WHAT WENT WRONG - Twilight Zone: The Movie (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 8, 2020

Twilight Zone: The Movie earned mediocre reviews at a very high price: a deadly helicopter accident on John Landis’ set which took the lives of actor Vic Morrow and two young children. This week Lizzie leads Chris through this tragedy-laden production that serves as a heavy reminder that no film is worth a human life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

and welcome to this week's episode of What Went Wrong. I am one of your host, Chris Winterbauer, with, of course, my lovely host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie speak so they know you're alive. That's me. Okay, cut it out. To get started, we would like to remind you guys if you are enjoying this podcast,

you can do us a huge solid by first hitting that subscribe button. And once you've done that, give us a rating, five stars, five stars, and then a review. And what does that get you well? not only does your review get printed out at my parents' house and stuck on their fridge, we'll also read some of them here. No way. Here we go.

A recent one I really enjoyed. The host keep you laughing throughout the whole podcast. Well, thank you, Bailey, CM7. We keep ourselves laughing too, except in this episode where we start crying. Obsessed with this podcast. I feel badly for my husband and friends. I feel bad for them, too, Angel 219. Fantastic podcast.

I can't stop listening to what went wrong. You might have a problem, Lauren Z, Z-B-Y. Great podcast. This has become a quick favorite of mine. I recently drove across the country. Well, way to brag, S.S. Trafiki. I normally don't listen to podcasts, but this one caught my eye after seeing an ad for it on Instagram.

Way to be susceptible to capitalism. The Birdman rises again. So what we're trying to tell you guys is that if you would like to be berated by Chris on this podcast, please leave a review because he will insult you in front of the whole audience. I read them verbatim. That's all I did. Anywho, that's your guys' directive. Hot to it after we get through this episode.

But first, I want to give a little PSA about the space that we're entering. You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension. A dimension of sound. A dimension of sight. A dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance of things. and ideas you've just crossed over into.

And no, that was not what played before we entered 2020. That was, of course, the original Twilight Zone introduction. Lizzie, how you doing this week? Well, doing a little rough after doing the research on this one. A little depressed. And this one, to be clear, is the Twilight Zone, colon, the movie. Actually, weirdly enough, it is just Twilight Zone, colon, the movie, which I don't understand because the show was the Twilight Zone.

But anyway, that's the beginning of many problems with this movie anthology version of the classic beloved TV show. So if you're ready, Chris, I'm just going to jump right in because there's really nothing. There's nothing fun to set up here. All I'll say is I've watched this movie

for the first time in preparation for this podcast episode. I am lightly briefed just through anecdotes about what went a couple of the major things that happened on this movie, and it made me so sad to think that such tragedies occurred in construction of, to be blunt, like such a mediocre to not good project. It's just everything about it just kind of bummed me out from start to finish.

So just so everybody knows, before we get into this, because it is significantly heavier subject matter than we have covered previously on the podcast. This is actually going to be a two-part episode. This will be obviously the first part. There's just too much to get through in one episode with this. I do think it's an important topic to talk about so that it doesn't ever happen again. But for anyone that does not know, this episode is going to detail the events that lead up to and include a deadly helicopter accident on the set of Twilight Zone the movie that resulted in the deaths of actor Vic Morrow and two six and seven-year-old children, Renee Chen and Micah Dinley. This is essentially I mean, honestly, I'm treating this like a true crime episode. So feel free to bail now if this is not something you want to hear about. It's not going to be graphic, but it is upsetting subject matter. I would argue, though, fascinating and again, important to learn about so that we do not repeat it. The second episode in the series, I'll be focusing on the aftermath of the accident and the ensuing

trial and how it changed Hollywood. So buckle up for that later. Let's get started. We are talking about the 1983 horror anthology film Twilight Zone, The Movie. It was produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis. The film features four segments, three of which are just straight up remakes from the original series, which when I watched this blew my mind because it's like, why? Why did you do this? There's really no why. Like I honestly couldn't particularly find it. There was, however, one completely original story out of the four, and that is the one that we are going to be talking about today. Each segment had a different director at the helm.

