Court Told of Repeated Warning on Use of Children in ‘Twilight’ Scene

An assistant director for the “Twilight Zone” movie testified Wednesday that he repeatedly warned his superiors of the danger of using children in the filming of a Vietnam battle scene involving helicopters and explosives but was told that the subject was “closed.”

“I was told that what we were doing was safe. . . . People were tired of listening to me,” said Anderson House, who served as second assistant director on the movie set where actor Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed in July, 1982.

House, who has worked in the movie industry since 1970, was the first crew member to tell a Los Angeles Superior Court jury that he expressed concern about possible safety hazards on the set. He said he voiced his worries to Dan Allingham, the unit production manager, but “Dan told me he wanted to close the subject.”

Allingham, director John Landis, associate producer George Folsey Jr., helicopter pilot Dorcey A. Wingo and special effects coordinator Paul Stewart are accused of involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of Morrow, 53; Myca Dinh Lee, 7, and Renee Chin, 6.

In one conversation, House said, he suggested that dummies be substituted for the children Morrow was to carry across the river during what was supposed to be the film’s final scene. He said Allingham told him: “Dummies looked like dummies, they did not look like the real thing. They would not have satisfied the demands of the script.”

House also said he wrote in a memo to Allingham--and mentioned to at least four other colleagues--that he recognized one of the fire safety inspectors on the set as someone who also worked as a teacher and welfare worker. This inspector, House warned, “would take whatever steps were necessary to shut the set down” because children were working on the set illegally.

But House never took his complaints directly to Landis, he testified. “I just wasn’t up to questioning John Landis on the subject,” he said. “ . . . I was intimidated.”

Under cross-examination, House acknowledged that his “primary concern” was the illegal employment of the child actors. “If I had believed the helicopter was going to fall down and kill somebody, I wouldn’t have been a part of it,” he said.

House said he would not have been opposed if the scene had included stunt men instead of children because “they would have made their own decision about whether they were willing to take part in that shot.”

In further testimony, the witness said that while standing in the middle of the river he overheard special-effects coordinator Stewart tell Landis that he could not place explosives under a hut in a mock Vietnam village because it would “throw debris in the area” and create a hazard for the low-flying helicopter.

But under cross-examination, House said it was possible that his recollection of the conversation had been influenced by newspaper articles he read after the crash.