Why an A-list director was blamed for horrific decapitation of star actor and deaths of two children on Twilight Zone: The Movie set

The devastating accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie saw a star actor and two children die horrifically in a fiery helicopter crash.

Years of litigation followed, threatening to upend the career of one of Hollywood’s greatest directors as he faced accusations of recklessness and neglect. 

The tragedy occurred on July 23, 1982, at a popular film ranch in Valencia, Los Angeles, that had been repurposed into a wartime Vietnamese village. 

Calling the shots was 31-year-old John Landis, the moviemaking mind behind Animal House and An American Werewolf in London.

Acting out the scene was 53-year-old Vic Morrow, a seasoned veteran, and film first-timers My-Ca Dinh Le, 7, and Renee Chen, 6.

Landis, fresh off his success with the Blues Brothers, stood as cameras rolled. Seconds later, two of the cast ended up decapitated, and a third crushed to death.

‘I’ll keep you safe, kids,’ Morrow was supposed to say during the scene, while he waded through knee-deep waters with a child in each arm.

The make-believe village behind them then began to erupt into flames, as a special effects man sent gasoline-and-sawdust-powered mortars skyward.

About 24 feet overhead was a fully operational combat-style Huey UH-1B helicopter, which weighed more than three tons.

As the special effects man fired, Morrow stumbled along – unaware that the pyrotechnician was not looking up when he shot one of the fireballs.

It went on to engulf the helicopter’s tail rotor before sending it into a death-spin – causing it to plummet to the ground.

Immediately, the machine crushed and killed Renee, with the main rotor blade decapitating Morrow and My-Ca.

A wall of water shot up to shield the scene from the camera’s view, but those on set, including Landis, stood shell-shocked as they took in the heap of twisted metal before them. 

The children who had just died not only had never acted before, but were not even supposed to be on the set in the first place.

At 2.30am, filmmakers were violating labor laws simply by having the kids there and their parents were only receiving a few hundred dollars for their work.  

Miraculously the helicopter pilot survived the crash and law enforcement made it to the scene just before dawn.

 LA County Sheriff’s Sgt. Thomas Budds came to the conclusion that criminal recklessness had played a part in the deaths – before painting a picture of a brash, bigshot director who thought little of risk and whose staff were scared to second-guess him.

After examining the bodies and administering hundreds of interviews with camera operators, assistants, makeup artists and hairstylists over the course of several months, he went to the district attorney’s office to recommend charges.

The decision came as the sole detective in the case said the smell of gasoline would forever haunt his memory, along with the sight of the children’s savaged, small bodies.

However, it was an account from cameraman Steve Lydecker that proved to be the deciding factor in his call to pursue a case – one that insisted Landis ignored a warning about the dangers of the special effects in the particular scene. 

‘We may lose the helicopter,’ the cameraman recalled Landis joking at one point – in the buildup to the crash.

Other signs of neglect from the director included allowing the two kids to be placed in a hut alone the night before the botched sequence – just feet away from several drums of gasoline.

‘All you needed was a spark, and those kids would have been killed,’ Budds wrote in his report – reportedly two binders-big.

A few hours later, a fireball singed the face of a production manager riding in the helicopter, Budd further noted.

‘The explosions were too big. They were put on notice at that point,’ he said.

‘If the 11:30 event hadn’t happened, I would never have pursued the case.’

He added: ‘It’s like they had a swimming pool and someone almost drowned. You’d think they’d put a fence up.’

His request to seek justice for the kids and Morrow was eventually heeded – with Landis becoming the first Hollywood director to face criminal charges for a death on set four years later.

Within that span, Landis remained a sought-after artist, directing Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in ‘Trading Places’, and Michael Jackson in his iconic ‘Thriller’ video. 

‘Twilight Zone: The Movie’, meanwhile, came out, to underwhelming reviews and with the helicopter scene omitted.

When Landis eventually took his seat in a court in downtown LA, he was facing six years in prison and charges of involuntary manslaughter. 

But despite the lead prosecutor bragging that he had never lost a case, Landis and four of his staffers were all later acquitted – with the director going on to work on Eddie Murphy in Coming To America later that same year. 

The man who fired the fireball shot granted immunity for testifying he had not looked up.

During proceedings, jurors were taken to the crash site, and a theater where they were shown footage of the crash from six different angles. 

One of the clips was repeatedly shown on TV, with a jet of water fortunately blocking the fatal moment from the camera’s field of view.

Co-defendant Dorcey Wingo, who piloted the helicopter, stunned onlookers with his testimony, which appeared to suggest that Morrow – who played a cantankerous coach in ‘The Bad News Bears’ – was somewhat to blame.

He pointed to the fact that five seconds had elapsed between the helicopter’s loss of control and the tragedy – during which Morrow, still clutching two children, failed to get out of the way.

‘It distresses me to the max that he never looked up,’ Wingo said at the stand at one point – an assertion prosecutor Lea D’Agostino proceeded to pan as ‘blaming the dead man.’

This came in stark contrast to testimony from the late children’s parents – one of whom had been present for the crash.

My-Ca Le’s father, Daniel Le, claimed he heard someone ordering the helicopter to descend as the special effects went off.

‘Lower, lower,’ he testified the person had said.

He also told the court that the magnitude of the on-set explosions were so pronounced that he dropped to the ground – citing reawakened trauma he experienced as a child in Vietnam.

D’Agostino, nicknamed the Dragon Lady due to her toughness, asked the other parent who was not on set at the time: ‘Did… Mr. Landis or anyone else on that motion picture tell you that your daughter Renee was going to be filmed with explosives in close proximity to her?’   

‘No,’ answered Mark Chen, almost five years after losing his only child.

