Accidents happen, despite all precautions and all safety measures painstakingly put in place. Film sets, whether on location or on a film studio, are a whirlpool of moving parts, explosions, car crashes, and wild stunts devised to make the star look heroic on the big screen. CGI looks cool but you can’t beat the real thing, especially when hyping a multi-million-dollar movie and the star casually mentions that they do most of their own stunts. That’s gold when it comes to hyping the movie and getting those bums on seats.
But when an accident does happen, some of them are just so unexpected, so unusual, that if not witnessed or caught on camera, they would not be believed.
1 The Death Of Three In The “Twilight Zone”
July 23 in 1982 saw the death of a famous actor and two child actors in a freak accident on the set of an episode of the Twilight Zone: The Movie. The actor in question was Vic Morrow. He had starred in over 100 films and tv shows in his long career, including shows such as Fantasy Island, Charlie’s Angels, Magnum P.I., Roots, Mission Impossible, to name just a few.
He was 53 when the accident occurred, filming a scene with the two child actors, Renee Shinn Chen and Myca Dinh Le, who were just aged six and seven at the time. The scene was on the last day of shooting, the trio running away from a pursuing helicopter on set. All safety precautions were in place, but human error cannot always be factored into an equation.
For some reason, a planned special effects explosion startled the pilot so badly that he momentarily lost control of the helicopter, accelerated, and killed all three of the fleeing actors.
2 Actor Killed Playing Russian Roulette With A Blank Gun
Boredom can make even the best of us do something incredibly dangerous – without realizing the severity of the consequences. This is what happened to an up-and-coming actor and model, Jon-Erik Hexum, on the set of his show, Cover Up, on October 12, 1984.
This particularly tragic accident happened when a Russian Roulette scene wasn’t exactly what the director was looking for. Delays in filming saw Hexum becoming frustrated and restless, playing with the very real.44 Magnum handgun. It was fully functional but was loaded with paper blanks, for the upcoming scene.
Feeling playful, but still being cautious at the same time, he unloaded all but one of the paper blanks which he considered to be harmless, and spun the barrel. Completely unaware of the explosive energy generated by the gunpowder, he placed the barrel against his forehead, simulating the Russian Roulette scene, and pulled the trigger.
The firing of the wadding was not so powerful as to penetrate his head, but the resulting blow was strong enough to propel a small bone fragment from his skull into his brain. Six days later he was pronounced brain dead.
3 An Unforgettable Parachute Jump
Despite having years of experience under his belt after performing over 800 parachute jumps, Ivan Lester McGuire overlooked a simple step on April 6, 1988, that led to him plummeting 10,500 feet to his death.
He was a seasoned videographer and this particular day he was filming an instructor and a student with a helmet-mounted camera as they prepared for their parachute jump. No one can say for sure what happened, whether he was preoccupied with ensuring the filming was going to be captured perfectly or if he was fatigued, but no one could predict what happened next.
All three leaped from the plane in perfect harmony, the other instructor and student captured squarely in the frame by the experienced McGuire. Filming was proceeding accordingly as they fell towards the earth, and when the other skydivers deployed their chutes, McGuire reached for his ripcord – only to find out that it wasn’t where it should have been.
Captain Ralph Brown of the Franklin County Sheriff’s department stated afterward, “a man who has jumped 800 times out of a plane should remember to put on his parachute.”
4 An Early Train Arrival
On Feb 20, 2014, the low-budget movie Midnight Rider was all set to continue filming on the 110-year-old trestle bridge over the Altamaha River in Wayne County. Many of the 20 strong cast and crew were nervous as well-maintained and stable the bridge was not. Compounding that unease was the fact that the Director, Randall Miller, had decided to film on the rickety bridge just that very day, without any safety checks or local permissions.
A lookout was placed onshore to alert the crew and actors with a 60-second warning to abandon the bridge in the event that a train appeared, believing that was plenty of time to remove the bed placed across the tracks, all the camera equipment, and all the cast and crew in time. It wasn’t.
Traveling at 60mph, the train appeared with virtually no warning and was upon them before they knew it. Panic set in quickly and they scurried off the tracks in desperation, leaving no time to remove anything from the path of the train. Two of the group, Joyce Gilliard, a 42-year-old hairstylist, and Sarah Jones, a 27-year-old camera assistant, both ran for their lives along with everyone else.
Gilliard suffered a horrific injury to her left arm, seven other crew members were injured, but when the smoke had cleared and the train had passed, the mangled body of Sarah Jones was discovered sprawled across the tracks.
The movie was never released.
5 Top Gun Aerial Catastrophe
The name Art Scholl isn’t a famous name that attracts hordes of people flocking to cinemas to watch the latest blockbuster movie. But in the stunt world, he was something of a legend, his exploits as an aerial stuntman and aerial camera operator second to none. It was a fateful day on September 16, 1985, on the set of the iconic movie, Top Gun, however, that his world came crashing down.
