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

The Twilight Zone Helicopter Crash is one of the most infamous accidents in Hollywood history. It claimed the lives of three people – veteran actor Vic Morrow and two child actors – Myca Dinh Le (age 7) and Renee Shin-Yi Chen (age 6). It led to a nine-month involuntary manslaughter trial, and numerous lawsuits and was considered the moment Hollywood finally started to take child labour laws seriously. It’s become a permanent stain on the legacy of director John Landis, and ghoulish footage of the incident is on permanent record, proving how complicated sequences can have deadly outcomes in only a split second. Indeed, in this episode of JoBlo Scandals, we’re digging into the Twilight Zone accident and the man at its heart, director John Landis.

Before the accident, Landis was one of the top directors in Hollywood. Two movements were going on in seventies films that forever changed the medium. One was the “New Hollywood” movement, where directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, William Friedkin and Martin Scorsese challenged the old way of doing things, generating a whole slew of masterpieces. Yet, as the decade went on and the grim New Hollywood movies started 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 yearned to make pure entertainment. There were some directors, such as George Lucas, who straddled the two lines, but of the Brats, the two biggest were Steven Spielberg and John Landis. 

After the accident, Landis’s career initially rebounded quite nicely, with him directing two of his biggest hits ever: the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Trading Places. But, the fallout from the accident eventually hit Landis hard, especially once he went on trial for involuntary manslaughter. In the video embedded above, we dig into what happened on set, and what happened after the accident to all involved.