Twilight Zone Accident | Shoot to Kill | 5

Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett Boman have always been fascinated by the stories that lie behind the big screen—the on-set dramas and untold disasters that befell some of Hollywood’s biggest movies on their journey into theaters. In 2019, they started their own podcast “What Went Wrong” to share those stories, and in this conversation with Lindsay, they discuss the notorious accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie—how it fit into a pattern of reckless behavior in Hollywood and whether the movie industry has really changed in the years since. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lindsay Graham?

  Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

• 0:21Lindsay Graham?

  From Wondery, I'm Lindsay Graham, and this is American Scandal.

• 0:44Lindsay Graham?

  In July 1982, the Santa Clarita Hills were the backdrop for one of the most devastating tragedies in Hollywood history. Thirty-one-year-old director John Landis was filming a segment for Twilight Zone: The Movie, an anthology picture executive produced by Steven Spielberg. But what should have been a night of movie magic ended in disaster when a helicopter crashed on set and killed three actors. The deaths of Vic Morrow and the two young children Renee Chen and Mika Din Lee were an avoidable tragedy. But in the aftermath, it wasn't only the decisions and conduct of Landis and the other filmmakers that fell under the microscope. There was intense scrutiny on the wider Hollywood culture that had allowed such a terrible thing to happen. My guests today are Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett-Balman.

• 1:29Lindsay Graham?

  They're the creators and hosts of the What Went Wrong podcast, which details the real-life drama behind some of Hollywood's biggest movies. Our conversation is next.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  PrizePix packs are here. Rip digital packs and get real basketball, football, and Pokemon cards on PrizePix packs. Available now nationwide. Once you see your pool, you have a choice to sell back instantly for real cash or ship at home. Cash from your sale will immediately be added to your PrizePix balance. It's just another way to run your game. New users, download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY to get $25 instantly in bonus packs when you buy your first $5 pack. PrizePix, run your game. Eighteen plus, eligible areas. Terms apply. Collect responsibly.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  We all have routines. I'm Jabran, and with diabetes, mine was finger sticks. Sometimes, I skip them because it hurt. The Freestyle Libre 3CGM changed that. It gives me glucose insights without finger sticks. Learn more at freestylelibre.us.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Finger sticks are required if your glucose alarms or readings do not match symptoms, or when you see check blood glucose symbol for the first 12 hours. The views expressed should not be used for medical diagnosis or treatment as a substitute for professional medical advice. Individual circumstances may vary. For prescription only. Safety info found at freestylelibre.us.

• 2:52Lindsay Graham?

  Chris, Lizzie, welcome to American Scandal.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having us.

• 2:56Lindsay Graham?

  We are thrilled to be here. So, in our most recent series, we've been talking about the tragic deaths on the set of Twilight Zone the Movie. Sadly, though, those are far from the only fatalities that have occurred while making a movie. One of the most notorious, I suppose, is the death of Brandon Lee on the Crow, which happened about 11 years after the Twilight Zone accident. So let's start there. Tell us what you know about how this tragedy happened.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  This is an interesting one. I don't think it's particularly unique in terms of this, but my understanding is that it was like 14 mistakes in a row, basically, that kind of piled up and led to Brandon Lee's death. And if anybody had stepped in at any one of those points and checked something, it wouldn't have happened. But, basically, as I understand it, what happened is, they were actually shooting an insert shot a few days or even maybe weeks earlier, meaning they were capturing a shot of the gun in someone's hand, a close-up. And you could see down the barrel of the gun. So they needed what's called a dummy round, which is just basically a completely fake bullet.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  It has nothing in it that could propel it forward, no gunpowder, nothing. But they were shooting in North Carolina, not Hollywood, so they couldn't just go out and buy a dummy round. So somebody decided, well, let's just make it. And so what they did is they took a real bullet. And they removed the gunpowder from the back of it. And they got the shot, they got what they needed. And then afterwards, they didn't properly remove it. And somebody kind of went click, click, click with the gun. And just doing that, there was a little bit left in the bullet that they'd made, enough to pop the physical bullet forward off of the casing, thinking the gun was clear.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  And what that did was it left a projectile in the barrel of the gun. When it came time to shoot this sequence with Brandon Lee, and again, this was later, this was not even the same day. They used the same gun. And they had sent their armorer home. And Michael Massey, who was playing Fun Boy in the movie, they got in position. He pointed the gun at Brandon Lee. And what he had in the gun at that point was a blank. But of course, a blank actually does have something in it to make the pop sound. And that was enough to propel the remaining bullet down the barrel and to shoot Brandon Lee. And they actually didn't even know what had happened. Because of course, he's supposed to be shot in the scene.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  And he has a bunch of squibs on him, which are the little exploding charges. And so the squibs went off. He went down exactly like he's supposed to. They call cut, they think it's all good to go. And then Brandon Lee does not get up. And he never regained consciousness and died a few hours later at the hospital.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  So like Lizzie said, it's just there are safety checks, multiple safety checks anytime that a gun is used on set. And obviously, in this instance, every instance of that safety check was either ignored or rushed through. And the circumstances differed, but a not dissimilar instance when Alec Baldwin shot cinematographer Helena Hutchins on the set of the film Rust in 2021.

