Introduction
The Twilight Zone premiered on television in 1956 and aired for five seasons. Rod Serling directed, often wrote and always introduced each segment. The introductions by the slim, dark-haired Serling were at once somber and teasing. The episodes were often surprising, ranging from light-hearted whimsy like “Kick the Can,” a program about the elderly finding childhood again, to dark parables about the mob mentality like “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.”
The Twilight Zone showcased many actors who would later become household names like William Shatner, Robert Redford and Dennis Hopper. It produced works by writers who would become well known, like Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont.
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Filmed in black and white, the show was inexpensively made and had little in the way of special effects. The audience got chills and thrills from the imaginative writing, the tight direction and the way it played with the most common fears. As Matheson once wrote, “The story was all in the Twilight Zone.”
The series became a cult classic.
In 1981 director Steven Spielberg, who had achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success with films like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark, wanted to make a film inspired by the TV series. He enlisted the help of his friend, director John Landis. Although not highly regarded by critics, Landis had demonstrated an ability to make money with comedies like Kentucky Fried Movie, The Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf in London.
Landis and Spielberg agreed that they would be co-producers and equal partners in making the movie.
Spielberg wanted an anthology of four stories, each of them approximately the same length as an episode of a TV Twilight Zone
Three stories were based on episodes of the original series, and one was written by John Landis. “[Serling] used the fantasy element of his program to deal with social issues. . . . the story I made up, trying to use the magic, the idea of The Twilight Zone was about racism,” Landis said.
Landis wrote a screenplay about an embittered white man named Bill Connor. Connor is first seen railing vulgarly in a bar against Jews, blacks and Asians. The bigot leaves the bar and steps into a series of scenes: Nazi-occupied France where SS troops chase him, mistaking him for a Jew. He flees from the Nazis only to find himself in the Jim Crow American South where Ku Klux Klansmen see him as black and try to lynch him. He escapes from them and is in Vietnam, attacked by American GIs who think he is the enemy.
Although Landis wanted to make a moral point with this film, the story had an ethical problem at its heart. The ordeal endured by Connor seems to equate courageous American GIs in Vietnam trying to protect the South Vietnamese from Communist invaders from the North, with such groups as the Nazis and the Klan.
To star as the repulsive Connor, Landis hired Vic Morrow, a middle-aged actor best known for playing tough guys, usually villains.
When Landis submitted this script to Warner Brothers executives for their approval, two raised objections. Lucy Fisher, vice-president in charge of production, and Terry Semel, president of the studio, thought that the central character was so negative that audiences would not be able to care about him.
After a meeting with Fisher and Semel, Landis hit upon the idea of having Bill redeemed from his bigotry. Running away from the American soldiers firing at him and an attack from a U. S. helicopter in Vietnam, he would come upon two Vietnamese orphans. Moved by their plight, the man would rescue them from an air attack, bravely carrying them across ariver to save their lives. At the end, as an entire village is dramatically blown up in the background, the former racist would reassure the youngsters, “I’ll keep you safe, kids! I swear to God!”
These script changes were approved.
However, Landis ran into an obstacle in the form of California’s child labor laws. Twilight Zone casting agents Michael Fenton and Marci Liroff of Fenton-Feinberg Casting told Landis and associate producer George Folsey Jr. that those regulations forbade children to work an hour past curfew and that a teacher-welfare worker had to be present when kids worked. Liroff remembered herself telling the director that the scene struck her as “kind of dangerous.” Fenton told Landis that, since the children were not going to have speaking parts, they were extras and could not be hired through Fenton-Feinberg Casting. Ron LaBrecque wrote in Special Effects that Liroff claimed, “Fenton’s response was a diplomatic way to avoid involvement in a questionable venture.”
Employers could get waivers to work kids later than that but Landis did not seek one. The exact reason for this failure later became a matter of intense dispute. Either he thought he would not get the waiver because the hour was too late or he knew he could not get approval to have kids around a helicopter and explosives.
The director decided to break the law. He would employ the kids illegally and pay them out of petty cash to avoid putting their names on payroll.
Out of the Twilight Zone
Movie people commonly refer to two categories of workers: “above the line” and “below the line.” The first group consists of actors, producers and directors. The second, larger group includes camera operators, stunt personnel, makeup artists and technicians of all sorts. In The Twilight Zone, unit production manager Dan Allingham oversaw most of the below the line hiring. Allingham was also first assistant director.
The second assistant director, Anderson House, had reservations about working children after hours and around a helicopter and special-effects explosives. He shared those concerns with Allingham. House wanted to know if Landis planned to film the kids during the daytime and artificially simulate night, then insert those shots into ones actually made at night. Allingham told him no. Later House asked if Allingham knew if Landis had considered using dummies or dwarf stunt people instead of children. Allingham replied that Landis had rejected those ideas because he thought they would look phony. House pursued the issue and Allingham told him there was no point in discussing it further.
Allingham recommended that Paul Stewart be put in charge of the special-effects explosives. He had a fine reputation in the field and had previously worked with Vic Morrow on Combat!
In early July 1982, Landis asked George Folsey to locate two young Asian children for the roles. Folsey agreed to do so despite misgivings. Production assistant Cynthia Nigh recalled Folsey coming out of a meeting with Landis and production manager Dan Allingham. The trio discussed the illegal hiring of kids and, according to Nigh, Folsey joked, “We’ll probably all be thrown in jail for this!”
(AP/Wide World)
Folsey phoned Dr. Harold Schuman, husband of Folsey’s production secretary Donna Schuman. Folsey knew that Dr. Schuman had often worked with Asian people and asked for his help. Dr. Schuman called a former associate of his, Dr. Peter Chen, and explained that he had friends who were trying to cast a couple of Asian children in a movie. Dr. Chen phoned his brother, Mark, who had a 6-year-old daughter named Renee. Mark discussed the idea with his wife, Shyan-Huei and little Renee. Shyan-Huei thought being in a movie “would be a very fine experience” for Renee who “would have a lot of memories of what she had done” when she grew up. The prospect of acting thrilled the girl.
Dr. Chen then approached Dr. Daniel Le and his wife Kim-Hoa, parents of a 7-year-old boy named My-ca (Farber and Green spell it sans hyphen). Little My-ca was an outgoing child who loved getting his picture taken. When told that he could be in a movie, the lad jumped up and down, shouting, “I like it! I like it!”
The youngsters were introduced to John Landis who thought the cute children were perfect for the parts.
On the night of July 22, 1982, Renee and My-ca were on location at Indian Dunes Park. According to “Death in the Twilight Zone,” a Rolling Stone article on the case, “The park is actually a private property . . . enclosed by steep, chaparral-covered cliffs. At the base of one of those cliffs, on the south shore of the Santa Clara River — a shallow, slow-moving stream that irrigates orange and avocado groves a few miles to the west — a ‘Vietnamese Village’ had been assembled out of bamboo poles, palm thatch and cardboard.”
There were several delays in shooting.
At one point, the pilot of the helicopter, Dorcey Wingo, talked about the scene with Vic Morrow. The actor was planning to toss a stick at the helicopter as he escaped across the river and wondered if that would be a problem. Wingo worried that an object contacting the rotor could be dangerous. Perhaps it would not do any harm, he suggested, if Morrow threw a lightweight piece of balsa.
It was after 2:00 a.m. when the children’s scene was about to start. Both of Chen’s parents were there as was Kim-Hoa Le, My-ca’s mother. Landis wanted to add some more realism to the youngsters’ appearance so he smeared a little mud on their faces and tore holes in their clothing.
