him off the set, where he and Renee Chen's mother was transported to the nearest hospital to be treated for shock.
As crew members and fire safety officers combed the water for additional body parts, they found the severed, waterlogged heads of Vic, Morrow, and Micah and brought them back to shore where each was placed inside a black garbage bag. Remarkably, all the men who had been up in the helicopter made it out of the incident with only minor injuries, for which they credited Dorsey, the pilot, who had no idea anyone had been killed until later that morning.
Up on the cliff were camera operators Michael Scott and Leslie Hill, completely forgotten about and abandoned in all the pandemonium that had ensued, which they watched in sadness and horror from the clifftop until dawn when a car was finally sent to pick them up. It was around this time that Sergeant Thomas Buds, a detective with the LA County Sheriff's Office, arrived at the scene. Because three people were dead, it was standard protocol for a detective to show up to investigate.
Meanwhile, John Landis was rushed to the hospital for minor injuries, and while he was at the hospital, Landis made an urgent phone call to his lawyer. He knew he might well be in trouble.
And that's where we'll leave it for this week. Next week, as we continue covering the tragic and totally avoidable deaths on the set of the Twilight Zone, the movie, we'll look at the aftermath, the multiple investigations that followed, and what, if any, accountability Landis and his co-producers faced for their roles in what happened. So join us next Wednesday for the conclusion to the story in part two. We'll see you then.