• 6:19Lindsay Graham?

  Russ, it's a good thing to bring up because certainly the nation was captivated by that accident, as they were with Brandon Lee's death. What kind of impact did Lee's death have on Hollywood? How might it have been different from the reactions to the fatalities on The Twilight Zone?

• 6:34Speaker 05

  On the one hand, The Twilight Zone movie, I think, much more captured the nation's attention, not the least of which because it involved a much more famous director, John Landis. It involved a much bigger production, which included Steven Spielberg. It took place in Los Angeles. It involved children. The Brandon Lee death, on the other hand, was obviously very notable, not only you see the son of Bruce Lee, but death by way of prop gun is actually exceedingly rare in film and television. I believe there are three instances in which someone was killed by somebody else operating a prop gun, and that's Brandon Lee, Helena Hutchins, and then over 100 years ago, Charles Chandler was an extra on the set of Cecil B. DeMille's The Captive, and he was shot by a live bullet from a rifle.

• 7:19Speaker 05

  And so the prop gun deaths are extremely rare. There's also John Eric Hexum. He was a television actor. He was playing with a prop gun, and the blank drove a piece of his skull into his brain on the set of Cover Up, a TV series. On the other hand, helicopter deaths are one of the leading causes of deaths on film sets. In fact, The Twilight Zone movie deaths in 1982 were three of nine that year. You know, on the one hand, The Crow was noticeable because it is the lead actor on camera, killed by a prop gun. There's something so tragically, almost grotesquely poetic about it, and same with the Helena Hutchins ones, but they're also notable for how rare they are.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  I think there's a couple of things to add there, too. One is that Brandon Lee was not a huge star at the time that he took The Crow. Obviously, his father was. If anyone doesn't know, his father was Bruce Lee. And this was kind of Brandon Lee's chance to come out into his own, and this was really going to be his movie. So to Chris's point, that one, that one almost, I think unfortunately, became more legend than it did cautionary tale, especially because there were already rumors about... There being kind of a curse on the family that sort of made it feel larger than life, you know, and then with Rust, I think so much of that media firestorm that followed that had to do with the fact that the person who fired the gun was Alec Baldwin.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  And, you know, I also see some similarities in terms of the way that Alec Baldwin handled it and John Landis handled the Twilight Zone. There wasn't a ton of sympathy necessarily expressed for the victims as much as there was sympathy expressed for themselves, but I think that that drives some of the interest around these cases, too. And of course, with the Twilight Zone, you get a massive court case.

• 9:07Lindsay Graham?

  So Chris, when you bring up how in quotes, "common" helicopter accidents are in Hollywood productions, if we zoom out and look at the industry as a whole, how dangerous is it to work on a movie set?