To set the children at ease, Morrow made funny faces. Both youngsters giggled uncontrollably. They could not stop when the camera started rolling and Landis had to repeatedly halt the scene and tell the kids to quit laughing. He got the scene he wanted at 3:30 a.m. Their parents were given envelopes with $500 in cash inside and told the children would be needed again the next night.
The kids showed up late July 23, 1982. Renee accompanied by her mother and My-ca by his father. It was the night they were going to film the climactic scene of Bill carrying two children across the river away from the attacking helicopter ending with his vowing, “I’ll keep you safe, kids! I swear to God!” as the village exploded in the background.
At 9:30 p.m., Landis needed a shot before that one. Renee and My-ca were in a hut, and Morrow was to pick them up and carry them to the shore. Landis was directing the scene from several feet out in the water. A water bomb exploded and Renee started crying because dust got into her eyes.
Concerned, Shyan-Huei Chen asked George Folsey, “Is it dangerous?”
“No, not dangerous,” he assured her, “just a loud noise.”
The director comforted Renee. Then the two children, with their parents, went back to a motor home to rest up for the final scene.
That scene’s first shot, of the helicopter heading toward the mock village, was filmed at 11:30 p.m. Pilot Wingo sat in the cockpit with Dan Allingham, who was focusing a spotlight on the scene underneath.
Vic Morrow stood in the river. Technicians fired guns, cueing special-effects experts to detonate bombs. Flames flew toward the chopper. A water ball splattered the windshield and Wingo could not see out of it. He put his head out of the window and swore because the heat burned him.
A fire-safety officer named Richard Ebentheuer told his superior, George Hull, he was concerned that the helicopter might crash because of the size of the blasts. Hull told his underling to take his fears to the filmmakers.
Ebentheuer let out an expletive and said, “The helicopter will be on the ground!”
Later, Ebentheuer was asked in court why he did not take Hull’s advice and report his fears directly to the moviemakers. He testified, “That’s not the way the chain of command works in the fire department.” Thus, neither Hull nor Ebentheuer took the latter’s criticisms up with the filmmakers.
When the helicopter landed, Wingo told Allingham to let Landis know that the explosions should not be so close to his aircraft. “You’re right,” Allingham agreed, saying, “Safety first.” Camera operator Roger Smith said he would not film it unless someone made sure the explosives did not get so close to the helicopter. Allingham assured him too that he would take it up with Landis. Allingham later told Smith not to worry because he had spoken to the director and Landis said that in the next scene they “would be flying over the water filming Vic and the two kids.”
Assistant camera operator Randy Robinson and Wingo were discussing the intense heat of the fireball and, according to Outrageous Conduct, a smiling Landis told them, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”
My-ca and Renee were found sleeping in the trailer. George Folsey and an assistant woke them up and asked if the kids wanted a bite to eat.
Later, both parents would claim that Folsey warned them against letting firefighters on the set know that the children were employed. “If the firemen approach you,” he supposedly said, “please tell them that you are not working for us. Say you are my friend, you are here to help me. Don’t tell them anything about the money or the children working.” Since Chen’s English was poor, Folsey allegedly asked Dr. Le to repeat the message to her. He did but in English because he was Vietnamese, she was Chinese, and he did not speak her native tongue.
As Chen and Dr. Le stood with other spectators watching the helicopter approach the faux village, anxiety seized Chen. “Is it dangerous?” she asked Dr. Le.
“George told me it would be scary,” he replied, “but he said not to worry.”
At 2:20 a.m., John Landis ordered the filming to start.
Vic Morrow went into the knee-deep water, holding a child under each arm.
The director shouted through his bullhorn at the helicopter, “Lower! Lower! Lower!” An assistant repeated the order to the pilot through a walkie-talkie.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” Landis commanded. Machine gunners Gary McLarty and Kenny Endoso fired as the aircraft descended. A special effects technician set off simulations of shots hitting the water.
James Camomile, a burly, soft-spoken technician, was in charge of setting off bombs in the back of the village. He worked with a firing board on which he ran a nail across to detonate explosions. Camomile had a welder’s hood on his head to keep dust out of his eyes. Another technician, Jerry Williams, set off blasts at another side of the village. Two camera operators ran up a slope to get away from the pain of the heat.
The blasts terrified Daniel Le who, according to “Death in the Twilight Zone,” was reminded of what he had witnessed in the actual war in Vietnam. “All the memory of the war came to my mind,” he claimed. “I was so horrified. I was screaming. The second blast, I fell down on the ground . . . I cried, ‘God!’ . . . I was so fearful, and I knew danger. It was not something made up, but real danger.”
Wingo felt his craft was in trouble and had difficulty guiding it through the fireballs. Sitting beside him in the cockpit, Allingham was alarmed and told the pilot to get out of there.
On the ground, Camomile did not know of the helicopter’s troubles. He detonated two charges close together and those bombs, in some way, harmed the aircraft.
The helicopter went out of control.
(AP/Wide World)
In the water, Morrow dropped Renee Chen. He grabbed at her but the helicopter’s right skid slammed into the child, killing her. Then its whirling main rotor ripped off the middle-aged actor’s head and the head, a shoulder, and an arm of 7-year old My-ca.
“That’s a wrap!” John Landis shouted through the loudspeaker and the standard, banal words signaling the end of filming day sounded sickeningly incongruous. “Leave your equipment where it is. Everyone go home. Please, everyone go home.”
The mother of Renee Chen and the father of My-ca Le were screaming. Taken to a local hospital, they were treated for shock, then driven home.
Some cast and crew believed telling everyone to immediately go home was misguided. Script supervisor Katherine Wooten commented, according to Farber and Green, “It might have been better if we had stayed together for awhile to console each other.”
George Folsey Jr. and John Landis wanted to deliver eulogies at Vic Morrow’s funeral. A close friend of the actor, Steve Shagan, reacted skeptically when the two said they wanted to speak about Morrow.
Folsey privately read his intended remarks to Shagan who exploded in outrage, “Why don’t you just run the trailer?” he asked sarcastically. “Let’s set up a screen right here. We can even sell tickets. . . . You’re not going to read that thing. . . . there has to be a time and place where somebody isn’t selling tickets!”
Both Folsey and Landis did read remarks at Morrow’s funeral. “If there is any consolation in this,” Folsey told the assembled mourners, “it is that the film was finished. Thank God. This performance must not be lost. It was Vic’s last gift to us.”
Landis’ eulogy sounded equally self-serving and clumsily ironic. “Tragedy can strike in an instant,” an obviously distraught Landis said, “but film is immortal. Vic lives forever. Just before the last take, Vic took me aside to thank me for the opportunity to play this role.”
grieve (CORBIS)
At Renee Chen’s funeral, a gray-faced John Landis, being held up by his wife and a friend, showed up to pay his respects. The child’s relatives fixed cold, accusing stares at the director except for Renee’s mother, who was sobbing.
Landis also went to My-ca Le’s funeral. The boys’ choir, to which My-ca had belonged, sang his favorite hymn, “Jesus Loves All The Children of the World.”
There is no question that the accident traumatized the director. For several weeks after it, he was heavily medicated. At one point, he called a confidant and wondered if he would ever be able to ask anyone to take even the simplest direction.