John Landis directed and wrote the prolog, epilogue, and segment one called Time Out, which will be the focus of our episode. Spielberg directed segment two, kick the can, which features Scatman Crothers and is fine. It's not great. Joe Dante of, I believe, Gremlin's fame, directed It's a Good Life. Although he had not directed Gremlins yet. No. So he and the next director we're going to talk about, both were much more up-and-coming directors than Spielberg and Landis. And the two segments that Dante and the last director is George Miller directed were far better of the four segments, like exponentially better than the ones that John Landis and Stephen Spielberg directed. This is the one little fun fact, Chris, that we can throw out is that in the third segment, entitled It's a Good Life, there is a cameo by one of your friends' dads.

There's a man who is rude to the little kid. Yes, who's rude to the little boy. Okay. That man who shoves a child is a man named Jeffrey Bannister. No. Troy Bannister's father? It looks exactly like him. It does. That is the slightly larger, more brunette version of Troy. Wow. Okay, so the last segment of the four is a remake of the very famous episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

This is directed by George Miller. It stars John Lithgow. Again, it's fine. John Lithgow gives a great performance. There's a couple of things in it that are really awesome. I actually liked the sort of like Immorten Joe monster, the way that it creeped out on the turbo. It's fine. It was like heavy metal. It's like riding like a dragon, like calling the lightning down on it. I enjoyed that. All right. So let's get into the background on the actual show the Twilight Zone very briefly for anybody that doesn't know. It's a series that was created by Rod Serling, and that's the man's voice that you heard at the top of this reading the very, very famous

intro to the Twilight Zone. That's the original intro, I believe. He was a successful television writer before he decided to write the Twilight Zone. The first iteration aired in 1958, it was called The Time Element. After the success of this one-off episode, The Pilot, Where Is Everybody, aired in 1959? The original first series ran from 1959 to 1964. Now, it's interesting the reason that Rod Serling turned to sci-fi and fantasy. As I said, he was a successful TV and drama writer. he was also a vocal opponent to censorship, and he had grown really, really frustrated with TV sensors for essentially nitpicking every single script he would turn in. There were a lot of stories about him having turned in like full TV scripts that were very racially charged and trying to make these points and everything. And by the time the network and sort of the ad executives would get the script back to him, it was completely changed and was basically nothing. So he thought, what can I write? that the censors either won't care about or won't be smart enough to figure out what I'm actually saying. And the answer was sci-fi.

Right. You can do socially conscious storylines that don't feel threatening because they're not in our reality. Exactly. And this is kind of around the Red Scare Time, right, in Hollywood as well, where a lot of writers and directors were being kind of blackballed for being, quote, communist sympathizers. Yes, a very interesting and scary time in Hollywood. Serling wrote 92 of the initial series runs 156 episodes. Wow. He was awesome. Really cool.

He also always appeared in every episode. He's the guy with the kind of messed up teeth that would tell you, you know, what you were about to see. The show was rebooted to not as much critical acclaim from 1985, 1989, which is interesting, because that's two years after this movie came out. And it has now been rebooted again with Jordan Peel at the helm in 2019. All of this is on CBS. Hearing that about Rod Serling and the censorship just made it make so much more sense to me why Jordan Peel would be so interested in the project. I feel like that's so in line with what he did with Get Out.

Get Out is sort of, to me, like, an excellent extension of the original Twilight Zone. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not going to go into any more detail on the original show or really the other three parts of the movie because we are here to talk about the first segment in the movie, which is called Time Out. again, this is the only original story that was written for Twilight Zone the movie and it was written and directed by John Landis. So let's talk about John Landis.

He was born in Chicago in 1950. He relocated to Los Angeles when he was only four months old, so he grew up in L.A. He decided he wanted to be a film director really young, and as soon as he was able to begin picking up as many jobs on a film set as he could, he did. There are quotes where he's like, I was a PA, I was a dialogue

coach. I mean, I'm paraphrasing. You know, I was a stunt double. I did everything, which, like, I believe him. I think he did. He was a real hustler. Right. But I do think this is an important point to remember because when somebody feels like they understand every aspect of every job on set, I think potentially an element of hubris can come in there that you might think you know better than other people. Yeah, like I've grown up with this.