• 9:19Speaker 05

  This is really interesting because I've worked as a writer and a director and I've directed a couple of movies, but I've never directed an action film or anything like that, just to be clear. Whenever a tragedy like the death of Helena Hutchins occurs, I think you tend to see articles published discussing, quote, "the all too common occurrence of film accidents." And that can feel anecdotally true because when there is an accident on a film set, they tend to involve people who are very visible to us, people who we feel we know parasocially in some way, like Alec Baldwin, for example. I think as a result, we overweight those accidents and assume that they are small samples of a much larger trend. And that isn't really the case. And so I was trying to pull some numbers to get my head around the data.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  And so there were 19 fatalities, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2010 and 2019 on film and television sets, 47 from 1990 through that date. But the fatal injury work rate for all industries nationwide in 2019 was 3.5 per 100,000 full-time workers. And the film industry has a rate of roughly 0.9 per 100,000 workers. The film industry is not an overtly dangerous industry in terms of these types of accidents that we're discussing. I think it's dangerous in Ways that we perhaps don't anticipate. And so, yes, we have the very famous Twilight Zone incident.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  But more than that, most of the individuals killed in helicopter accidents are cameramen and cinematographers, for example. And then another big cause of deaths and injury in film is that the working hours are extremely brutal. And there are countless cases of folks who work on film sets crashing their cars when they drive home drowsy after a 16-hour, 18-hour, 24-plus-hour day. And that has been something that in the film industry has continued to plague productions and has continued to be a fight between unions like IATSE and studios in terms of what is reasonable. So on the one hand, I do think statistically, the film industry isn't particularly dangerous,

• 11:30Speaker 05

  especially in comparison to some very dangerous industries in the United States like roofing. But on the other hand, I do think that there is a culture of don't do anything that could hurt the show, don't do anything that could hurt the picture. And there are, again, many anecdotal instances of people feeling like they speak up for safety issues and then they feel that they are silenced or are unhireable after the fact. And on the flip side of that, you have someone like John Landis, who is in charge of a production that resulted in the death of three people, including two children. And he went on to continue to enjoy a very successful directing career. So the rules seem to apply unevenly, depending on your status within the industry.

• 12:09Lindsay Graham?

  Is there a sentiment in Hollywood that accidents of these sorts are an unfortunate inevitability?

• 12:14Speaker 05

  I don't feel that way. I have not felt that way in my experience. And I believe if you look at some of the commonalities between a production like Rust and The Crow, these are two films that are being done very independently in the instance of Rust and somewhat independently in the instance of The Crow. And the common DNA that's shared between a lot of these is there are regulations in place that are flouted due to the lack of time on a film set. So I do think that while people do not expect accidents like these to happen, and I do think that there are many, many people in Hollywood who work Extremely hard to prevent accidents like this. There is a top down pressure.

• 12:55Speaker 05

  And I think that the executives at the studio feel it, you know, from their shareholders or their the studio heads. And it goes down the producers and it goes down the directors, all the way to the poor person. Managing the gun or holding the gun or piloting the helicopter. And that pressure is time and money. It is very hard to turn around and say, no, we cannot do this. This is not safe. And so that's where I do think the culture. Tends to break down a little bit is that film is very hierarchical. And I do think that it's easy to say, speak up. You know, if you see something, there's, there's very much this idea of speak up. If you see something unsafe. I think that's much easier said than done.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and just to speak to what Chris is talking about in terms of. People speaking up. There was another death on a set in 2015. The movie was Midnight Rider. Never came out, will never come out because of this, but it was a biopic covering the life of Greg Allman. William Hurt was set to play Greg Allman. They were filming, I believe, a dream sequence that required a bed to be laid across a train track. They actually tried to get permission from the railroad company to film this sequence. They were in Georgia. The railroad company said, no. And they said, well, we're out of time. We're out of money. We're doing it anyway. So they went on to the railroad track. They told the cast and crew, look, we have 60 seconds to clear the track when we see a train coming. And a train did start coming.

• 14:16Speaker 04

  They tried to get everyone off. They did not have enough time and the bed actually ended up. Causing debris to fly into a camera assistant named Sarah Jones, who was then pushed in front of the train and died. It's a similar situation where if you think you maybe shouldn't be doing it. Or you're cutting corners or you don't have the right permits. It's never worth it. And, you know, on bigger budget productions, fortunately, a lot of these corners are not cut in the same way now. I think that was different at the time of the Twilight Zone. Based on how productions were run and also how much authority these directors had at that time.