However, Landis’ personality is resilient and at least some in Hollywood were forgiving. He was soon back in the director’s chair and giving direction in his old, demanding style. In the four years between the accident and the trial, Landis would take on several projects, including Michael Jackson’s video Thriller. He would also direct Into the Night, in which he acted the part of a brutal, although comically clumsy, murderer. That Hollywood would continue to hire Landis should not shock. He could make money. Additionally, some believed that having been once so badly burned, he would become especially careful.
The grieving families filed lawsuits. According to Outrageous Conduct, “Mark and Shyan-Huei Chen filed suit August 3, 1982, asking for $200 million in damages and naming Landis, Spielberg, George Folsey, Jr., Paul Stewart, Dorcey Wingo, Frank Marshall, Warner Bros., Western Helicopters, the owners of Indian Dunes park, and a host of other defendants.” My-ca Le’s family filed their suit over a year later.
Replying to Chen’s lawsuit, the law firm hired by Warner Bros. made an argument that was startlingly callous in describing a 6-year-old. They contended that “the risk, if any risk there was, was knowingly assumed by the decedent, Renee Shin-Yi Chen.”
(AP)
Vic Morrow’s daughters, Carrie Morrow and actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, filed suit against Warner Bros., Landis, Spielberg, and others in late 1982. They settled about a year later. The terms of the settlement have never been made public.
The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office needed to determine if there was criminal liability for the accident. District attorney John Van De Kamp assigned prosecutor Gary Kesselman to the case. Sergeant Thomas Budds, who headed the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s probe into the incident, assisted Kesselman in his investigation.
Kesselman soon uncovered much troubling and confusing information. When he interviewed Donna and Dr. Schuman, they told him that they had no idea that the children they helped recruit would be near either explosives or a low-flying helicopter. Cynthia Nigh told him that Landis as well as Folsey and Allingham knew they were breaking the law when they hired the youngsters and she told him of Folsey’s nervous joke that they would “probably all go to jail” for it.
To obtain information he needed, Kesselman granted several of those people involved immunity from prosecution. Second assistant director Anderson House, James Camomile (who had set off the explosives that downed the helicopter), and all the special effects crew that served under Paul Stewart, but not Stewart himself, got immunity.
House told Kesselman that the children had been deliberately hidden from Jack Tice, a fire-safety officer who was sometimes a teacher-welfare worker and would surely have reported the illegal hiring. House also said he had warned Dan Allingham about risks to the children.
At the grand jury hearings, Paul Stewart and Dorcey Wingo refused to answer questions, citing the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Folsey testified and said that “in retrospect” he would have wanted “to shoot the helicopter at one time and the actor and the children at a separate time.”
John Landis testified and blamed underlings for the tragedy. He said he had assumed Stewart and Wingo had worked out the coordination of their jobs. He did not make certain of it “because I assume if these men are experts, licensed by the government to do their jobs, they’ve done their jobs.”
Kesselman pressed on as to why he did not make sure they talked. “Because when you get into a taxi,” Landis replied, “you assume the driver is not going to drive you off a bridge. It’s just assumptions. The guy is a licensed taxi driver. These are experts.”
Later the prosecutor began, “The final authority in terms of camera, actor positions, helicopter, or whatever on that set — “
“Is not mine!” Landis broke in, “because if I ask an actor — I said, ‘Would you please take your hand and stick it in this garbage disposal,’ the actor is going to say, ‘Of course not.’”
On June 15, 1983, the grand jury brought back its indictments. Landis, Folsey and Allingham were each charged with two counts of manslaughter in the deaths of Renee Chen and My-ca Le. The charges were based, as Farber and Green wrote, “on the legal theory that if death occurs as a result of the commission of an ‘inherently dangerous’ unlawful act, that constitutes manslaughter.” The illegal hiring of the children was the “unlawful act.”
Effects Coordinator
Landis, Stewart and Wingo were indicted on three counts of manslaughter because of “aggravated, reckless, grossly negligent” acts resulting in the deaths of Morrow and the children.
Early on, Kesselman made a decision that would haunt the prosecution. He decided not to seek an indictment against Landis, Folsey and Allingham for the illegal hiring of the children itself or the crime of hiring them to work past curfew, crimes of which they were indisputably guilty. Kesselman thought making these minor charges would give a jury an easy, comfortable way of avoiding convicting these men of much more serious charges. Farber and Green quote him, explaining that decision. “Both of [the hiring crimes] while denominated misdemeanors,” Kesselman said, “in fact are infractions. My recollection is that both of them carry a maximum sentence of ten days in the county jail. No one in their right mind would have gone through the investigation we did, the grand jury proceeding, a preliminary hearing that was really a trial, and the trial itself merely to get convictions on infractions.”
Twilight Zone — The Movie opened in theaters on June 24, 1983. Most reviews were dismal. The freshness of vision that had made the TV series so memorable was absent from the movie, and special effects could not compensate. Landis’ segment was especially panned for its ham-handed moralizing. Time critic Richard Corliss said, “the story hardly looks worth shooting, let alone dying for.” The movie showed nothing of Renee Chen and My-ca Le. In fact, Landis’ segment appeared about as he had written it before the decision to “soften” Morrow’s character. The bigot just gets a magical comeuppance.
The lawyers for all five Twilight Zone defendants requested that the charges against their clients be dismissed in a January 1984 hearing before the Los Angeles Municipal Court’s Judge Brian Crahan.
Tall, flamboyant, combative Harland Braun was Landis’ attorney and head of the defense team. Roger Rosen represented George Folsey and Leonard Levine was Allingham’s lawyer. Former prosecutor Arnold Klein represented Paul Stewart. Eugene Trope, hired by Wingo’s employer, Western Helicopter, was the attorney for the pilot.
As noted in Outrageous Conduct, “From the start of the preliminary hearing, there was a clear division between the above-the-line defendants — Landis, Folsey, and Allingham — and the two below-the-line workers, Stewart and Wingo. The latter two even sat apart from the other three at a side table. Landis had continually argued that blame for the accident belonged to the ‘experts’ who had failed him. At the preliminary hearing, the ‘experts’ began to fight back. Trope said stingingly, ‘The responsible party here is the director-producer, and I think Landis is trying to shift the blame off to anyone and everyone he can.’”
Braun called Landis “an artist” and praised his Twilight Zone segment as “a cinematographic statement against racism and bigotry.” He also gave a strangely cynical reason for the casting of the children. “Children are classically used in films other than as principals,” he opined, “in order to evoke emotion in an audience because adults generally don’t like one another but everyone likes children.”
with relative (CORBIS)
Kesselman called Shyan-Huei Chen to the stand. Renee’s mother spoke through an interpreter. She cried as she talked about watching her daughter die.
In the corridor after this heartbreaking testimony, Landis told a reporter, “This is a terrible, terrible accident and it will cause pain and anguish to all of us for the rest of our lives. I can think of nothing worse than losing a child. The idea that this could be anything other than an unforeseeable accident is not only wrong, it’s bewildering.”
The prosecutor called casting director Marci Liroff to the stand and she testified that she had told Landis that hiring the children was illegal and the scene he spoke of shooting “sounded kind of dangerous.” She claimed that Landis, Folsey and Allingham said they were going to hire the kids illegally.
Farber and Green wrote that, “Braun tried to make an issue of the cause of the crash.” Prosecution witnesses said debris from an explosion had caused it. Braun called experts who thought “heat delamination” had pared off the rotor blade’s protective skin and downed the chopper. Metallurgist Gary Fowler testified that the heat from the fireball had been about 180 degrees, a lower temperature than was known to cause heat delamination. Braun argued that the defendants could not have foreseen the danger since the problem was unprecedented.