I've been doing this for years. Which, to be fair, is true. Right. It was true. He didn't go to film school. He worked his ass off and worked his way up, essentially, from the mailroom and really did learn every aspect of the set. This guy has always known he wanted to be a director. I want to play a clip from the Fangoria series Screamography, which one episode focused on John Landis, where he talks about when he found out that this is what he wanted to do. I saw a movie at the Crest Theater in Westwood Boulevard in Westwood, 1957 or eight. called The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. And you'll find that most filmmakers have some movie. It's often King Kong or The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad

or Touch of Evil or La Dolcevita, some movie that spark them, that inspired them, that that was the movie. And Seventh Voyage of Sinbad for me, I was really little. I was seven or eight, and I really had the full theatrical experience of suspension of disbelief.

I loved it. I loved it. And so I went home and asked my mother, who does that? Who makes the movie? And she said the director. And that was very sophisticated of her. I realized in retrospect, honestly, I mean, she could have said, you know, the hairdresser. I have a whole different career.

But she said the director. So from the time I was eight, that was what I wanted to be, was a movie director. So I had that advantage, which was knowing very clearly what I wanted to do. I do think it's an interesting tell that his question was basically like, who is in charge, who runs this show? Yeah, who makes all of this happen. Right. Not like, who writes this, or who's that person on screen?

Or, like, it's, who is the person steering this ship? Yeah. So, at 21 years old, he makes his directorial debut with the movie Schlock, a tribute to monster movies. From there, he is hired to direct Kentucky Fried movie, and this ends up kind of being his audition to direct the movie that launches him into Hollywood Stardom, which is 1970. 78's National Lampoon's Animal House. Even though it didn't necessarily receive the best reviews, it was a huge financial success. It's great. There's really no way around that. It's an awesome movie. I'm sure it was a bit of a mess, but very fun.

He follows this up with 1980s, the Blues Brothers, which I'm sure we will cover on this podcast at some point. Very excited. Yeah, it cost $30 million. Yes, it did. an infamous mess. However, again, kind of a great movie. Like, I love it. Apparently, a 300-page first draft script. Jesus. Yeah.

Dan Aykroy just didn't know how to write a movie, so he just wrote every scene he'd ever wanted to write in a row for 300 pages. Sounds right. Yeah, exactly. But again, like, it ends up being great. It's a classic. Next comes 1981's An American Werewolf in London. So these are three, like, massive hits.

I love American Warwolf in London. It's such a fun movie. They're all amazing. This is all before he's 35 years old. Jesus should mention he has also, in the same year that the Twilight Zone comes out, Trading Places Comes Out. Oh, wow. Which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I'm actually, I was realizing as I was researching this, I think I've grown up with a lot of John Landis without realizing it.

My parents loved these movies, and so I would watch them, and I do think that they have very much sort of affected my sense of humor. also should mention he directed Michael Jackson's thriller. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Wow. That makes sense. It feels John Landis. Yeah.

So basically, at this time, Spielberg was quickly becoming the master of summer action blockbusters. He had done Raiders of the Lost Ark at this point. He had done E.T. Obviously, he's done Jaws. He's enormous. And Landis has become sort of the master of this kind of, like, gross out, raunchy comedy as well with a kind of like horror element added to it. which was like pretty pioneering, I think.

Yeah, and it feels very 80s. Like, Landis feels so 80s to me. He is in a way that I think Spielberg's movies transcend the time they came out in a little bit. Yes. Landis is the time. Yes. Yeah, exactly. I also think it's interesting to note that the late 70s, and we talked about this on the

Heavens Gate episode, but this is really the heyday of the new Hollywood era, a time where the power on a film set had completely shifted from the studio to one person, and that one person was the director. So that's the world in which Stephen Spielberg and John Landis are coming up, a world in which they have almost complete control over the sets that they are on. If you look at the cast of Twilight's Zone the movie, they're not really the draw here. The draw are John Landis and Steven Spielberg. Yeah, it's like, if anything, maybe the most famous cast at the time was the prologue, because you have Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks.

Yeah. And I guess Lithgow was pretty popular. The guy was the other one. I think he'd maybe just done World, according to Garp. There's not a ton of information about how or why the idea for this Twilight Zone reboot came about. It doesn't really matter. I suspect if I had to guess that it had something to do with the idea that being able to throw more money at these stories would offer something better. And it's clearly a show that Spielberg and Landis had grown up watching. I think that this idea is particularly evident in the fact that the story Landis chose to direct and also write involved much. much bigger set pieces and was designed to allow him to play with so many explosives.