• 14:53Speaker 05

  I think that's a great point. If I can jump in really quickly, you know, Lizzie, you mentioned how much authority the directors had. This was really the, you know, by the 80s, you have seen the complete inversion of the producer-director relationship, right? From you have the studio system where you have the central producer as epitomized by Irving Thalberg, and then, you know, an independent producer like David O. Selznick, for example, and then directors come up as auteurs by the 60s and 70s, and then with Spielberg, Lucas, Landis, et cetera. Coppola, these are the titans of industry. These are the names that we know. Coppola, very famously too, nearly lost his star in Apocalypse Now. Michael Sheen had a heart attack on the set of that movie. They infamously slaughtered a water buffalo on camera, which also led to some changes in the way that animals were

• 15:38Speaker 05

  treated on set. But I think the idea of the genius director remains a romantic ideal within Hollywood, I think, even today. And Lizzie, the idea that you're circling is, what is an acceptable amount of sacrifice for great art? There is a way in which we lionize people, I think, over history who have sacrificed for their art. What I think makes film unique is that it requires the coordination and collaboration and subjugation of an incredible amount of people in order to realize one person or a few people's vision. I do still think that idea of, above all, protect the picture, does pervade productions big and small across the board. And there is a sense that if and when an accident

• 16:22Speaker 05

  does happen, not that it was necessary, but sometimes I do think there can be an attitude of, this is the cost of doing business. And I think about that more in terms of other abuses that we see on set. Abuses of power, manipulations of people. You know, we've seen many instances of sexual abuse or sexual harassment on set. And the directors are very often protected in these instances because they are viewed as such a precious resource. John Landis is a unicorn in their eyes, and there are only so many people that can do what John Landis does at the box office. His career eventually slowed down because his movies stopped making money, not because of this accident.

• 17:09Speaker 06

  Confidence, it's listening to your gut. It's moving forward even when the path ahead is unclear. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has helped people keep their promises, building confidence for generations. Whether you're confident in your financial future or just beginning to envision it, we're here to help. Ask a financial professional how. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska. And in New York, Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona.

• 17:40Speaker 07

  If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. It's destroying athlete, creator, and YouTube Maxer. YouTube Premium enhances how I use YouTube with awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite training videos before I hit the gym. So no Wi-Fi doesn't turn leg day into loading day. Plus, I get ad-free videos, background play, and so much more. YouTube Premium is like YouTube got some extra gains. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium.

• 18:10Speaker 08

  Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get background play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful.

• 18:47Lindsay Graham?

  You were earlier talking about the rise of the auteur-director in the late 70s and early 80s. Tell us a little more about the culture that was evolving. What was this new Hollywood?

• 18:59Speaker 04

  Well, I think to understand where you get by the 70s and 80s, you first have to understand the studio system that existed from basically the birth of Hollywood up through early 60s. But the reason I bring up the studio system is because the studios controlled everything. I mean, the reason that it ends up dissolving is because of a very famous Supreme Court case that declared it vertical integration, which it was. They were controlling everything from the development of the films to the contracts that the directors, actors, and writers held. They controlled the production of the films. They controlled the distribution of the films. They controlled the theaters that the films were distributed to.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  And what that did, it put the power in the hands of the studios and the producers. As the studio system began to break down, that's when the director starts to emerge as the visionary behind the movie. You start to get the Coppolas, the Scorsese's, people like Landis operating in the comedy space. And Chris, maybe you can kind of speak to the emergence of the auteur.

• 20:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think as these directors start to gain more and more control, then these auteurs really control their material. You know, when Alfred Hitchcock first came to the United States, David Selsnick controlled his ability to work through an exclusive contract. And because Selsnick didn't have enough work for him, he would actually loan him out to other productions and studios at a higher rate than the agreed-upon rate of Hitchcock's contract with Selsnick. And Selsnick pocketed the difference. And so as these directors come up, they get more and more control on set, on the back end, in terms of the way in which their movies are released. And so everything's completely flipped by this point in time.

• 20:42Lindsay Graham?

  And for a director like John Landis, what does this shift mean for him?