‘Did… Mr. Landis… or anyone else on that set, Mr. Chen, tell you that your daughter Renee was going to be filmed with a helicopter approximately 24 feet over her head?’ D’Agostino asked.

‘No,’ the dad replied – making the heartbreaking admission he personally had agreed to let his daughter do the picture so ‘she would have a lot of memories’ when she grew up.

Both parents said they had been misled about the dangers the kids may have faced. 

D’Agostino, meanwhile, tried to hit this point home by billing Landis as ‘tyrannical dictator’ – one who who ignored common sense and regulations intended to ensure his staff’s safety in a quest for realism.

This, she said, all came in service of ‘a lousy motion picture’ – an apparent jab at the film’s failure to live up to expectations.

The original Rod Serling creation had captivated audiences just a couple of decades earlier, and the film featuring installments from not only Landis, but George Miller, Joe Dante, and Steven Spielberg, was a pale comparison, critics largely agreed.

Spielberg and Landis in particular had been big fans of the trailblazing program as kids, and were reportedly enraptured with the concept of taking a stab at it themselves.

Spielberg – who directed the segment spinning off the famed episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet featuring a young William Shatner – reportedly sought out Landis specifically to head this part.

But by the time of the trial, the eventual ET director broke off the pair’s longtime friendship – telling reporters later that the crash ‘made [him] grow a little’, while leaving everyone who had worked on the film ‘sick to the center of [their] souls.’

‘No movie is worth dying for,’ he went on to add.

‘I think people are standing up much more now than ever before to producers and directors who ask too much. 

‘If something isn’t safe, it’s the right and responsibility of every actor or crew member to yell “Cut!”‘ 

Landis, meanwhile, took the stand in his own defense, during which he admitted he ignored rules regarding children due to a hesitance to use dummies instead.

‘We decided to break the law,’ he said, calling the decision ‘a technical violation.’

‘We decided wrongly to violate the labor code,’ he continued, while refuting previous testimony that alleged he joked about losing the chopper. 

He also denied the idea that the children’s parents were never briefed about the nature of the scene, claiming he told them personally what it entailed.

Moreover, he denied being warned that filming such a scene would be dangerous, and said he had no recollection whatsoever of ordering the helicopter to go lower.

At the time, the director – who would never have a hit again after the 80s – appeared increasingly emotional, even tearing up at points. 

‘Would you like some Kleenex, sir?’ D’Agostino sniped sarcastically – before slamming the display to reporters as a calculated performance worthy of an Academy Award. 

‘The whole world is lying, according to John Landis, except John Landis,’ she said at the time. 

‘I find that somewhat incredible, and I’m assuming that the jurors will, too.’

Joined in court by Sgt. Budds, D’Agostino appeared confident the case would be closed quickly, and that she would be able to hold her own against a star studded, seven man cast of defense attorneys. 

Among them was James Neal, who successfully prosecuted the Watergate case and mobbed up union boss Jimmy Hoffa, 

He insisted to jurors the incident was merely a freak accident, deflecting blame to the effects man, James Camomile, who had been given immunity for his testimony. 

He framed the crash ‘unforeseen’ and ‘unforeseeable,’ while insisting the explosives were simply let off at the wrong time. 

‘Not one of these gentlemen intended to hurt anyone,’ the burly jurist said.

‘Not one of these gentlemen thought the scene as planned and rehearsed was dangerous. Not one of these gentlemen is guilty of criminal negligence.’

To make his case, he further claimed that if the helicopter crashed just a few feet away, it would have been Landis who had died that night.

Some later claimed Landis’s A-list status and celebs like Aykroyd occasionally visiting the courtroom star-struck jurors.

And at the end of the 10-month trial, all five defendants were acquitted on May 29, 1987. 

After nine days of deliberations, the jury forewoman read the sensational verdict,  echoing the defense’s main argument in the process. 

‘You don’t prosecute people for unforeseeable accidents.’  

A year later, those same jurors received invitations to a special preview screening of Landis’s Coming to America, with their families welcome as well.   

Even Harland Braun, an acerbic attorney who represented one of the other defendants, found this unethical, telling reporters after the fact: ‘I wonder if he invited the parents of the children, because they were part of the case, too.’

As for D’Agostino, she was sorely mistaken about the jurors – who were seen embracing Landis and his wife after reading their verdict. 

She said the jury had been unfairly influenced by Landis’s starpower – a belief still belief held by Budds today, as a 78-year-old retiree.

‘They just identified with the whole Hollywood scene, and I think they missed the whole point about the responsibility to protect children,’ Budds told the LA Times.

‘It’s one thing if Vic Morrow chose to be under the helicopter, but to put little kids in that situation, it’s just unconscionable.’

He added that he thought the way jurors hugged the Landises following the verdict was unseemly. 

Landis, meanwhile, has framed the case as a hit job, calling D’Agostino ‘grotesque’ and her case ‘completely dishonest.’

‘I feel that accident very strongly,’ he insisted in a recent interview.

However, after the case, the Directors Guild of America reprimanded Landis and tightened safety procedures.

In the years since, on-set deaths have become much more rare – thanks also in part to advances in computer-generated imagery, making real explosions like the one in this instance unnecessary. 

Between 1990 and 2016, there were 43 fatalities on sets in the US – compared to 37 deaths the decade prior.

Twenty-four of these involved the use of helicopters – a statistic that includes Dinh Le, Chen, and Morrow.

Many of those killed were behind-the-scenes crew members, an AP investigation found – including the recent death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the Alec Baldwin  ‘Rust’ in 2021.

In April, armorer Hannah Gutierrez was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting.

She has appealed her conviction, after unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the film’s set.

Actor Alec Baldwin is set to go on trial for manslaughter this summer. He has pleaded not guilty and faces up to 18 months in prison if convicted.