This Saturday, July 23, 2022 marks the 40-year anniversary of the tragedy and disaster that occurred on the movie set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
This occurred during the early-morning hours on Friday, July 23, 1982.
Actor Vic Morrow—an Emmy nominee in the 1960s for the ABC series Combat!—was killed at the age of 53, as were child actors Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, ages 7 and 6, from a helicopter which crashed to the ground where the three were on the scene.
The particular segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, which cast Morrow, was directed by John Landis who, according to Wikipedia, “violated California's child labor laws” by hiring the young actors without “the required permits” and “for a number of labor violations connected with other people involved in the accident, which came to light afterwards.”
The shooting of the film’s scene was in the Indian Dunes in Santa Clarita, California. It was a “night scene which called for Morrow’s character to carry the two children out of a deserted village and across a shallow river while being pursued by American soldiers in a hovering helicopter.”
Video of this tragedy is in included with this blog topic. It may take some readers back in time with recalling however one felt about this back in 1982. I was 10, one month from turning 11, years old. I was too young. But, I remember my father—who turned 50 in 1982—finding this to be so outrageous and stupid and reckless. After I came to understand enough about this accident, I thought John Landis’s freedom and his career should have ended. (The next year, 1983, saw the release of his big-screen comedy, Trading Places, starring Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Lee Curtis, as well as the music-video of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”)
Actor Vic Morrow (1929–1982) was survived by two ex-wives, including Emmy-nominated screenwriter Barbara Turner (1936–2016), and two daughters, including Oscar-nominated actress Jennifer Jason Leigh (b. 1962).
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