In a way that like it doesn't match. It feels so different than the other three. It doesn't match any Twilight Zone episode ever. I think it's also worth noting that Rod Serling's original show was often played by budget limitations and cutbacks. So I wonder if this was an attempt to throw the money that they felt Twilight Zone should have had. add it. Like for example, six episodes in season two were actually shot basically live to tape to minimize both shooting and editing costs, but that made it an absolute nightmare for locations

and they had to stop doing it. Unfortunately, I think what we're going to learn here is that more money does in fact equal more problems. So let's go ahead and talk about this first segment of the movie, timeout. Following a short prologue with Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brooks, as Chris mentioned, we get to the first full segment of the movie. It follows a man named Bill Connor as he joins his friends at the bar for a drink. He just found out that he didn't get a promotion he wanted and starts on a super racist diatribe against the Jewish guy who got the job instead. Should be noted that evidently this Jewish man had been at the company longer.

Anyway, he then proceeds to start in on pretty much every other marginalized group, including black people, Muslims, and Koreans and Vietnamese. He is an equal opportunity bigot. When he exits the bar, he's suddenly transported back. to Nazi-occupied France, where he experiences a brief moment of what it might have been like to be a Jew. Then he's suddenly sort of thrown into a KKK rally where he experiences it from the POV of a black man. Then finally, he's transported to Vietnam during the Vietnam War, where he's fired on by American troops despite being unarmed. It ends with a sudden jump back in time to the World War II setting, where he is captured, thrown on a train, and carted away.

Looking out the slats in the woodcar of the train, he scenes the bar and his two friends outside, looking for him. So I want to introduce you to the main people we're going to be talking about over these two episodes. The first is Vic Morrow, and he is the actor who played Bill. The second is John Landis, our director, who you've already met. The third is George Fulsey Jr., an associate producer. Next, unit production manager Dan Allingham, special effects coordinator Paul Stewart, and finally, helicopter pilot Dorsey Wingo. So let's start with Vic Morrow. He's born Victor Marrow. He's born Victor Marzoff in 1929, raised in the Bronx to a Jewish family, interestingly enough. At 17 years old in 1946, he dropped out of high school, enlisted in the United States Navy. He uses the GI Bill

to enroll in college. He studies drama, makes his big screen debut in Blackboard Jungle for MGM in 1955, went on to have a very successful career as a prolific, mostly TV actor, including his role as Sergeant Chip Saunders in the series combat, as well as Walter Mathau's nemesis and the bad newsbears. He also studied directing at USC and directed seven episodes of combat along with a few other TV shows. It should also be mentioned he was Jennifer Jason Lee's father. George Fulsey Jr. is a frequent Landis collaborator. This is the associate producer on Twilight Zone the movie. That's important to remember, as he will come up frequently over these next two episodes, particularly in the second episode when we get to the trial.

He's been an editor or co-editor alongside Landis for tons of movies, including Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, The Blues Brothers, thriller coming to America, among many, many, many others. The guy works like crazy. He keeps working like crazy. He had also served as an associate producer on the Blues Brothers Schlock and American Warwolf in London trading places. The movie Landis had released just prior to Twilight Zone and, of course, the two Landis-led segments of Twilight Zone.

Dan Allingham, a production manager who also worked with John Landis on Thriller. Twilight Zone and Thriller were his first times working with Landis as opposed to George Fulsey. and by the time that Dan starts working with John Landis, John Landis is already huge. He went on to work with Landis a few more times. However, his last credit as a production manager on IMDB is 1989's communion. And Allingham is actually in the helicopter during the accident,

which we'll get to in a little bit. Paul Stewart is an experienced special effects supervisor. His first credit is in 1971. He's probably used to relatively overbearing directors who are asking for a bit too much. He's continued to have an extremely successful. successful career as an effects coordinator and supervisor, lots of movies, the Burbs, Thelma and Louise, Far and Away, Tombstone. By all accounts, I mean, he's a very accomplished special effects

supervisor. Oh, wow. It should, however, be noted that unlike the other guys, he only works with Landis one more time, and that is on 1991's Oscar. The last person we're going to talk about here is helicopter pilot Dorsey Allen Wingo. Wingo was 35 years old at the time of filming. He was a real-life Vietnam veteran who had very recently set his sights on becoming a stunt helicopter pilot in the movie industry. So worth noting, he had more than 4,500 hours of flying time prior to the shoot and was the head of operations for Western Helicopters Inc. of Rialto. All this is to say that this is not an inexperienced pilot at all. He was an Army combat pilot in Vietnam and had experienced flying while serving in remote mountaintop regions of Peru.