Kesselman contended that the exact reason for the crash was immaterial because the helicopter was brought recklessly close to explosions.
Judge Crahan announced his decision on April 23, 1984. He dismissed the manslaughter charges against Folsey and Allingham because “there is no hard evidence in this case to reach the inferential conclusion of homicide by mere [illegal] hiring.” He upheld the charges against Landis, Stewart and Wingo. The judge said that Landis “appears to have gone beyond the realm of simple mechanical direction, but in fact set up, among other things, the combination of circumstances which, in the final seconds of filming, caused death and destruction.” He described Stewart as the “ultimate arbiter of the special effects” and said Wingo “knowingly hovered his helicopter at such close alignment to the explosions as to create a known risk of harm to anyone within the danger zone of the crash.”
The prosecutor appealed the decision to dismiss charges against Folsey and Allingham and the defense appealed that to uphold those against Landis, Stewart and Wingo. Judge Gordon Ringer reinstated the charges against Folsey and Allingham in November 1984. The court of appeals upheld the charges against all five and the California Supreme Court decided not to review that decision.
Before the actual trial got underway, Landis decided to change attorneys. Braun had sent a letter to the chief deputy district attorney charging that there had been “a consciously truncated investigation” into involvement by others including Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros. executives. Landis did not appreciate that letter because it was mailed without consulting with him.
The director hired James Neal, a well-respected lawyer from Tennessee, to represent him. Neal had been in the national spotlight in the early 1970s as a Watergate prosecutor. He successfully defended the Ford Motor Company against manslaughter charges in the infamous exploding Pinto case. He also won a not guilty verdict for Elvis Presley’s doctor who had been charged with overprescribing medication to Presley.
Braun did not leave the defense team, however, but became an attorney for Folsey.
The prosecution did some shuffling as well. Gary Kesselman was assigned away from the Twilight Zone case because of negative publicity involving a dance hall he owned. Hostesses at the club had been arrested on lewd conduct charges and several who were in the country illegally had been deported.
Lea Purwin D’Agostino became the prosecutor. She was a petite, strikingly attractive woman with dark hair and high cheekbones. Decidedly feminine in appearance, D’Agostino exuded an air of confidence and was known as a tough, aggressive prosecutor with a string of courtroom victories behind her. Some people called her “The Dragon Lady.” Others nicknamed her “Queen Lea.” In court, she wore designer outfits accented by a golden bumblebee brooch.
The relationship between D’Agostino and the defense attorneys was unusually acrimonious. Attorney Arnold Klein commented, “Since she came on the case, we all want to win twice as bad, not only to prove our clients are innocent of any crime but also because we want to make D’Agostino eat it.” An element of sexism may have entered into this enmity. The defendants and their lawyers looked like a proverbial “Old Boys’ Club.” D’Agostino was bold, assertive and sometimes arrogant.
The jury consisted of seven women and five men. About one-third of the jurors were Asian, black or Hispanic. They included two homemakers, a pallet repairperson, a chemist and a clerk-typist.
Balding and mustachioed Judge Roger Boren presided. He had been the prosecutor in the case of Angelo Buono, one-half of the duo (his crime partner was his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi) responsible for the serial “Hillside Stranglings.” Boren was married and the father of five.
The trial began September 3, 1986. In her opening statement, D’Agostino recounted the illegal hiring of the children by Landis, Folsey and Allingham. The kids were hired secretly not only because the scene would take place at night, she contended, but because Landis and his cohorts knew that the teacher-welfare worker who would have to be on the set if they were legally employed would never have allowed youngsters in the vicinity of the explosives and helicopter. She would prove that both Stewart and Wingo knew of the high degree of hazard and proceeded despite it.
She told the jurors they would see footage of the crash. “What you will see is no illusion,” she said. “You’ll see real fires put out with real water. The helicopter you will see is no toy . . . And they were very, very real deaths, not ones where the people could get up and wipe the ketchup off. You won’t see My-ca Le or Vic Morrow walk in from the back of this courtroom and put their heads back on!”
James Neal told the jury that the scene of the fatal shooting had been meticulously planned and carefully rehearsed. “Action films are meant to appear dangerous,” he commented, “and proof will show that had this scene gone as planned and rehearsed, there would have been no accident.” Unforeseeable events and the mistakes of a technician named James Camomile had caused the tragedy, according to Neal. As Farber and Green wrote, Neal informed the jury that Camomile “had detonated two explosions almost simultaneously, without looking up to check the location of the helicopter, and in direct contravention of the prearranged plan. His error was compounded when one of the blasts misfired and ‘married’ with the other, creating a fireball far larger than anyone anticipated. Moreover, Neal insisted, the defendants could not possibly have known that the heat generated by this fireball would cause the helicopter’s tail rotor to delaminate, since such an occurrence was unprecedented in the history of aviation. It was this delamination — the melting away of the rotor’s protective skin — that disabled the craft and forced it to spin out of control.”
The prosecutor’s first witness, Donna Schuman, acknowledged that testifying against Folsey was uncomfortable for her since he was a personal friend. Nevertheless, she said Folsey told her the children would be hired without the required permits from the labor commission.
Schuman also related statements she attributed to Folsey and Landis that she had not mentioned in testimony before either the grand jury or in the preliminary hearing. She claimed that she had asked Folsey what the penalty was for working kids illegally. She said he replied, “A slap on the wrist and a little fine — unless they find out about the explosives, then they’ll throw my butt in jail.” She also claimed Landis said lightheartedly, “Arrgghhh, we’re all going to jail!”
Under cross-examination, Schuman said that the previous prosecutor in the case, Gary Kesselman, agreed not to ask her about the remarks in prior court appearances out of respect for her feelings about testifying against her friend Folsey. She also said that Kesselman wanted to withhold knowledge of the remarks from the defense. “He said you never put your whole case on until you go before the jury,” she claimed, “and that’s the only time the defense really needs to have everything.”
This testimony was a gift to the defense. Under the rules of discovery, the prosecution must make all evidence available to the defense before the trial. The defense did know about Schuman’s quotes from Landis and Folsey before the trial proper but could still claim the information had been wrongly hidden from them before the prior proceedings. As James Neal put it, “We have a witness who is absolutely lying, or we have a prosecutor who is deliberately withholding information from us.”
After this troubling testimony, the defense subpoenaed Gary Kesselman. He did not testify in front of the jury since he was not a prosecution witness and the prosecution was putting on its side of the case at the time.
In the hearing before Judge Boren, Kesselman contradicted Schuman’s testimony. He claimed that Schuman had never told him that either Landis or Folsey said anything about fearing they would go to jail.
D’Agostino stood by her witness. “I believe Donna Schuman one hundred million percent,” she said, “because I can’t count any higher. I have to believe Mr. Kesselman’s recollections are not as good.” At one point, D’Agostino took the stand in this hearing outside the jury’s presence. Without naming Kesselman directly, D’Agostino testified, “I figured someone was trying to withhold information from me so I wouldn’t be adequately prepared. Possibly I was not the recipient of all the information when the file was turned over to me.”
Thus, the defense had successfully diverted attention from the relevant issue of whether or not Folsey and Landis feared jail for their illegal hiring of children to, as Farber and Green put it, “the contest of credibility between Schuman and Kesselman.”
The prosecution put red-haired Colleen Logan on the stand. Logan was the deputy labor commissioner who oversaw the entertainment industry’s employment of minors. Her office had already levied fines against Landis and Warner Bros. for the illegal hiring of Renee and My-ca.
