“What other major witness could avoid questioning by signing a piece of paper? Your office never asked Spielberg a single question about the accident or the hiring of the children. Your claim that Spielberg was ‘unavailable’ is simply false.”
Braun later declared, “If Frank Marshall went out on a Spielberg movie and hired kids illegally who ended up being killed, and Spielberg didn’t know about it, he would can Marshall immediately. It’s clear that Marshall and [Kathleen] Kennedy [who was associate producer on Spielberg’s segment] told Spielberg.” Folsey, Landis’s associate producer and codefendant, similarly insisted, “We wouldn’t have hired the kids on a Spielberg picture unless either Spielberg or his people knew it. I mean, that would have been a terrible thing to do, put them in that position. The fact that Frank agreed to do it made me feel that it was OK, that it was really his responsibility, too.”
The complicated hiring process began five weeks before the accident, when Landis and Folsey described the scene involving the children to casting directors Mike Fenton and Marci Liroff. Liroff, who had worked on E.T. and Poltergeist, told the filmmakers that working children late at night was illegal under California labor laws. She added that the scene “sounded kind of dangerous.” Since the children did not have speaking parts, Fenton told Landis and Folsey, “Then they’re extras, and our office doesn’t hire extras.” “The hell with you guys,” Landis gruffly replied. “We don’t need you. We’ll get them off the streets ourselves.” Liroff subsequently repeated her objections to Marshall, who told her, “I will check it out.”
According to Folsey, Kennedy, at Marshall’s request, called the state labor commission and asked if waivers could be issued for children to work at night. She was told children that young would not be allowed to work late at night. As a result, Landis admitted in court, “We decided to break the law. We decided, wrongly, to violate the labor code…. I thought, and we discussed, that we would honor not the letter of the law but the spirit of the law. And I thought, and we discussed, that we would find children whose parents—we would explain to them that we were doing a technical violation, that we were working them without a teacher on the set—explain to them what we were going to do.” The parents, he said, would “be the guardians, be there with them on the set…. Frank and George volunteered to try and find people.”
Three days before the accident, Marshall’s accountant, Bonne Radford, who worked out of Spielberg’s offices, asked veteran Warner Bros, production manager James Henderling if child extras could be hired outside of the auspices of the Screen Extras Guild. Henderling said any children hired, whether through the guild or not, would require work permits from the labor commission. After speaking to Marshall, Radford told Henderling no children were going to be hired after all.
The two children, who had no acting experience, were recruited through Dr. Harold Schuman, the psychiatrist husband of Folsey’s production secretary, Donna Schuman. The money to pay the children’s parents came from the production’s petty cash funds, on a check made payable to Folsey and cosigned by Marshall and Henderling. Henderling later said he had suspicions about what the money might be used for, but was told by his superior, Edward Morey, to sign the check on the grounds that a producer could not be refused petty cash. The check was cashed by Radford (a longtime Spielberg aide, she still works for him today). A sealed envelope containing twenty $100 bills was picked up at Spielberg’s offices by a Landis assistant, Carolyn Epstein, who passed it to Folsey for payment to the children’s parents.
The parents testified that they were not told work permits for their children were required by law and that they were not informed how dangerous the scene might be. That did not stop defense attorneys from trying to shift part of the blame for the accident onto the children’s parents for allowing the youngsters to participate in the scene. In response to a wrongful-death suit filed against Spielberg and others by the parents of Renee Chen, Spielberg’s attorneys filed a legal brief stating:
“Spielberg is informed and believes and thereon alleges that at the time and place of the events complained of, plaintiffs [the Chen and Le families] and each of them were not exercising ordinary care, caution or prudence to prevent the injuries sustained by them or by decedent and that, therefore, the injuries alleged were proximately caused by the negligence or comparative negligence of the plaintiffs.”