However, he was an extremely inexperienced pilot when it came to being a stunt pilot on movie sets, which is a very, very different thing than being a pilot in a war. So it was clear from the beginning of filming on this segment that Landis was adamant the stunts be as, quote, real as possible. On June 21, 1982, according to later testimony by both special effects operator,

Kevin Quibble and on-set photographer Morgan Renard, Landis had allegedly been getting frustrated with the first of Vic Maro's scene in Vietnam. Now, Chris, I don't know if you remember this, but it's actually the only scene you end up seeing in the final cut. It's where he's in the stream kind of surrounded by those like banana plants. He hides from Vietnamese soldiers only to be mistaken by Americans as the enemy and fired on. Now, Landis allegedly, by the way, there's going to be a lot of allegedly in this episode, felt that the scene didn't feel real enough and the holes being blown in the banana plants weren't big enough. They were using air guns.

Renard reported that Landis was informed it would take about 15 minutes to make some adjustments to the special effects. And again, allegedly, Landis decided this would take too long, so we have one of the special effects guys. Just go get live ammunition. Whoa. Yeah. To fire around Vic Morrow? So there's very conflicting information about this. I saw one thing that said that what they did, they essentially,

had Vic Morrow on set, yanked him off set, and then fired a couple seconds after they pulled him off set. I saw other things saying that they never fired anywhere near Vick Morrow that they fired in a different direction, that they were like 25 feet away from him. Yeah, but even so, using live ammunition on set, like, no. Others testified that the idea to use live ammunition was the idea of someone other than John Landis. However, no one seemed to be able to actually pinpoint who that other someone was. It should be Right. It was the ghost. It was the ghost.

It was the poltergeist. It was Dan Akroy. Dan Akron was just hanging out. And he was like, hey, let's use some live rounds. Probably. But regardless, it is confirmed that live ammunition was used. Like, that is not a rumor. That is real.

That's insane. It's insane. And this is something that when Steven Spielberg found out about later, he was furious. Also important, Stephen Spielberg, according to his own sworn statement, was never on set for any portion. of this segment that John Landis shot. And I don't think that if he had seen any of what we're about to start talking about, he would have allowed any of this to happen. Yeah.

He wouldn't have allowed the live ammunition. Like, that's... No. There's no way. Camera operator Michael Scott was quoted as having said, quote, I had no sense whatever that the people running the operation had any sense of caring, any sense of responsibility for anyone involved, whether it be actors, crew, or bystanders.

Yeah, not a good place to start, guys. Your case is not on a good foot right now. So this brings us to later that night on July 21st, 1982. The location of the shoot was Indian Dunes in Santa Clarita, California. This is a very frequent shooting spot, was a very frequent shooting spot, due to its exotic look and close proximity to Los Angeles. The scene that was to be shot was supposed to be the climax of the entire segment.

Morrow would stumble upon a Vietnamese village, under attack by U.S. forces. And in a heroic and ultimately redemptive act, he would carry two young Vietnamese children to safety across a stream, all while massive explosions were going off with helicopters hovering above them. Now, this does not appear in the final cut of the movie.

All we see is Vic Morrow appears in the stream, sees the U.S. soldiers, says I'm American, they start firing at him, they fire in every direction, he jumps off to the side. And then we're out of that segment. Yep, that's it. And we just jump back to the, Nazi section and it's over.

Yeah. My suspicion is that the segment that we do actually see end it where he is carted off on the train back in the sort of Nazi era was not supposed to be the end of the segment and that this scene that we are talking about in Vietnam was supposed to be the big final ending moment. Right. Without it, there actually isn't really a redemptive moment for Vic Maro's character in the segment at all and it leaves for kind of a weird experience. Kind of like he goes to hell.

Yeah. Like, there's just kind of ants. So, this is always designed as a night shoot, which right away is problematic because it involves children. According to casting director Marcy Learoff, she told Landis at the scene, quote, sounded kind of dangerous more than a month before it was shot. It was also pointed out to Landis and company by the casting team that having children work after 10 p.m. would have required a special waiver from the state labor board. Yep, because we shot with kids on our movie, and you can't shoot kids overnight. It's just not allowed.