Logan testified that the regulations of her office forbid children under eight from working past 6:30 p.m. but waivers are frequently granted to allow their nighttime employment. She also testified that she thought it dangerous for children to work near helicopters and special effects explosions. The judge had previously ruled that D’Agostino could not put the hypothetical question to her of whether or not she would have given a waiver to let children work in the specific scene that Landis wanted to film.
The deputy commissioner explained the role of the teacher-welfare worker who is supposed to be on the set when a child is working. “The teacher on the set really has the final say about whether a child can work under certain circumstances,” she was quoted in Ron LaBrecque’s Special Effects as elaborating. “If they think it is an unsafe condition, they stop the movie.”
Inevitably, the most heart-tugging testimony was that of the parents. My-ca’s mother, Hoa-Kim Le, was the first of the parents to testify. She was a social worker who aided abused and neglected children. Under D’Agostino’s questioning, she claimed not to know that permits were required for children working at night or that My-ca would be near a helicopter or explosives. She also remembered Folsey saying after the first night of shooting, “You don’t have to come back. I will treat your children as my own.”
D’Agostino asked about the next night when her husband went alone with My-ca to Indian Dunes. “Did you ever see My-ca again?” the prosecutor asked.
“No,” the witness replied, her eyes brimming with tears.
Then Renee’s father, Mark Chen, testified. He denied being told that his child should have had a permit to work legally at Indian Dunes or that the girl would be in close proximity to a helicopter and explosives. At one point, Mark Chen began crying.
Over defense objections, jurors saw the film of the accident at Indian Dunes. That 20 minutes of celluloid included the 2:00 a.m. rehearsal and the scenes shot at 9:30 p.m., 11:30 p.m. and 2.20 a.m.
The court met at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills. As Rob LaBrecque wrote, “The movie began with scenes from the nine-thirty shot, close-ups of Morrow running to the hut where the children were huddling, and carrying them away just before two mortars explode.”
John Landis called “Action!” and Vic Morrow came on the scene. He grabbed up Renee and My-ca, then ran toward the camera as mortars exploded around the little group. “Cut!” Landis yelled. The film showed the director walking up to the camera and signaling the helicopter pilot to fly away. A special-effects worker hosed the fire from a hut. Other segments showed the violent thrashing of a rotor and My-ca’s hair blowing.
The 11:30 p.m. scene was more frightening and D’Agostino argued that it ought to have unequivocally warned of the danger of special-effects explosions close to a helicopter. Camera operator Roger Smith appeared unsteady in his movements. A mortar exploded in the water and splashed large columns of water against the aircraft.
The mood in the theater was somber and became even more so as the 2:00 a.m. rehearsal appeared on the screen.
The segment showed Landis with his bullhorn wading through the river. Morrow was seen holding a child under each arm. There was an explosion, sprays of water, and simulated machine-gun fire.
In Special Effects LaBrecque wrote, “Then Morrow stumbles forward in the water, which rises to his waist. Suddenly there is only a large spray of white water filling the screen . . . The wall of water quickly falls and reveals the helicopter’s fuselage, lying at an awkward angle on the ground.
“The sound ends, creating a silently fearsome scene. . . . people running toward the helicopter. Landis runs desperately to the far side of the helicopter as a red landing light on the aircraft flashes on and off . . . the village huts are engulfed in billowing flames.”
There was another view from a camera on a cliff looking down at the mock village. A crash off-screen was heard.
Then, according to LaBrecque, the film showed “a close-up of Morrow, apparently taken from directly across the river, looking into the village. He is seen tightening his grip on the children as the rotor wash pushes at him. Here, his struggle — whether exaggerated by his acting or made real by an unexpected combination of wind, water, and the children’s weight — is obvious. The children’s feet drag in the river, and Renee is immersed to her knees. Just after Morrow stumbles, the flash of a fireball washes out the images. When the three are seen again, My-ca is held high above the water, but Renee is in water up to her neck. She appears to slip in Morrow’s arms as he tries to stand upright.
“Just as Morrow strengthens his grip on the children, the sound of a rotor blade hitting the water is heard. A massive spray of water hides from view the terrible moment of death. The bodies of Morrow, Renee and My-ca are never discernible on film. The main rotor blade makes one revolution before the tip of one blade sticks in the mud of the riverbed.”
George Folsey’s wife Belinda and Sgt. Tom Budds were weeping. D’Agostino commented, “The jurors are not supposed to make up their minds until they’ve heard all the evidence but you can’t not see what you’ve seen. They’ve just seen three people killed. And for what? For a lousy movie.”
Back in the courtroom, Shyan-Huei Chen took the stand. Uncomfortable in English, she testified through a Mandarin interpreter. She related how she believed her daughter appearing in a movie would be “a good experience, a very good memory.”
She told how she had been concerned after the 9:30 p.m. shot and George Folsey reassured her that it was “not dangerous. Just the sound, very loud sound.” Then she testified about Folsey visiting her in the trailer and saying, “If the fire department people come over and if they ask what you are doing here, just tell them you are friends helping us. Don’t mention anything about money.”
Shyan-Huei Chen testified about the accident itself. “I saw my child and the actor,” she began. “He carried her across the river. John Landis was right behind us. Then he went over to a hill. Then I saw him with this speaker, a big speaker. Then I saw the helicopter in the sky above the three people. Then the producer [apparently she confused producer with director and meant Landis] was yelling, he’s yelling ‘Lower! Lower!’ Then I heard loud explosions, and then the sparks and the wind. Very windy and dusty.
“Then I saw the helicopter fall, fall on top of three people. At that moment I was so scared. I felt something happened to my daughter. They were running, also yelling, asking to run. I was yelling for my daughter.” The witness broke into tears, still talking about how Folsey had protectively pulled her away from the helicopter’s path.
Braun cross-examined her gently and drew an admission that she had not listened carefully to everything Folsey had told her a week before the shooting, raising the possibility that she could have been informed of more details about the scene than she had said she recalled.
Next, neatly attired in a dark blue suit, Daniel Le took the stand. He claimed that no one told him his son would be working illegally or explained that the child would be around a helicopter and special-effects explosives. When he was asked about the fatal scene, he answered, “I fell to the ground because I was so horrified. The next thing, I saw people running, shouting, running for their lives. Then I saw the body of my son.”
Arnold Klein, Paul Stewart’s attorney, questioned Le concerning what he knew of explosives. Le became visibly flustered. “I don’t know about the technicalities!” he replied. “I was scared. I’ve never been so scared in my entire life!”
D’Agostino called several fire-safety officers who had been at the Twilight Zone crash to the stand. George Hull, chief fire-safety officer at the shooting, testified about the explosions that “these were the largest I had ever been involved in, in the magnitude of fire and smoke.” As Farber and Green wrote, “Hull testified that he had never been informed the helicopter would hover twenty-four feet over the river, or that a bomb had been placed under one of the huts, or that live actors would be used in the final scene. He had never before been on a movie location where children were filmed in the same scene with special-effects explosives.”
The prosecutor would call 71 witnesses in as many days. A juror would eventually complain of “overkill” in D’Agostino’s presentation of the case. That may have referred to her calling so many witnesses but also to her tendency to grill those she called. Set designer Richard Sawyer testified that he had been “ill at ease” when a mortar was placed under a structure prior to the fatal scene. At the preliminary trial he had used the word “shocked.” D’Agostino repeatedly questioned him about this discrepancy to suggest he was trying to lessen the impact of his testimony. Additionally, D’Agostino sometimes called witnesses whose testimony she knew would be different than the version of events she wanted the jury to accept. She believed jurors would “respect” her integrity but this tactic was surely misguided. After all, the defense puts on its own case without the prosecution doing it for them.