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Well, you know, he's interesting.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  I mean, he came up, you know, obviously through the comedy scene, but he really broke out with, of course, National Lampoon's Animal House, as opposed to something like Coppola, Scorsese. But it was financially very successful. I think the thing with him is that from the beginning, he was a moneymaker. And he follows that up with Blues Brothers, which was an absolutely insane production. It cost so much money. There were so many disasters behind the scenes on that movie. But again, it made money. And then following that is An American Werewolf in London. So he's popping out bangers across the late 70s and early 80s. And the thing is, at this time, when you have someone

• 21:33Speaker 04

  who has developed this kind of voice that is just minting cash, that's where I think you get into the kind of control that John Landis was able to have on his sets. He was also really young. I believe he was not even 32 when he was filming Twilight Zone.

• 21:51Speaker 05

  That's right. He's 28 when Animal House is released, 30 when Blues Brothers is released. These movies are also extremely affordable, even though Blues Brothers went way over budget. Landis was a commercial filmmaker. He is able to transcend that moment because he is such a commercially successful director. He mainstream audiences love his movies. Yeah, he was, he was pretty bulletproof at the box office.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, Landis was batting a thousand.

• 22:23Lindsay Graham?

  So we've been describing several possible factors that could contribute to an accident like The Twilight Zone. We have directors who are becoming more powerful, and their voice is so commanding that they set the tenor of the set. We have studios who are much more interested in sure bets. What other aspects of working culture in Hollywood might have made a tragedy like The Twilight Zone more likely?

• 22:48Speaker 04

  I mean, I think unfortunately, it was maybe not so uncommon to be pretty flexible with labor laws at that point, particularly as it pertained to children. My understanding of this accident is that those kids shouldn't even have really been on that set because it was filming in the middle of the night and they would have needed special permits to film with them after 10:00 PM and they hired the kids under the table. And that's something that, to his credit, John Landis has never denied, and I'm sure that's something that they thought was not a big deal. I think we see unfortunately quite a bit of flexibility with regulations across this accident, although a lot of regulations would also come into place after The Twilight Zone.

• 23:32Speaker 05

  I think another big thing, especially with The Twilight Zone, is that we are at a really important moment in special effects history and action effects history as well. And then in the 1980s, we get the birth of not only the summer blockbuster, but the action blockbuster. And I think that there's this sense that in these big commercial tent pole movies, you need an amount of spectacle that is bigger and bigger in order to satiate the audiences. And what's, I think, particularly tragic is in a mere 10 to 20 years, visual effects will have come far enough that they will reduce the need for some of the techniques used on this movie.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  But for example, I believe well before this accident, on set, Landis called for the use of live ammunition because it was going to, in his mind, take too long to reset the squibs, the detonators on the bantry to blow them up in a safe way. There's this desire to create something mind blowing for the audience. The other thing happening on sets at this time, you've got aerial photography is obviously very big at this time. Imagine in the opening shots of The Shining, for example. You've got Apocalypse Now. The helicopter has become this very iconic, maybe in a negative way, image in the American mind following the Vietnam War. You have a sense that bigger is better with all of these movies.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  We've got things like Commando, eventually Predator, Die Hard, et cetera. And so the explosions need to be real and they need to be big and we need to feel that sense of danger coming through the screen at us as an audience.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  And I think also, when you're someone like John Landis, you're very young, you have a lot of power. As far as you're concerned, everything's going to go your way. So if you want bigger explosions, then people better do it. And it'll be fine and it'll look great. Something that was interesting to me about this is had the helicopter fallen in just a slightly different direction, it would have crushed John Landis. That tells me everything I need to know about the way that he was viewing this stunt. I don't think he thought anything could possibly go wrong because he's untouchable. That is exactly where the problem comes in.

• 25:54Lindsay Graham?

  So the Twilight Zone accident resulted in criminal charges, but no convictions. What do you think that tells us about either Hollywood or the justice system?

• 26:05Speaker 04

  One of the things that I did find really interesting about this is that they didn't charge them with hiring the kids illegally, which is the one thing we know for sure that they did. And I don't know if that's because it would have complicated the case. You know, I believe they were going after child endangerment among other charges. But I think it it made it a bit difficult to parse out exactly what had happened. And the other thing is, of course, it is part of the director's job to ensure that the people on set are safe. Obviously, there's people underneath them who are ensuring more specific elements of that. But I think Hollywood and many big directors at this time

• 26:46Speaker 04

  were thinking, that could have been me because they had cut corners. They had tried to save time. They had done things that they maybe looked back on and thought, I probably shouldn't have done that, but you know what? It was fine. And of course, in this case, he shouldn't have done it and it wasn't fine. I think there was a real hesitancy around this case because the feeling was if Landis in particular had been convicted, it would have changed the way a director operated on sets. It could remove some of their authority. It could limit their creativity. It makes them potentially criminally liable. These are all things that these massive directors

• 27:29Speaker 04

  and also much of Hollywood did not want to happen.