Yeah, can you actually talk about how difficult it can be to work with kids? It's impossible for a good reason, too. But so the way it works is, based on the child's age, you get a certain number of shooting hours with the child. And when they're 18 or they're an emancipated adult, and that can be as early as 16, you can work a full 12 hours with them. But for every year you go back, you lose some time. So at, you know, 13, 14, for example, you can get nine, I think, shooting hours with them. That's a lot. With a full one hour, like, break of education.

Yeah, I think that might be 14. And then once you go earlier than 15 or 14, it starts getting restricted where you're down to seven shooting hours, six shooting hours. And that's time on set. So, like, they can go into school for, like, a one hour break. But then once you bring them on, the clock is ticking. And when you have a 12-hour shooting day and you need, like, a lead child action, for the whole, you know, movie, you're restricting your daily capacity by a lot and everyone's getting paid every day as if they're working a full 12 hour a day. And then that goes all the way down

to, like, you know, if you work with an infant, you get them for 30 minutes. Right. That's, like, literally what you get when you're shooting a commercial with a baby. You know, you get 30 minutes. And if you don't have it, like, that's why they use twins. Yeah. It's so that you can get 30 minutes with each of the kids and move on. So keep in mind that the kids that we are talking about here are six and seven years old. So based on what Chris just said, not only would they, should they have gotten a special permit from the state labor board for them to have been shooting after 10 p.m., but they also would have had extremely limited time with them. And this is the biggest scene they're trying to shoot in the entire thing, a very ambitious scene. And my guess is that

the waiver might not have even been approved because it's such a dangerous setup that oftentimes these things are rejected. Yeah. So Landis allegedly told the casting team, quote, to hell with you guys, we'll get them off the streets ourselves. This led to two children, six-year-old Renee Chen and seven-year-old Micah Dinley being quote-unquote hired under the table. Production secretary Donna Schumann would later testify that both Landis and George Folsey Jr. joked about going to jail for illegally hiring the children. So I want to play a clip for you guys from the Dick Cavett show. And please keep in mind that this. is after the accident has happened. This is once the, I believe, actually, trial itself has started.

Dick Cavett had a bunch of really famous directors on his show for a director's roundtable, including among them Sidney Pollock and Ivan Reitman. Dick Cavett kind of tentatively broaches the subject of the Twilight Zone trial, and the only person on the entire stage who seems to be willing to talk about it is Ivan Reitman, who, if you don't know, directed Ghostbusters, among many other things, and is an incredible director. So let's hear what Ivan had to say about the Twilight Zone accident. I don't quite know how to get into this subject, but what's being called the Twilight Zone trial,

as we are sitting here now, is taking place. And this is a case where three people were killed in the making of a film. And I think, as far as I know, isn't this trial unprecedented in this sort of thing and people being held accountable for the deaths of performers? I think it's the first time. Yeah. That a director is especially.

Yeah. Did any of you wipe your brow like this when this happened and think this could have happened to anyone? Well, you know, films are really complicated, so it's certainly possible, especially if you have stunts. I had a lot of fires, for example, and legal eagles, and it was something that always concerned me and always worried me. I mean, the special effects people talk about a controlled fire. Don't worry, it's a film, and we know.

know what we're doing. It's a controlled fire, but there is really no such thing as a controlled fire. I mean, fires seem to have a mind of their own when they want to get going. So it makes you nervous. There seemed to be a lot of things that went wrong and that were sort of awkward that night. I don't really know a lot about it, but

certainly those children shouldn't have been there. Yeah. So I wanted to play that because a couple of reasons. first of all, good on you, Ivan Reitman. Because as we're going to get to in the second episode, there are an awful lot of directors who I think, to Dick Cavett's point, kind of out of fear

because they had maybe done similar things, end up rallying around John Landis. As far as I can tell, Ivan Reitman is not one of them. Neither, by the way, is Stephen Spielberg. So that's the first thing, is that I think it's important to note that while we're looking back on this and saying, oh, my God, what were they thinking?

