Landis Plan for Hiring 2 Children Told

“Twilight Zone” movie director John Landis gruffly told a casting director, “The hell with you,” when she refused to cast two children for a dangerous war scene, saying he would hire them illegally “off the streets,” the woman testified Wednesday.

Prosecutors at the involuntary manslaughter trial of Landis and four others charged that the director later carried out his threat and hired two Vietnamese children to act in the scene.

Renee Chen, 6, Myca Dinh Lee, 7, and actor Vic Morrow were killed on the set of “Twilight Zone: The Movie” on July 23, 1982, when a helicopter being used in the Vietnam War scene became crippled by a special-effects explosion and crashed on top of them.

Marci Liroff, who has cast actors for such films as “E.T.,” “Poltergeist” and “Indiana Jones,” testified that she met with Landis 10 to 15 times in June, 1982, to discuss casting for “Twilight Zone.”

War Scene

At one such meeting on June 16, 1982, she said Landis asked her and her boss, Mike Fenton, to hire two children for the Vietnam War scene. She said Landis wanted Morrow, who portrayed a racist in the movie, to save the children in order to soften up his character.

She said Landis--whom she described as “a very good storyteller”--vividly described the scene and said the three actors would be “pursued by American soldiers who were in a helicopter and were shooting at them from the helicopter and the ground and explosions going off all around them.”

“I explained that to hire the children would be illegal due to the hours of the shooting,” Liroff testified. “I wouldn’t be able to get work permits for them. I also mentioned that it sounded kind of dangerous to me.”

She said she asked Landis if the children would have any speaking lines and when he replied no, Fenton said he would not cast children for the roles because “we don’t hire extras.”

Unit production manager Dan Allingham then came into the meeting, she testified, and began discussing the idea of hiring the children with Landis and associate producer George Folsey.

“Mr. Landis said . . . ‘We’ll take care of it; we’ll hire the kids,’ ” Liroff testified. “Mr. Folsey said, ‘We won’t tell anybody; we won’t put their names on the production reports. We’ll pay them with petty cash.’

“He (Landis) was a little gruff because . . . we wouldn’t cast the children, and he said, ‘The hell with you guys; we’ll get them off the streets ourselves.’ ”

Folsey and Allingham are two of Landis’s co-defendants. The other two defendants in the case are special-effects coordinator Paul Stewart and helicopter pilot Dorcey Wingo.

Landis, 36, believed to be the first director ever tried in a death on a movie set, is charged with five counts of involuntary manslaughter.