In its response to the suit filed by the parents of the same six-year-old victim, Warner Bros. Inc. went even farther, arguing with stunning callousness, “That if the plaintiffs suffered or sustained any loss, damage or injury … the risk, if any risk there was, was knowingly assumed by the decedent, Renee Shin-Yi Chen.”
As the circuitous trail of responsibility for the hiring of the children shows, although the money for their payment was routed through Spielberg’s office, and although some of his closest aides were involved in the hiring, no direct involvement by Spielberg was found in those processes. That still left open the key question posed by Farber and Green: As one of the movie’s producers, “shouldn’t Spielberg have known that his associates were planning to violate the child labor laws? Whether Spielberg intentionally turned a blind eye to the illegal hiring of children or was too busy to keep himself informed, his behavior did not reflect well on him.”
The Los Angeles Times reported in 1985 that according to Gary Kesselman, the first prosecutor assigned to the case, “Investigators attempted to interview Marshall and Spielberg but were unsuccessful because the men were either unavailable or out of the country when the grand jury was conducting its deliberations.” The investigation was hampered by Marshall’s repeated evasion of attempts by Budds to question him about the hiring process and about what he had seen as an eyewitness to the accident. During much of the investigation, Marshall was out of the country producing the next movie Spielberg directed, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and the Amblin Entertainment production Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While the trial was underway, Marshall was out of the country with Spielberg, making Empire of the Sun in China, Spain, and England.
In June 1986, Detective Budds traveled to London to arrange for Marshall to be served with a subpoena at the St. James Club, where the producer was staying during the preproduction of Roger Rabbit. When an employee of the U.S. embassy went to the club to deliver the subpoena, Marshall said he was not receiving visitors that morning, but would see her if she came back later in the day. In less than half an hour, he checked out of the club and left for Paris on a private jet operated by Spielberg’s film company, Amblin Entertainment.
Marshall made no public comment on the Twilight Zone accident until he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990 it was “terrible and horrible for everybody. But it was an accident. Which is eventually what the jury decided.” He also said he had been in Los Angeles for two years after the accident, “and nobody ever talked to me.” After that, he said, he was “inaccessible” making movies abroad, “And I didn’t really feel that I had anything to add that wasn’t already out there [other] than what had already been revealed.”††† Marshall’s evasiveness during the Twilight Zone investigation, Farber and Green wrote, “was not illegal. But, as [sheriff’s detective] Tom Budds says, ‘it certainly is less than meeting your civic responsibility.’ The actions of Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg lent credence to what cynics have long suspected, and what the Twilight Zone trial would attempt to refute: Some people in Hollywood may indeed be above the law.”
*
THE acquittals in the criminal cases against Landis and the others came as a shock to many observers. In media postmortems, prosecutor Lea Purwin D’Agostino was singled out for heavy criticism. A lengthy analysis by Gay Jervey in The American Lawyer, “Misfire in the Twilight Zone,” carried the subhead, “How the Los Angeles D.A.’s office—and prosecutor Lea D’Agostino—blew the case against John Landis.” D’Agostino’s flamboyant, often abrasive courtroom style was considered a liability by many observers, as was her tendency to make provocative stateme
nts to reporters. She was accused of overtrying the case by calling too many witnesses, muddying the impact of the basic allegations, and acting as if she were prosecuting a murder case, not a manslaughter case. The district attorney’s office was faulted for what Jervey called its “critical decision … not to charge the defendants with the one crime of which they were indisputably guilty: illegally hiring the children.” One of the jurors, Lauretta Hudson, commented, “I still say and will always say that their asses could have been in jail, and should have, but not for what they were accused of.”
Shortly after the verdict, D’Agostino said, “You’ve got a situation where three people died because they were placed twenty-four feet under a helicopter which has a main rotor blade that’s four feet longer than the courtroom, forty-four feet, with gigantic bombs going off a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet in the air at 2:20 in the morning. How can anyone tell me that it is not reckless? If I live to be a thousand years old, I will not accept that.”