What were they doing? I do believe that at the time this was not, like, should they have been doing this? No. Was this extremely uncommon given the time and the way they were running film sets? No, I don't think so. And the last thing is that what Reitman just said is that the children should never have been there in the first place. He's 100% right. And that is the thing that you just can't get past. It's also something that to, I guess, Landis's credit. He and his attorney always said he would have pled guilty to the

charge that they failed to apply for state work permits for the children. Had they been charged with that? They were not charged with that, which is, we'll get into some of the failings of the prosecutorial team in the second episode, but they're completely up front about that. They did not get work permits

for this kids. They did pay them under the table. They hired children illegally. So I do want to state the obvious. No one on set thought that what was about to happen could possibly happen. They were behind schedule, they were rushing, they were thoughtless. At the same time, I don't think Landis thought the kids were in danger. There are a lot of reports that said that John Landis actually was very close to them

on set when they were shooting this scene. And we'll get to kind of the positions of everything in just a second. This is just so rough. Prior to the shoot on July 21st, Micah's mother, Kim, I'm sorry, I don't know how to pronounce this, Kim Hoa Lee, said that she was simply told, by George Fulsey Jr., remember, our associate producer who's worked with John Landis a ton, that, quote, they were going to shoot the movie, and if they hired Micah, they would use him where a Vietnam village would be bombed and destroyed, and only two children would survive. As far as I

understand, Mrs. Lee and her husband were Vietnamese immigrants. Her husband, at the very least, had lived through the Vietnam War, and he would later say that the explosions that he saw on set were worse than what he had seen in the actual Vietnam War. So there's a key piece of information about the scene that was missing from what I just read you that Fulsey told Mrs. Lee. Did there's a helicopter? Yeah. There's no mention anywhere of a helicopter, even being in the scene, let alone flying close to her son. Renée Chen's father, Mark Chen, said that he'd heard about the opportunity for Renee to appear in the movie through his brother, who was friends with production secretary, Donna Schumann, who will come back quite a bit later in the trial.

He said Renee and Micah's audition basically consisted of being paraded in front of Landis on set, who reportedly took a brief look at them and said, quote, it's good, it's fine, end quote. Now we're at the night of July 21st. The children are kept waiting and waiting in a trailer as shoots ran more and more behind schedule. Eventually, the filming began at 2 a.m. on July 22nd. However, Micah and Renee kept laughing. They're kids. which delayed the scene even further. So frustrated Landis and Co. shut down that shoot for the night

and moved on to other scenes. Fulsey went to the parents and asked if they could have the kids just return the next evening, which they did. The children, their parents, returned July 22nd, and again waited for hours.

According to Mr. Chen, Fulsey reassured him that the shoot would be very simple and also told him that he would not need to accompany his daughter during the actual filming of the scene that night. Which I believe is illegal. You have to have either a studio, well, maybe that's more recent labor laws,

but you have to have a studio teacher within view of a monitor so they can review the scene, and you have to have a legal guardian present. We're going to get into that more. I think some of these laws actually may have come about because of this. Fair. I'm just saying that's what you need now. Totally. You can't do a shoot without that.

I don't even think back then it would have been acceptable or okay to tell a parent that they don't need to be on set with their kid during something. like this. Yeah. Also, by several accounts, the scene was only rehearsed a few times prior to actual filming and never with the full set of explosions that they were actually going to use. Kevin Quibble, who we mentioned above, would later say that he wasn't given any information about the scene prior to filming.

According to the LA Times, another special effects guy, Jerry Williams, said that Paul Stewart, again, he's our special effects supervisor, pulled special effects technician James Camamele, who is a key player in this as well. aside only minutes before the shoot to tell him not to detonate until the helicopter was at a safe height. So they had never tested this with the full level of explosions they were about to do it with. I bet you they're thinking, like,

we don't have time and we don't have money, and that's all that it came down to. In fact, three hours earlier while shooting a different scene, Dorsey Wingo, our helicopter pilot, had been injured by excess heat from an explosion that was detonated too close to the UH-1B Huey helicopter he was piloting.