53-year-old Art Scholl had been performing in movies doing aerobatic flying feats since the 1960s in such movies as The Great Waldo Pepper, The Right Stuff, and even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, so he had a wealth of experience in front of the camera doing stunts and capturing stunning aerial videography’s.
It was as he was performing an upside-down spin, which he had completed hundreds of times before without incident, that something went wrong. His last words were, “I think I have a problem here,” then his plane plunged into the ocean. The cause of the accident that took his life was never solved as neither the plane nor his body was ever recovered, even though the crash happened just 5 miles from the coast of Encinitas, California.
6 Location, Location, Location
Not all deaths that occur on a film location result in fatalities on the same day.
In 1956, Howard Hughes produced a movie located in Utah called The Conqueror that, including all the actors, artists, stuntmen, directors, and workers behind the scenes, amounted to approximately 220 people. What made the choice of location so controversial was that it was on a former nuclear fallout site.
Although the project was completed in 1956, it wasn’t immediately released by the tortured producer owing to the slew of deaths that followed in the ensuing years. The deaths haunted him relentlessly for years and it was rumored that he watched the finished product repeatedly, compounding the mental problems which began to plague him. It wasn’t until 21 years had passed that the film was eventually released for public viewing.
In total, 91 out of the 220 people that worked on the project died after contracting some form of cancer. The most famous being John Wayne who died of stomach cancer in 1979, 23 years after the film was shot.
7 An Unforeseen Costume Disaster
Martha Mansfield was just 24 years old when a freak accident on the set of The Warrens of Virginia on November 29, 1923, was to end her life in a horrific fashion.
The big-budget movie was set in the Civil War and no expense was spared to recreate an authentic backdrop, with the actors regaled in full period costumes, the location staged accurately, and all the weapons chosen meticulously to depict the armory of that era.
It was just after Mansfield had completed filming her scene, was taking a break in a car away from the action, that the bizarre accident happened. According to reports, it was a passing smoker’s match casually tossed through the open window that fell on her dress. The highly flammable costume dress immediately burst into a raging fireball, engulfing her from head to toe.
Valiant efforts were made to put out the inferno, to save her, but the next day she passed away from her injuries in hospital. The smoker was never identified.
8 Death of the Phoenix
Paul Mantz loved to fly but it was that passion that would lead to his untimely death on the set of Flight of the Phoenix on July 8, 1956, at the age of 61.
On the day of the accident, he executed the stunt the director wanted impeccably on the very first pass with the help of his co-pilot, Bobby Rose, touching down briefly to simulate the iconic takeoff for the movie in the Sahara Desert. The co-pilot was necessary due to the plane’s composition and irregular handling, cobbled as it was together from other plane parts to recreate the look of the Tallmantz Phoenix P-1 that the actors were repairing themselves in the movie to take to the skies.
The second unit director requested another pass, to get further shots from different angles, but this time the actual frailty of the patched-together plane was exposed as, skimming the surface at 90mph, the underbelly grazed the top of a sand dune. That slight impact broke the back of the P-I like a twig, flipping the fragile plane head over tail twice, sand and parts scattering everywhere, all caught on camera.
Amazingly, even with life-threatening injuries, the co-pilot, Bobby Rose, survived. Art Mantz, a veteran of over 250 films, died on impact.
9 A Freak Accident
The waterfront location was being taken down for the mega movie, Jumper, on January 25, 2007, and David Richie, along with several other experienced set dressers, were dismantling the exterior set for transport to another location in California.
The huge walls, made of heavy timber, were 30 feet high, covered in earth, grass, and sand, had to be cleaned by an excavator to clear away the heavy dirt around the base of the structure before being loaded for transport. Once it couldn’t clear away any further debris, Richie and his co-workers, moved in to dislodge the pieces that the excavator couldn’t reach.
What killed him that day wasn’t the structure itself coming apart. Chunks of frozen earth and sand stuck to the surface came loose and rained down on them with the full devastating force of solid concrete.
One worker miraculously escaped unscathed, one required hospitalization with serious injuries, while David Richie, at the age of 56, was killed instantly in what was described as a freak accident.
10 A Blogging Gone Wrong
Now, not technically on a film set, blogging and vlogging have made many people as famous as actors on tv or in movies recently, many of them gathering thousands of followers on Instagram and Facebook.
Rebecca Burger, 33, was a lifestyle blogger and model in France who was in the fashion, food, style, and fitness niche. The day of her death was June 22, 2017, was like any other, spent at her home honing her chosen craft.
What happened and how she died was a one-in-a-million freak accident, when a can of high-pressure whipped cream she was using exploded catastrophically when the top burst off. The one-in-a-million blow from the flying can to her thorax sent her tragically into cardiac arrest and led to her demise.
There have been similar accidents with this type of dispenser, but the only fatality has been that of Rebecca Burger, a rising star who had her whole life ahead of her, in front of and behind the cameras, that was cut short by a simple dispenser of whipped cream.