In the final analysis, however, the case may have been decided by the testimony of James Camomile, the special-effects technician who set off the explosive charges. Under a grant of immunity that backfired against the prosecution, Camomile testified he was wearing a welder’s hood at the time of the accident and did not look up at the low-flying helicopter just before he detonated an explosive underneath it in the set of the Vietnamese village. The resulting explosion hurled debris from the set and sent a fireball into the path of the helicopter; according to differing theories of the accident, either the debris or the fireball could have caused the helicopter to crash.
Camomile’s immunized testimony made him a handy scapegoat, enabling Landis to blame him for the crash. The jury was not swayed by testimony by crew members that Landis, in staging the scene, had behaved in reckless disregard of safety considerations. Crew members testified Landis had joked before the accident, “Well, we may lose the helicopter,” and that during the scene he had shouted over a bullhorn to the helicopter pilot, “Lower! Lower! Lower!”
Reaching for a cinematic comparison to describe the jury’s action in acquitting him, Landis told the press it was “like a Frank Capra movie.” But he added more soberly that the crash “changed everyone’s life connected with it. No deceptions, no lies, no overt chicanery is going to change the fact that three people died in a terrible accident.”
Although Spielberg and Landis had to confer occasionally during postproduction on the Twilight Zone movie, it became increasingly obvious as time went on that Spielberg wanted to distance himself as much as possible from Landis.
When Landis made a public appearance in December 1995 to autograph copies of his movies at a Los Angeles area laserdisc store, the author approached him with tape recorder in hand, seeking an interview for this book. All Landis would say about Spielberg was, “I haven’t talked to Steve in years.” Landis heatedly refused to answer questions posed to him about Twilight Zone—The Movie.
Spielberg made a rare public statement on the accident in an April 1983 interview with Dale Pollock of the Los Angeles Times. “This has been the most interesting year of my film career,” Spielberg reflected. “It has mixed the best, the success of E.T., with the worst, the Twilight Zone tragedy. A mixture of ecstacy and grief. It’s made me grow up a little more. The accident cast a pall on all 150 people who worked on this production. We are still just sick to the center of our souls. I don’t know anybody who it hasn’t affected.”
Spielberg summed up the lessons of the accident with a philosophical observation that, while not referring by name to Landis, seemed a pointed criticism of his former friend and colleague:
“A movie is a fantasy—it’s light and shadow flickering on a screen. No movie is worth dying for. 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!’”
*
AFTER the accident, Spielberg lost interest in making his own segment of the movie. “His heart just wasn’t in it anymore,” said his first assistant director, Patrick Kehoe. Indeed, Spielberg tried to abandon the entire project, but Warner Bros. lawyers, fearing that cancellation of the film could be construed as an admission of guilt, insisted he fulfill his contract.
Feeling there was “something odd about proceeding” under the circumstances, Joe Dante was the first director to film a segment following the accident. “When the accident happened, everybody became very scarce. George [Miller] and I, whose first studio filmmaking experience this was, were given a lot of autonomy. I was amazed that they went ahead with it.” Dante remembers being anxious to do as good a job as possible on his contribution, because he knew there would be “a lot of people looking to justify that movie. It’s not Schindler’s List—it’s not worth dying for. No movie is worth that.”
Dante’s “It’s a Good Life” began filming on September 28, 1982, and was followed before the cameras by Miller’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” and then by Spielberg’s segment (Dante later filmed a new ending for the film, a gag taking the movie full circle back to Landis’s prologue). The story Spielberg originally planned to film, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” would have required a permit for a prominently featured child actor to work outdoors at night, in frightening scenes involving special effects. Spielberg switched to a simpler, less disturbing story from the TV series, “Kick the Can,” which also had scenes taking place at night involving children but was filmed mostly on a soundstage during normal daytime working hours.