So there was already an indication that something was wrong. At approximately 2.20 a.m. on July 23rd, Vic Morrow was carrying both children across the river, with Dorsey Wingo and five other people on board his helicopter, including Dan Allingham, hovering above them. This is one of the most disputed claims in the entire case and one that I believe the prosecution hangs much of their case on, but I would be remiss not to mention that multiple people claimed,

with many later denying, that Landis could be heard over the radio commanding Dorsey to go, quote, lower, lower, lower, resulting in the helicopter being only about 20 to 30 feet above Morrow and the children. It was then that James, sorry, I don't know why this is going to make you cry again. It was then that James Camamel triggered a massive explosion that as far as I understand, they had not tested before this. The explosives damaged one of the helicopter's rotors, causing it to spin out of Wingo's control, and again, he's only 20 feet. above the ground at this point, there's nothing that he could have done to control the helicopter or get it to land anywhere that he could plan. The helicopter crashed immediately to the ground, crushing six-year-old Renee Chen, and as Vic Mara reached back to her, decapitating him and seven-year-old Micah Dinley. Prior to doing the scene, Mara reportedly said, I've got to be crazy to do this

shot. I should have asked for a double. His final line to the children, which he never got to deliver, was supposed to be, quote, I'll keep you safe, kids, I promise. nothing will hurt you, I swear to God. After the movie came out, I want to read an excerpt from a New York Times review from 1983, which said a lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just re-released the original programs. In the Hollywood era that we were talking about

where the directors wielded all this power and corners were cut on set in service of these big moments, a lot of that has been curbed inside the studio system. Now, stunt doubles and performers are killed, injured, in horrible ways at kind of an alarming rate still. The most recent Resident Evil that was shot that one of the stunt performers lost her arm, she broke her spine, she'll never be able to work again. And she has not been paid because they were filming in South Africa, and there's a dispute over what insurance policy would cover her. Jesus.

I don't want to get this wrong, but I think on one of the Captain America films, one of the stunt doubles suffered brain damage, and then on Deadpool 2, a stunt double. she died in a motorcycle accident. Outside of the studio system, there is a pervasive attitude that we got to do whatever it takes to get this movie made. We're going to go guerrilla style. We're going to shoot it. We're going to do it the way that Apocalypse Now was shot back in the day. Well, that's the key point is that that idea that you might see on these sort of non-union outside the box shoots now, that is how these big budget shoots were operating in the 70s and early 80s. That is the mindset John Landis was operating under was just get the job done no matter what.

And when I said I was going to talk about positioning, what I meant is that by pretty much all accounts, if the helicopter had fallen at a little bit of a different angle, it may have crushed John Landis. He was almost directly underneath them. This was just not, this was not safe for anybody. This was putting every single person on that set at risk. I rewatched Nightcrawler the other night. And I promise I'll bring this back full circle. At the end of the film, Jake Gyllenhaal's character, who's a sociopath, turns to a new set of employees that are working for him.

And he says, and remember, I will never ask you to do something that I would not be comfortable doing myself. Yes. It is, that is the exact perspective. I believe a lot of, not just directors, leaders in general, like to take as if it is some sort of moral stopgap that they have. Well, and it takes us right back full circle to what we talked about at the beginning, where he potentially felt that he understood every part of the process. And I believe felt that no one was doing anything that he wouldn't feel comfortable doing. Case in point being, if he was close enough to the helicopter to also get hit, he clearly didn't feel the risk was high enough. But the problem

is his risk assessment is not something that should or can be transposed onto the people around him, nor should it ever be. A director will always, for the most part, be willing to put themselves in harm's way, be it through their health, be it through their physical, emotional, mental health, because they so passionately believe in doing this thing that they'll chase it no matter what.

Like, it's not a healthy person that wants to become a movie director. And I say that is someone who wants to be a movie director. That is someone who desperately wants to create something lasting, that wants control over the process, that wants this thing to outlive them, that cares more about the project than even themselves, maybe, because the project is an extension of themselves.

That's not the person who ultimately should be allowed to dictate what level of risk other people in the set. This is why we have stunt coordinators who are able to say, we're shutting this down. That is where we will pick up in two weeks, actually, with Twilight Zone Part 2, where we will follow the ensuing investigation, criminal trial, and then civil suits that stretched on for almost a decade following the accident and led to

helicopter pilot Dorsey Wingo, special effects of coordinator Paul Stewart, unit production manager Dan Allingham, Associate producer George Fulsey Jr., and of course, John Landis, charged for the deaths of Vic Morrow, Renee Chen, and Micah Dinley. To support what went wrong, gain access to bonus episodes. Subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS fee. You can also visit our website, What When WrongPod.com, for more info.

What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman.