Outstanding Documentaries - Chopper Down: Helicopter Deaths in the Movies (1989)

This short but powerful 12-minute piece was shown at 1989's Banned Film Festival after being shut down by HBO brass for potentially "offending business partners".  (Quiet part loud but okay).  It focuses on film set safety, or lack thereof, during the 1980s--particularly involving helicopter crashes.  I can't find director or producer credits for it anywhere online.

Three cases are recounted by witnesses & survivors, 2 of which involve Chuck Norris movies & the other being the notorious Twilight Zone: The Movie incident involving Vic Morrow & 2 child actors--one Taiwanese & the other Vietnamese--who were decapitated by helicopter rotors during filming.  (None of the scenes here is too gory or graphic, though the Twilight Zone deaths are shown).  Many people are familiar with this case as it involved an almost decade-long court battle for director John Landis & others who worked on the film.  They were eventually acquitted of manslaughter charges in 1987.

I was more surprised that two of the three helicopter crashes involved Chuck Norris films, both of which were shot in the Philippines only 2 years apart.  They killed 9 people in total & injured many more.  Very little has been made about this when lionizing Norris online.  While the directors, producers & stunt coordinators are more to blame than the actors in cases like this, it's definitely not a good look when your name is on the marquee of multiple movies that kill people.  And this is what Chuck had to say regarding these incidents:  

'I'm terribly depressed and sorry about the deaths of my friends and fellow workers in the crash, but there is nothing I could have done. I suppose there isn't anything anyone could have done to prevent it.  You try to reduce risks to a minimum. We took every possible precaution. I would not have gotten aboard the chopper, nor would any of the stunt men, if I felt there was any type of unsafe situation.  My heart goes out to the families of the people who lost their loved ones. I'm just lucky I wasn't aboard when the accident happened.'

Notice the "but".  The very fact that they chose to film in a region with lax safety regulations disproves his claim that there's "nothing more they could've done".  Family members of the victims of the 2nd crash sued Cannon Films in 1990, claiming that the studio had no ambulance or rescue provisions nearby during a treacherous jungle combat scene, and that the pilot flying the helicopter was unqualified.  One of the victims involved in the lawsuit is shown below.

Survivor Mateo Gomez recounts his story

This subject is especially timely after the shooting death of Halyna Hutchins on the set of the movie Rust in 2021.  Who's to blame when deadly accidents happen on a movie set due to cost cutting, unsafe working conditions & carelessness?  Is it fair to spread the blame around simply because there are a lot of people on set?  Should negligence be punished as harshly as murder?  The outcome is the same--an innocent person is dead and it could've been prevented.  What's more, negligence is often driven by the same greed, egoism & disregard for human life as murder... all that's missing is a plot to kill the victim.  And the outcome is the same.

Near the end of the film the question is posed:  "How many lives do we have to lose?"  I wanted to know so I did some digging.  Since this documentary was made in 1989, a horrifying number of lives have been lost on movie sets, including most famously that of actor Brandon Lee in 1994, but I was shocked to see how many lesser known deaths have occurred.  They include death by electrocution, exhaustion-induced car wreck, jousting accident, staged explosions gone wrong, balcony falls, accidental shootings & many more helicopter crashes.  And those victims were arguably the lucky ones.  

The survivors often fared even worse, incurring catastrophic brain damage, 3rd degree burns & other life ruining injuries.  The fact that these cases rarely make headlines because they involve lowly extras or stuntmen instead of big stars like Alec Baldwin should trouble us all.  Some of the victims were bystanders not involved in the film at all, which means the unsafe practices of the movie industry are endangering society as a whole.  No fictional piece of entertainment is worth a real person's life.  

Maybe if this film wasn't banned by HBO way back in 1989, awareness would've been brought to this issue sooner & some of these deaths could've been prevented.  The very fact that there is (or was?) a "Banned Film Festival" in what's supposed to be a free country is a whole other problem.  More docs like this and less Tiger King, please.