While D’Agostino usually went for the jugular even with her own witnesses, she took a markedly different approach in the examination of James Camomile. Farber and Green called her attitude “protective, almost maternal.”
The powder technician often seemed confused. He was clearly haunted by the tragedy and was vulnerable on cross-examination. James Neal tried to pin the blame on Camomile for being derelict as he ignited the charges from his firing board.
“When you set off the number-two explosion,” Neal queried, “you were not looking at the helicopter?”
“I don’t believe so,” Camomile answered quietly.
He acknowledged that he had not looked at the helicopter before setting off explosions three, four, five, and six either.
Neal pressed, “isn’t it a fact that the special-effects man on the firing board is supposed to look at the set before you set off any of the special effects to determine at that particular point whether it is safe or not?”
“That is correct, sir,” Camomile replied.
The powder technician appeared to concede that at least some of the responsibility for the accident was his.
The first witness for the defense was John Landis. With black hair and beard neatly trimmed, wire rimmed glasses, and a tweed coat, the high school dropout looked like a stereotypical college professor.
“You are John Landis,” his attorney began, “and you were the director of the Landis segment of the Twilight Zone?”
“Yes,” the witness replied.
“How old are you, Mr. Landis?”
“I am 36.”
The lawyer led his client through his background, present family life with wife Deborah and two preschool-aged children, and involvement with movies. Landis told the jury of the writing of his Twilight Zone segment and the decision to “soften” the character of Bill Connor.
Landis said “absolutely not” when asked if Marci Liroff told him she thought the proposed scene sounded dangerous.
He testified that he believed he would be unable to get a waiver to have children work after 8:30 p.m. when it was “still light” so “we decided to break the law. We decided wrongly to violate the labor code. . . . we would find children to whose parents we would explain that we were doing a technical violation.”
Neal asked about suggestions for using dummies instead of youngsters in the scene.
“It was suggested,” he recalled, “to get around the lateness of the hour, if we could use dummies or puppets to replace the children . . . and I decided no, that even in the Twilight Zone, I didn’t think that would work.”
“Was there any suggestion of danger in this conversation?” Neal asked.
“No.”
“Did anybody at any time suggest to you that those scenes as planned were dangerous?”
“Never.”
Neal was trying to establish that his client had a blameless state of mind. Landis had never believed the scene would endanger anyone, Neal would argue, and could not be held criminally responsible because it had.
The lawyer also drew forth responses indicating that Landis had informed both sets of parents that their children would be in the vicinity of a helicopter and special effects explosives. He said he had not told them that the kids would be working illegally but believed Folsey had done so.
Landis denied that he had ever joked with a camera operator about losing the helicopter. The director testified that the fatal scene was meticulously planned.
While testifying, Landis frequently got teary eyed when speaking of the dead children. On cross-examination, D’Agostino attempted to show that he was acting when he wept. A twist in the questions and answers along this line made the prosecutor look foolish and it was recounted in both LaBrecque’s and Farber and Green’s books.
“Do you consider yourself a good storyteller,” D’Agostino asked, “a good writer?”
“Better storyteller than writer,” Landis replied.
“And when you write a story, Mr. Landis,” the prosecutor continued, “and when you write a script, there are certain techniques, are there not, to engender sympathy from the people reading the script or that audience watching the film?”
“Yes,” was Landis’ unsurprising answer.
“And one of the those techniques, I would assume, would be to possibly have the character cry. That’s a technique to get sympathy for the character, correct?”
“Depends on the scene,” the witness replied.
After some other questions about acting techniques, D’Agostino inquired, “Well, you don’t put an onion there and get the tears that way?”
“They’ve done that,” Landis said.
“Do you also tell them to think of something sad and maybe that will evoke sad images?”
“I haven’t. You could.”
“Do you know of any other ways that you could get actors to cry?” the determined prosecutor asked.
“Well, the easiest way is with glycerin,” the defendant explained. “You put a tear there.”
“They are some actors that are accomplished and don’t need the glycerin, is that correct,” she pursued, “and/or the onion? They can cry on cue?”
“I have never met one,” Landis claimed. “I am told; I assume . . . “
“Comes easier to some people than to others, true?” she prodded.
“I don’t know. I suppose.”
“Does it come easily to you, Mr. Landis?” D’Agostino demanded.
“Crying?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“No,” he claimed.
She continued questioning him about ways he used to get actors to weep. This director who specialized in raunchy comedies and action films did not often have crying characters in his movies, he said. “I can’t recall a scene where an actor was crying,” Landis elaborated, “except for Schlock. At the end of Schlock the monster is shot and he cries.”
“And he cried?” D’Agostino repeated.
“Yes,” Landis agreed. “That was me. That was glycerin.”
“You had to have the glycerin?” D’Agostino asked, her voice thick with mock wonder.
“I was in ape make-up,” Landis replied.
Laughter rippled throughout the courtroom.
The prosecutor had better luck when she asked about contradictions between his testimony and that of other witnesses. Landis claimed he never discussed hiring the children with Marci Liroff. D’Agostino showed him a casting sheet from the Fenton & Feinberg agency that was dated June 16, 1982. He saw a handwritten notation saying “Two Vietnamese kids, boy, girl.” Landis said he had “no explanation” for the note that Liroff had apparently written.
D’Agostino zeroed in on Landis’ reason for not seeking a waiver to have the children work after 8:30 p.m.
“Mr. Landis,” she began, “did it ever remotely occur to you that the labor board would let you have children work with the special-effects explosions and a helicopter?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“You thought that they would?” D’Agostino asked incredulously.
“I did not specifically think of the special effects and a helicopter as the problem,” Landis said. “The problem was the lateness of the hour.”
“Mr. Landis, are you telling this court and this jury,” the prosecutor asked, “that you believed and you believe as you sit here now that the labor board would grant you a waiver to film children next to special-effects explosions of the size of a hundred fifty, two hundred feet in the air and twenty-four feet under a hovering helicopter? . . . Was that your state of mind, sir, back in 1982?”
“Yes,” the director replied firmly.
“That they would allow that?”
“Yes,” Landis repeated.
Perhaps Landis’ most extraordinary claim was that the apparently painful stumbling of Vic Morrow in the river right before the accident had been planned and rehearsed.
“Was it also planned, Mr. Landis,” D’Agostino asked skeptically, “that when Vic Morrow stumbled, or tripped, or whatever you want to call it, that he should almost drop Renee?”
“It was planned that Vic should stumble,” Landis replied, “I think you are having a problem with the fact that makes this so especially terrible, which is, that they are acting, and it looks horrendous, because it’s supposed to look horrendous, and the tragedy makes it that much harder to watch.”
“Mr. Landis, my question was, when you told Vic Morrow to trip, when you had this planned that he would trip, was it also planned that he should drop Renee, or almost drop Renee, or lose his grip on Renee?”
“We did not discuss dropping Renee,” Landis asserted, “and I don’t believe he did.”
“Well, you have seen the footage on how many occasions, sir?” the prosecutor pressed.
“As often as the jury and twice before that.”
“You only saw it twice before this jury saw it?”
