Twilight Zone: The Movie – what really happened on set?

We take a behind-the-scenes look at one of the worst tragedies to ever occur on the set of a major motion picture – the Twilight Zone helicopter crash.

The Twilight zone The helicopter crash is one of the most infamous accidents in Hollywood history. Three people died – veteran actor Vic Morrow and two child actors – Myca Dinh Le (7 years old) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (6 years old). It led to a nine-month wrongful death trial and numerous lawsuits and was considered the moment Hollywood finally began to take child labor laws seriously. It has become a lasting blot on director John Landis’s legacy, and chilling footage of the incident is permanently recorded, proving how complicated sequences can have deadly consequences in just a split second. In fact, that’s what we’re tackling in this episode of JoBlo Scandals Twilight zone Accident and the Man at the Heart, director John Landis.

Before the accident, Landis was one of Hollywood’s top directors. There were two movements in 1970s films that changed the medium forever. One of these was the “New Hollywood” movement, in which directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin and Martin Scorsese challenged the old ways of doing things and produced a whole series of masterpieces. But as the decade wore on and the gritty New Hollywood films began to fail at the box office, the other movement, the “movie brats,” began to take hold. This generation of talent included directors who grew up obsessed with Hollywood classics and longed to make pure entertainment. There were some directors, like George Lucas, who were on both sides, but of the Brats, the two biggest were Steven Spielberg and John Landis.

After the accident, Landis’ career initially recovered quite well, and he directed two of his biggest hits ever: the music video for Michael Jackson thriller And trading venues. But the consequences of the accident eventually hit Landis hard, especially when he stood trial for involuntary manslaughter. In the video embedded above, we go into more detail about what happened on set and what happened to everyone involved after the accident.