Helicopter Accident
During the filming of the "Time Out" segment directed by John Landis on July 23, 1982 at around 2:30 a.m., actor Vic Morrow and child actors Myca Dinh Le (age 7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (陳欣怡, age 6) died in an accident involving a helicopter being used on the set. In the scene, Morrow's character was to have traveled back through time again and stumbled into a mock-up of a deserted Vietnamese village where he finds two young Vietnamese children left behind when a U.S. Army helicopter appears and begins shooting at and destroying the village. Morrow was to take both children under his arms and escape out of the village as the hovering helicopter destroyed the village with multiple explosions. The helicopter pilot had trouble navigating through the fireballs created by pyrotechnic effects for the sequence. A technician didn't know this and detonated two of the pyrotechnic charges close together. The explosions caused the low-flying helicopter to spin out of control and crash land on top of Morrow and the two children as they were crossing a small pond away from the village mock-up. All three were killed instantly; Morrow and Myca were decapitated and mutilated by the helicopter's top rotor blades while Renee was crushed by one of the skids.
| “ | The probable cause of the accident was the detonation of debris-laden high-temperature special effects explosions too near a low-flying helicopter leading to foreign object damage to one rotor blade and delamination due to heat to the other rotor blade, the separation of the helicopter's tail rotor assembly, and the uncontrolled descent of the helicopter. The proximity of the helicopter (around 25 feet off the ground) to the special effects explosions was due to the failure to establish direct communications and coordination between the pilot, who was in command of the helicopter operation, and the film director, who was in charge of the filming operation. | ” |
The deaths were recorded on film from at least three different camera angles. As a result of Morrow's death, the remaining few scenes of the segment could not be filmed and all of the scenes that were filmed involving the two Vietnamese children, Myca and Renee, were deleted from the final cut of the segment.
It later emerged that Myca and Renee were being paid under the table to get around California's child-labor laws. At the time, California did not allow children to work an hour past curfew. Landis opted not to seek a waiver, either because he didn't think he'd get one for such a late hour or because he knew he would never get approval to have young children as part of a scene with a large number of explosives. The casting agents didn't know that the children would be involved in the scene. Associate producer George Folsey, Jr. told the children's parents not to tell any firefighters on set that the children were part of the scene, and also hid them from a fire safety officer who also worked as a welfare worker. A fire safety officer was concerned the blasts would cause a crash, but didn't tell Landis of his concerns.
The accident led to civil and criminal action against the filmmakers which lasted nearly a decade. Landis, Folsey, production manager Dan Allingham, pilot Dorcey Wingo and explosives specialist Paul Stewart were tried and acquitted on charges of manslaughter in a 1987 trial. In the aftermath of the accident, regulations were changed involving children working on movie sets at night and during special effects-heavy scenes. Hollywood also avoided helicopter-related stunts for many years, until the CGI revolution of the 1990s made it possible to use digital versions. As a result of the accident, second assistant director Andy House had his name removed from the credits and replaced with the pseudonym Alan Smithee.
Read more about this topic: Twilight Zone: The Movie
Famous quotes containing the word accident:
“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)