“It’s very hard for me to watch,” the witness replied, as he dabbed at his eyes with a tissue. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you want a Kleenex?” D’Agostino asked, making no attempt to cleanse her voice of sarcasm.
“No.”
“Was it planned that he would almost drop Renee, sir?”
“No,” Landis said.
“Well, were you concerned that if he stumbled, the children might fall?”
“No, that’s why we rehearsed it,” the director explained. However, he soon admitted that Morrow had never rehearsed the scene {with} little Renee and My-ca in his arms.
Later in the cross-examination, D’Agostino again queried Landis about the risk he took.
“I believed it was safe,” Landis said resolutely.
“And of course,” D’Agostino said, “if you believe that that was a perfectly safe scene to film at the time you filmed it, sir, you, of course, would have no hesitation in filming it again, would you?”
“I would not film it again!” Landis answered. “I’m sorry, three people died closer to me than you are, and I’m not emotionally prepared, regardless of who told me it was safe, no. I haven’t shot with a helicopter since then.”
“Because of the danger?”
“I haven’t said that!” a flustered Landis shouted.
Kesselman and Wingo
The dispute about former prosecutor Gary Kesselman’s recollections versus those of Donna Schuman showed up again in this trial. As Farber and Green wrote, “On March 10, 1987, in one of the most bizarre turns in this bizarre marathon of a trial, Deputy District Attorney Gary Kesselman was called to the witness stand to help exonerate the very defendants he had once worked so sedulously to convict. . . .
“Now testifying with the jury present, Kesselman stated that the first time he interviewed Harold and Donna Schuman was on May 11, 1983, less than a month before the case was to be presented before the grand jury. . . . Kesselman had no recollection of hearing about the remark that Schuman attributed to George Folsey regarding the penalty for his infractions: ‘a slap on the wrist and a little fine, unless they find out about the explosives, and then they’ll throw my butt in jail.’ Nor did Kesselman recall her reporting that John Landis once threw his arms in the air and joked, ‘We’re all going to jail.’” However, Kesselman went on to say that after Sergeant Tom Budds interviewed Cynthia Nigh, he had learned through Nigh that Folsey had joked about going to jail
Pilot Dorcey Wingo took the stand. His lawyer, Eugene Trope, asked the witness about his background. The jury learned that he had flown hundreds of hours in combat during the Vietnam War, battled forest fires, and aided in the rescue of stranded forest hikers.
Wingo testified that he anticipated movie work as a piece of cake after the demanding missions, both military and civilian, in which he had participated. “I was used to doing live performances before hundreds of thousands of people at a time,” he said. “And I thought [in movie work] if there was a problem, the director would say, ‘Do it again.’ And in the live performance, you only had one shot at it.”
His attorney led to safety issues on the Twilight Zone. Wingo claimed that Dan Allingham often used the phrase “safety first.” He testified to several preparation meetings taking place on the night of the accident. He claimed he had told Paul Stewart, “The helicopter and the special effects could not occupy the airspace at the same time.” He said he also told Stewart that, as the pilot, he should approve it before they decided to put any intentional debris into the air. He also testified that, “I just concluded that he [Stewart] knew more about pyrotechnics and the way of the fireballs than I did.”
The pilot later described the accident itself and lost his composure as he did so. He said he had suffered from bad nerves and insomnia and been to a psychologist who diagnosed post traumatic stress syndrome.
In her cross-examination, D’Agostino tried to establish that Wingo was shielding Landis as well as himself. The following dialogue was pieced together from that reported in both Outrageous Conduct and Special Effects.
“Since the trial have you become friendly with John Landis?” the prosecutor queried.
“We’ve found it …” The pilot seemed to grope for an answer, then said, “Propinquity has set in, yes.”
“Propinquity?” D’Agostino asked, her voice ridiculing the rarely used word meaning, in context, a sense of kinship or nearness.
D’Agostino referred to the word again when she questioned the pilot about his failure to confront the director or special effects supervisor after being upset by the force of the 11:30 explosions. “Didn’t you feel,” she asked, “it was absolutely mandatory that you express your dissatisfaction to Landis or Stewart?”
“No,” he answered.
“You hadn’t developed a propinquity by then?”
This exchange caused many people in the courtroom to wince but it was not as bad as when Wingo revealed his sense that Vic Morrow failed both himself and the children by not running from the falling aircraft. The pilot said he had discussed danger with Morrow. “I described to him that he should make himself like a chameleon and, that is, keep one eye on the helicopter at all times. I didn’t want him to be ignoring where the helicopter was if something happened and I had to make an emergency landing.”
“How did you expect him to keep one eye on the helicopter,” D’Agostino asked incredulously, “making his way across the river with children and explosives?”
“It was not out of the ability of the man,” Wingo asserted. “I saw no problem in him looking up a few degrees to his left, to see if the helicopter was still there. I saw no problem in him keeping his ears tuned to any changes in the helicopter, because we were not that far away. And I am extremely distraught to this day that the man never looked up.”
“Are you blaming him, sir?” D’Agostino pressed.
“I am saying it is extremely — it distresses me to the max that he never looked up after having that conversation with him.”
After a couple of other questions and objections from defense lawyers, D’Agostino went on, “Where did you expect Mr. Morrow to run with these children if he heard a change in the noise of the helicopter?”
“Away from the helicopter,” a distressed Wingo replied. “He had over five seconds between the time that the sound of the helicopter changed and it impacted. I would hope to God he could have used those five seconds to his advantage and the children’s.”
“And you are now assuming the Mr. Morrow had the ear that he would know precisely the split second when the pitch on that helicopter changed? Is that what you are telling us?”
Trope objected and the judge declared an afternoon recess.
When the court was back in session, D’Agostino again zeroed in on the five seconds the pilot said the dead actor could have used to save himself and Renee and My-ca. “Mr. Wingo, you have the same five seconds, Mr. Morrow had, did you not?”
“No,” Wingo said, “I didn’t have. I don’t agree with that.”
Then she asked a related, and pertinent, question. “How did you brief the children on what to do for this flight, sir?”
“I never talked to the children,” Wingo answered.
While it may have been misguided for Wingo to believe that the 53-year-old actor, knee-deep in water and holding a child under each arm, should have successfully escaped from a crashing helicopter, there are others who think that Morrow was to some degree culpable in the case. Sgt. Budds is quoted in Special Effects as saying, “Had Morrow lived, he should have been charged. He knew about the problems they had at eleven-thirty and what they were doing about it. He’s an adult, he can make a choice.”
After the pilot left the stand, the defense called experts to support their heat delamination theory of the specific cause of the accident. On rebuttal D’Agostino called a witness to say that debris caused the crash. Since Judge Boren had indicated that he intended to instruct the jury that the precise cause of the accident did not have to be foreseeable for a manslaughter conviction, the debate on this point may have been something of a diversion. However, there had been many issues in this lengthy, complicated trial that were arguably distractions from the most important points.
In her closing argument, D’Agostino suggested that the perverse values of the defendants depreciated human life. “There is no motion picture that was ever made,” she declared, “or that ever will be made, that is worth risking one human life for, much less three. The utterly senseless, needless loss of three lives for a motion picture is what makes what these defendants did so barbaric.”
D’Agostino believed the opposing attorneys had put on three major defenses. “The ‘SODDI’ defense — ‘Some other dude did it.’ He’s James Camomile. Defense number two was what I’ll call the red herring defense, the technical defense, confused with technicalities that obscure the facts. . . . And the third one was the ‘BEE’ defense, and ladies and gentlemen, I assure you it was not in honor of my broach. This one was ‘Blame everyone else.’”
