‘Twilight’ Jurors See Film of Rehearsals, Crash

For 56 minutes, the entire time they spent Wednesday watching film of helicopter overflights and loud special-effects explosions, the jurors in the “Twilight Zone” manslaughter trial were silent.

From their seats near the darkened front of a theater in Beverly Hills the jurors and the five defendants, including director John Landis, viewed several rehearsal runs with explosions and helicopter overflights before they were shown footage from six cameras of the actual helicopter crash that killed actor Vic Morrow and two children.

The unusual court session, open to the press but not the public for security reasons, took place in the 1,100-seat Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Superior Court Judge Roger W. Boren had allowed the special session after he agreed with the prosecutor that jurors could better view the film clips in the theater than on the small screens of courtroom television monitors.

No one knows what the jurors thought about what they saw. They looked solemn as they left the theater, keeping their silence.

But lawyers for both the prosecution and the defendants said they believed that the film clips supported their cases.

“I honestly don’t know of a more important piece of evidence,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Lea D’Agostino. She said jurors had seen “the kind of setting in which they put these two little babies and Vic Morrow.” The prosecution has maintained that the defendants were so anxious to create spectacular special effects that they disregarded the safety of the actors.

The defense, however, contends that the helicopter crash was an unforeseeable accident.

James Neal, attorney for Landis, said the film showed that the accident could not have been predicted, adding: “It’s very, very tragic. The more you see of it, the more you realize that.”

Morrow, 53; Renee Chen, 6, and Myca Le, 7 were killed July 23, 1982, when the helicopter crashed on top of them as they crossed a stream during filming of a war scene at a mock Vietnamese village movie set 35 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

Landis, associate producer George Folsey, unit production manager Dan Allingham, special effects coordinator Paul Stewart and helicopter pilot Dorcey Wingo are charged with involuntary manslaughter.

In the film the jurors watched Wednesday, Landis could be seen after the crash rushing to the spot where the victims were cut down by a rotor blade and shouting to assistants. Among others seen rushing to the site are the screaming parents of the two children.

Defense attorneys had said Tuesday that they were concerned about some of the intentional distortion Landis put into the film, which they say makes it appear that Morrow and the children were in greater danger than they actually were.

But Boren rejected additional expert testimony, noting that the camera operators and sound technicians who filmed and recorded the sequence had already testified about the effects of certain lenses and recording techniques.