As a boy living on Crystal Terrace in New Jersey’s Haddon Township, Spielberg had played kick the can, a simple game requiring only a tin can and some imagination. His remake of George Clayton Johnson’s ethereal, sweet-natured fantasy about old people reverting to childhood centers on an itinerant miracle worker, Mr. Bloom, played by Scatman Crothers, whom the director called “the black E.T.”‡‡‡ After Mr. Bloom’s magical game of kick the can turns them into children, all but one of the old folks of the Sunnyvale retirement home decide to go back to being old, realizing that they value their adult memories and accumulated wisdom too much to start over. That poignant addition to the original story reflects the complexity of Spielberg’s view of childhood—not a simple nostalgia, by any means, but the acknowledgment of an unfulfilled wish for a state of innocence that perhaps never really existed. Mr. Bloom’s gentle influence has taught them that “fresh young minds” do not require young bodies. The defiant exception is a Peter Pan–like character who emulates the swashbuckling fantasy life of his movie idol, Douglas Fairbanks Sr. Part of Spielberg could not surrender that dream of escapism, which he had inherited from his own father, a boyhood admirer of Fairbanks.
“Kick the Can” began shooting the day after Thanksgiving 1982 and finished only six days later. “It seemed like he was just going through the motions,” said Spielberg’s secretary, Kathy Switzer. Although filmed in an excessively whimsical manner that blunts some of its emotional potential, “Kick the Can” represents a further step in Spielberg’s maturation process. Under the sobering influence of the events of the previous summer, he made a bittersweet film about the need to turn one’s back on childhood and accept the coming of age.
*
DESPITE opening on June 24,1983, the same day the indictments were handed down in the criminal case, Twilight Zone—The Movie was not a total failure at the box office, grossing $42 million worldwide. It even received a few good reviews, mostly for the Miller and Dante segments, but some of the critical response was vitriolic.
“A lot of money and several lives might have been saved if the producers had just rereleased the original programs,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times. The critics for both Time and Newsweek seemed almost as outraged at Landis for the aesthetic shortcomings of his segment as for what took place on his set. “Even with the helicopter sequence mercifully cut,” wrote Richard Corliss of Time, “the story hardly l
ooks worth shooting, let alone dying for.” David Ansen of Newsweek judged that the segment’s “poor quality and moralizing tone make that tragedy doubly obscene.”
Spielberg’s contribution, which might have seemed innocuous enough in another context, came in for some remarkably vicious attacks, of which J. Hoberman’s in The Village Voice perhaps was the most extreme: “In terms of pathology, … Landis is easily eclipsed by the project’s capo di tutti capi, Steven Spielberg, whose remake of the 1961 Zone episode ‘Kick the Can’ is a lugubrious self-parody set to a raging torrent of sappy music…. Spielberg has become the King Midas of Candyland—from space monsters to senility, everything he touches turns to icky goo.”
*
IN what may have been partly an expression of disgust over the events surrounding the making of Twilight Zone—The Movie, as well as a more obvious backlash against the runaway success of E.T., the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences again snubbed Spielberg in the Oscar competition. Although nominated as Best Director for E. T., Spielberg lost to Richard Attenborough, director of Gandhi.§§§ Attenborough’s victory did not come as a surprise, for he earlier won the Directors Guild of America award, traditionally a harbinger of things to come at the Oscars.
At the DGA dinner, Attenborough “went out of his way to embrace me before going up onto the podium to collect the award,” Spielberg recalled in 1994. “That meant a great deal to me then, as it does now.” Attenborough explained, “I thought E.T. was the more exciting, wonderful, innovative piece of film, as against Gandhi, which fitted into the David Lean mold in terms not of cinematic execution but of concept and sweep…. Steven and I were at opposite sides of the room, and when the winner’s name was announced after all the speeches and such, I literally had to be nudged. I couldn’t believe it. I got up from the table and it was a sort of knee-jerk actor’s reaction. I didn’t go to the podium, I went over to Spielberg. He got up, I put my arms round him, and I said, ‘This isn’t right, this should be yours,’ and then I went to collect the award.”
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