Referring to the involuntary manslaughter charges against Landis, Folsey and Allingham stemming from the illegal hiring of the children, D’Agostino said that these defendants “knew from day one that the children were going to be placed in a scene involving special-effects explosions and a helicopter and that Landis intended on doing it at night. Common sense tells you that is a dangerous scene.” Then she discussed the charges against Landis, Wingo and Stewart of allegedly reckless acts with, she asserted, “wanton disregard of these three human beings.”
Landis’ attorney James Sanders was the first of the defense attorneys to speak in closing. “There is one main issue and one main truth in this case,” he declared, “and that is whether Mr. John Landis believed that the scene was dangerous and acted in a reckless, wanton, or grossly negligent manner.” This was not precisely true. The criterion for an involuntary manslaughter conviction was not just the defendant’s personal perceptions but included what the accused reasonably should have thought. Then Sanders went on to attack Donna Schuman’s credibility, implying that the state’s case was based on lies.
James Neal spoke and blamed Camomile. “How could anyone foresee that a man holding the highest powder card issued by the state of California,” he asked, “would not follow instructions, would not follow the first principle of his profession, and would prematurely set off a special effect with the helicopter right there?”
Defending Paul Stewart, Arnold Klein told the jury, “The evidence shows that Paul Stewart approached the task with careful consideration of the safety of those around him . . . I am not trying to blame Jim Camomile, but Paul Stewart cannot be held criminally responsible for the acts of Jim Camomile.”
Eugene Trope said, “Dorcey Wingo might be classified as a scapegoat. I must say one thing about all types of pilots. I never met one that wanted to commit suicide. They all wanted to make that trip home. His helicopter was blown out from under him. Let Dorcey Wingo rebuild his reputation. Let him resume his career. Let him resume his life.”
In closing for Dan Allingham, Leonard Levine said, “He took the risk that [the production team] would be charged, convicted, and punished [for illegally hiring the children], but he never would have taken that risk [had he thought] that these children were in any danger of losing their lives. . .
“It’s time for the prosecution to go back to what they do best, or should be — prosecuting real criminals and real crimes. These five men were not perfect. The last perfect man was crucified two thousand years ago. They are not heroes. They are not martyrs. They are not saints. But they were not prophets. And they are not guilty.”
Harland Braun, in summing up for George Folsey, attacked Donna Schuman’s mental state. “The statements come from a witness who looks like she’s emotionally distraught, unbalanced, probably guilt-ridden,” he claimed. “Not in the sense that she’s guilty of anything but psychologically, in the sense that she participated in the hiring of some children who died.”
The prosecution had a final rebuttal before the case went to the jury. In this summation, D’Agostino put on a demonstration unique in its irrelevancy and foolishness. She took out an ordinary potato and a plastic soda straw, then dramatically shoved the straw through the vegetable. “If I can do this with a straw on a raw potato,” she rhetorically asked the jury, “what do you think a piece of bamboo, a hard piece of bamboo, could do on that tail rotor blade?” She handed the pierced potato to an understandably befuddled juror.
Judge Boren ordered the jury to disregard the demonstration because no evidence had been put on to suggest “that the potato and the plastic straw have any relevance to this case.” His order may have been intended to aid the prosecutor despite herself.
The jury elected housewife Lois Rogers, who had taken copious notes throughout the trial, as their foreperson. She helped systemize their deliberations by handing out computer sheets that listed the counts against each defendant and the judge’s instructions of the legal requirements for guilt. One juror wanted to take a poll immediately but the others insisted on going through the evidence first.
After discussing the dispute between Schuman and Kesselman, most jurors believed it was not actually germane to the issues. The jurors tended to think Camomile bore a great responsibility for the wreck and could not understand why he had been granted immunity.
According to Ron LaBrecque, the jury misunderstood the judge’s instructions as saying that the defendants had to believe they were putting people in danger rather than that they should have known it. Rogers would later state, “I don’t believe that I ever thought that they believed there was any danger.”
On Friday, May 29, 1987, the jury returned its verdict. Foreperson Rogers handed the verdict forms to Judge Boren. He looked them over, then gave them to the court clerk, Sylvia Felien to read aloud.
“We the jury in the above-entitled action,” Felien began, “find the defendant John Landis not guilty of involuntary manslaughter . . .” The clerk read each count, followed by a verdict of not guilty.
Lea D’Agostino appeared stunned. As Farber and Green wrote, she looked “bitter, betrayed, and abandoned.”
Deborah Landis, weeping with joy, went to the jurors to hug, kiss, and shake hands.
Shaking her head, D’Agostino made no attempt to hide her disgust at what she called “this lovefest.”
The Monday after the acquittals, a jubilant John Landis appeared on Good Morning America. He said he had been the victim of a “thoroughly dishonest and political prosecution.” In another interview, with Paul Feldman of the Los Angeles Times, he called Lea D’Agostino “Grotesque, an aberration. She is very unimportant. What is important is the Los Angeles district attorney’s office spending this kind of money pursuing something that they know damn well is bogus.”
On the very day of the verdict, D’Agostino went on CNN’s Crossfire. Her message to Landis was “there is a higher justice . . . Three people are dead because of his vision.” Robert Dornan, the fiery right-winger who co-hosted the show, thundered, “I hope they learned their lesson because they beat justice.”
Later the prosecutor went on a Los Angeles radio talk show. Michael Jackson — not the famous singer Landis directed in Thriller — but a liberal white commentator, hosted the program. D’Agostino said she believed the jury let the defendants walk because of Landis’ celebrity.
The jury’s foreperson, Lois Rogers, called in to dispute that view. “As far as the jury was concerned,” she asserted, “we were none of us awed by the fact that these were Hollywood people. In fact, I think the majority of us had never even heard of John Landis before we went into the trial.”
“I have to tell you,” the prosecutor commented in exasperation, “based on the mail I have received throughout the trial from all over the world — England, Australia, all over the United States — it appears as though everyone in the country, if not the world, totally agrees that these people are guilty except the twelve jurors. That’s what I find so amazing!”
“And isn’t that what the system is for?” Rogers asked in a pertinent rejoinder.
On March 1, 1988, D’Agostino announced herself as a candidate for Los Angeles County district attorney. She ran against her boss, Ira Reiner. Hearing about her candidacy, Leonard Levine wryly commented, “I’ve never heard of a prosecutor riding the coattails of defeat.” Harland Braun donated $250 to her campaign. She lost badly. However, she has continued her career as a prosecutor.
Since his acquittal, John Landis has directed several popular movies. Coming to America, starring Eddie Murphy, was released1988 and became one of Landis’ biggest hits. He directed Murphy again in Beverly Hills Cop III (1994). Landis continues to write scripts, produce, and act. His work is not highly regarded from an artistic viewpoint but is sought after and lucrative.
George Folsey, Jr. continued working with Landis.
Dan Allingham left the Landis and Folsey production team to produce the film Communion, based on Whitney Streiber’s book of the same title about the author’s supposedly true encounters with extraterrestrials.
Paul Stewart got a job working in special effects on the TV series Moonlighting. He claimed to have trouble finding jobs with movie studios. “Warner Bros. and Columbia will not hire me,” he complained.
Dorcey Wingo continued working for Western Helicopters. He did commercial flying.
Vic Morrow was never a top star but he was a good actor. To a large extent, his accomplishments in his chosen profession have been sadly overshadowed by his grisly death.