• 27:33Speaker 05

  I think Hollywood was pretty split based on what I've read. I think that there were a lot of individuals who, especially by the end of the trial, felt Landis was at fault and had brought this upon himself, that this was an extremely arrogant director, although maybe not unusually so. He had a pretty bad reputation already as being a screamer on set. But despite Hollywood maybe being split and maybe even generally feeling like this should go against Landis, there were not sweeping changes made after the fact. You know, from the reporting I've read that was released contemporaneous to the trial, there was very much a sense of the reason this happened is because Landis skirted

• 28:16Speaker 05

  the regulations. We have the proper regulations. We have the proper safety precautions. And when they're followed, everything is fine. And the problem is Landis. And but and I'd be curious to hear what you think, Lindsay, but to me, what that fails to recognize is Landis isn't really an exception to this rule in a lot of ways. I think he represents the way that a lot of directors behaved at the time and maybe continue to behave. And I do know there were some changes after the fact, but there were not sweeping regulatory legal changes in the way that the industry was regulated immediately afterwards.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  To me, the thing that really freaked people out is the fact that it was a criminal trial and that he would have been held criminally liable had he been convicted, something that I think was truly scary for them.

• 29:09Lindsay Graham?

  It sounds like, Lizzie, that not much really happened in Hollywood after this accident, but maybe you know that there were some regulations changed.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  There was a little bit, not maybe as much as you would hope, but there were some things, particularly around helicopters. I believe that there actually weren't very many regulations following helicopters on sets at this time. There were for fixed wing aircrafts. So following this accident, they did put in place some regulations for helicopters. I think you, you know, you had to get a permit. There were things like that that weren't even there when they were filming this, which is insane when you think about it. There were some changes to child labor laws, I believe. There was also a SAG hotline setup where you could call if you were feeling unsafe. And I think that actually did make a difference.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  And then the DGA did start to discipline directors who did not adhere to safety standards. So that's pretty minimal, given how horrific this accident was, but it's a little something.

• 30:09Speaker 05

  John Landis was reprimanded but not disciplined. And it reminds me a little bit of the way Hollywood operates can be seen similar to the way American sports leagues often operate, where you have instances of player behavior that are treated with relatively light sentences from the leagues. Domestic violence is the big one that comes to mind. And then you have a player who gambles on a game and he is kicked out of the league forever. To me, it just shows, in this instance, folks made changes, but I think they were a bit underwhelming, given the circumstances.

• 30:55Speaker 09

  They're running a cover two defense. But you're running to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's watch party fed with deals from your go to restaurants. Or stock up with deals on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. It's not football without food. Uber Eats. Order now. Terms apply. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.

• 31:25Speaker 10

  Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat and Fish are back for a whole lot of wonderfully whimsical fun. What happens when you switch bodies with your best friend? Discover a caveman frozen in ice? Or make an alien so angry he threatens to destroy the planet? Find out in season two of the Cat in the Hat podcast. The Cat and Fish are traveling the world in the great catastrophic cacophony cruiser, meeting genies, clown professors, cave trolls, and extraordinary characters along the way. With clever wordplay, imaginative rhymes, original songs, and stories celebrating curiosity, empathy, and creative problem solving, every adventure brings something new to discover.

• 32:07Speaker 10

  It's a world of wonderful words, big imaginations, and plenty of heart for the whole family. Listen to the Cat in the Hat podcast wherever you get your podcast. Audible subscribers can binge all 20 episodes early and ad free right now.

• 32:31Lindsay Graham?

  So we've already touched on the death of Alina Hutchins on the set of Rust most recently in 2021. Given this industry's reputation and very public reputation for accidents like these, how could this happen again?

• 32:46Speaker 04

  In some ways, this one is a bit unique because my understanding of this is that she was actually shot with a live round. This is another instance where time was an issue. They were under a lot of pressure. They were not paying people very well. They had hired an armorer who was not particularly experienced. And she was monitoring far too many weapons for one person. And somehow, a live round made it into the gun that Alec Baldwin fired, which I don't understand how that happens. You know, we talked about live rounds of ammunition being used on the set of The Twilight Zone. It should never be on the set.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  There is no reason that live ammunition should be on any set, ever, period. Because you just don't know what can happen, especially if you don't have someone who is monitoring the weapons the way that they should be.

• 33:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, this unfortunately seems to have been a set where there was so much chaos. There was such little oversight across the board in terms of just trying to get things done. And they didn't have the money sufficient to accomplish what they wanted to. And so there were a mix of blanks, dummy rounds, and suspected live rounds found. And one of the live rounds had made it into the gun. There's been a lot of speculation. I believe at one point, somebody suggested, could it have been a disgruntled member of the production who put the live round in the gun? That, I believe, has been dismissed. But there seemed to have been either a lack of understanding or a lack of acknowledgement of the safety processes that were supposed to have been in place,

• 34:26Speaker 05

  including the gun was not locked up in the way that it should have been. And there was some sort of communications breakdown between the armorer and the first A.D. It was then handed to Alec Baldwin. I believe, again, following safety regulations. It never should have been pointed at Hutchins and the director, Joel Souza. But the point is, as Lizzie mentioned with The Crow, there are so many inflection points where somebody should have stepped in, done something, said something. And then where it gets really murky, even though films are very hierarchical, who is at fault suddenly becomes very difficult to determine

• 35:08Speaker 05

  in an accident that has been precipitated by so many poor decisions, from the budgeting of the film. Done by the producers and line producer to the handling of the weapon by Hannah Gutierrez Reed to the first A D, Dave Halls, to Alec Baldwin, who's not only an actor on the movie, but also a producer on the movie. And so responsibility becomes extremely difficult, I think, to assign after the fact, which I think I would have to imagine is disturbingly frustrating for the family of Helena Hutchins. And that doesn't even get to the fact that most film productions are set up by way of very Byzantine LLCs, you know, as funneled in ways where getting compensation after the fact for an injury or a death can be very difficult.

• 35:52Lindsay Graham?

  Earlier, we discussed the sea change of the collapse of the studio system, and we could be seeing a very similar collapse in theatrical releases of films with the rise of streaming and even more, the rise of platforms like YouTube with creator-generated content. What do we think are going to be the consequences of entertainment switching to what are functionally amateurs?

• 36:13Speaker 04

  I mean, I think one factor of that is that not all, but certainly some of the content that we see on a platform like YouTube can be very dependent on shock value. How far is X person willing to go to do X, Y, Z? I can think of one very big YouTuber for whom this was recently quite a problem. And you're working with not much time and quite a lot less money. And as we've learned on any set, whether it's YouTube, whether it's a film set, that's going to be a problem. And the second you start putting the art or the content over anybody's safety, you're in trouble and there's going to be a problem.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  And I think that, you know, we are seeing some of that across YouTube. I think we'll probably see more of it. And one area of YouTube and of social media content in general that I do think definitely scares me is the amount of children that are on camera in these videos and whether they're doing something physically unsafe or emotionally unsafe, it can get extremely murky and I don't know what guardrails are in place to protect them.

• 37:25Speaker 05

  It reminds me in a sense of something like Uber, right? Where there has been the question of are they the employer of their drivers or not? And a big issue with Uber has not only been the way they pay their drivers, but also are they liable, for example, for the sexual assaults that are happening in the backs of Ubers, which happen at a disturbing rate? And with something like YouTube, or Facebook, or Instagram, or whatever, these platforms have created a situation where they say, we have no liability. We are simply a platform for other people to publish their own actions for which they are responsible. And as Lizzie said, in an attention-dominated economy, attention is most easily come by, or the perception seems to be,

• 38:09Speaker 05

  through spectacle, risk, putting yourself in harm's way. You know, the number of selfie deaths, for example, is alarming, you know, across the world. There have been YouTube creators who have crashed planes, you know, attempting to create content. Mr. Beast has consistently come under scrutiny for the way in which his productions have treated individuals who have come on his YouTube show, and he's the most popular creator in the world. In my opinion, these tech companies, there needs to be a lever, or some mechanism, to hold them liable in some way as not only things that are harmful to us physically, but things that are harmful to us psychologically, politically as well,

• 38:53Speaker 05

  proliferate through YouTube is obviously the most-watched service in the world. And they're able to simply say, we have no control over this, which I don't believe is true.

• 39:05Lindsay Graham?

  If you had a magic wand, what would you wish for the entertainment industry to become more safe and more caring of its inhabitants?

• 39:13Speaker 05

  As strange as it may seem, I think one of the biggest issues that plagues the entertainment industry, and this does tie a little bit into your comment, Lindsay, about YouTube, is that no one is an actual employee. So many people who work on these productions, you are all contractors who have come together. It's like the circus. Or something, right? You come together for this thing that occurs over a few weeks and then you all leave and you have to get hired on to the next thing. And the problem with that system in my mind is that it creates, there's already a scarcity problem in Hollywood, right? Hollywood, the film and television industry has a higher unemployment rate than many other industries because there's so many people that want to work in it. And they're kind of willing to take bad pay in order to realize a dream of working in this industry.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  And by making everybody a contractor, they are not protected in the same way that many employees are protected under United States labor law. And then they also are dependent on getting hired again every few months. And when you are dependent on getting hired again every few months, I think that it creates a condition where you are extremely hesitant to be the squeaky wheel. I don't want to speak up on this production because I'm going to need to get a new job in six weeks. And if I'm wrong about this, or I am proven wrong about this, I don't want to be viewed as the person who's going to be brought into your production and cause problems. And so the studio system had a lot of problems, but one nice thing I think about it earlier on, potentially, was

• 40:43Speaker 05

  relatively consistent employment for a lot of the folks that worked below the line. Now, there are still a lot of safety issues, but I believe that employment protections as they pertain to safety in a lot of ways, I think are downstream of more general employment protections. And if we can give people the sense that their jobs are secure, they will then feel ownership and the ability to speak up because they will understand I'm not just going to be jumping on the grenade when I bring this up in the next safety meeting.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  I wish that it could be burned into the brains of everyone working on a film set that the needs of the art.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  will never outweigh the needs of the people who are making the art. And there's long been this idea that sacrifice and suffering equals great art. Whether that's something as innocuous as choosing to hurt yourself for the method of the acting, or make the other people around you uncomfortable because you're in character, all the way up to sacrificing the physical safety of people around you in order to get a shot, it's never worth it. And I think that we've seen from some of our greatest directors that you don't have

• 42:08Speaker 04

  to do that in order to make great content and in order to make great art. So that's what I would say. Never put the safety of anyone around you in front of the movie that you're making.

• 42:21Lindsay Graham?

  Chris and Lizzie, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American Scandal.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Thank you for having us.

• 42:26Lindsay Graham?

  Thank you so much for having us. That was my conversation with Chris Winterbauer and Lizzie Bassett-Bowman. Their podcast on the extraordinary difficulty and sometimes danger of making movies, What Went Wrong, is available wherever you get podcasts.

• 42:45Lindsay Graham?

  From Wondery, this is episode five on the tragedy that occurred during the filming of Twilight Zone, the movie for American Scandal. In our next series, in 2023, a deep-sea tourism venture ends in disaster when the Titan Submersible vanishes beneath the North Atlantic. But the disappearance of the Titan wasn't just a tragic accident, it was the culmination of years of reckless decision-making that only confirmed the deadly price of cutting corners in the world's most unforgiving environment.

• 43:16Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.

• 43:50Lindsay Graham?

  American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham, for Airship. Audio editing and sound design by Gabriel Ghul. Music by Throning. Managing producer Emily Burke. Development by Stephanie Jens. Senior producer Andy Beckerman. Executive producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Jenny Lauer-Beckman and Marshall Louie for Wondery.

• 44:19Speaker 11

  Journalist Tristan Redman goes where no son-in-law should ever go. Deep into his wife's family history, digging up the cold case of who murdered her great-grandmother. Because, I should mention, he thinks the murderer might actually be the beloved family patriarch. For the best binge-watch series, like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.