The recent indictment of Alec Baldwin has brought to light numerous other
incidents in which movie people were taken into custody. These
are just a few of the most notorious and unusual cases of on-set arrests to date.
In 2021, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed when a prop gun held by actor Alec Baldwin
discharged during the making of the Western movie Rust. The accident drew intense scrutiny
by both legal and media professionals, who opined furiously over issues of set safety and debated
who bears responsibility for the accident. Baldwin was handed what he believed to be a "cold gun,"
or one without live ammunition. He claimed no responsibility for the shooting, sought to avoid
financial responsibility for Hutchins' death, and even sued crew members over claims of negligence.
"I think with Rust it was a perfect storm of, you know,
the armorer, the assistant director, the culture that was on set, the rushing."
The Times quoted investigators' interviews with the film's armorer,
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who claimed she loaded and checked the gun, but added,
"I wish I would've checked it more."
In January 2023, prosecutors in New Mexico, where the accident occurred, announced they sought to
charge Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed with involuntary manslaughter. Officials revealed that the prop gun
involved in the shooting could not have discharged ammunition without its trigger being pulled.
"The trigger wasn't pulled. I didn't pull the trigger."
Baldwin has vehemently denied doing so, but Santa Fe County district attorney
Mary Carmack-Altwies has claimed that Baldwin should have properly checked the gun. However,
Baldwin's assertion that actors have never been responsible for gun safety on sets is
backed by the actors union, SAG-AFTRA. The union issued a statement that noted,
"An actor's job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert."
The Rust case remains ongoing.
While filming a segment for the 1983 anthology film Twilight Zone: The Movie,
actor Vic Morrow and two child performers were killed during a sequence in which
Morrow's character and the children run to a waiting helicopter. The chopper was
incapacitated by special effects explosions and plummeted to the ground, killing Morrow,
six-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen, and seven-year-old Myca Dinh Le.
The tragedy led to indictments for involuntary manslaughter for director John Landis,
the helicopter's pilot, Dorcey Wingo, and three others involved with the film. The
10-month trial was closely followed by the media and members of the film industry — and in the end,
all five defendants were acquitted. Landis went on to direct Coming to America and
other projects — though for some defendants, the case spelled the end of their careers.
"I'm sorry. I think it's inappropriate for me, at this time, to say anything."
The deadly Twilight Zone accident inspired change in the industry. John Silva, a vice-president
at Warner Bros., which released Twilight Zone, created a committee to establish on-set safety
standards. With the help of the unions, Silva and the committee laid the groundwork for the Injury
and Illness Prevention Program (IIPP), a set of guidelines issued to studios and regularly updated
to reflect developing standards. Though injuries and even fatalities have continued to occur on
movie sets, the IIPP has led to greater attention to safety in the film and television workplace.
Although he's known today as an Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker, as well as an outspoken
social and political activist, Sean Penn's early career was marked by altercations with the media
and the public. The mid-1980s, in particular, saw Penn charged with misdemeanor assault and battery
on several occasions, including a fight with an extra on the set of the Dennis Hopper-directed
film Colors in 1987. An extra on the film photographed Penn and co-star Robert Duvall during
a break in filming, but Penn reportedly objected and spat at him before striking him several times.
The assault charge violated Penn's probation on a previous battery charge,
which he had already broken due to misdemeanor charges
of reckless driving and driving under the influence of alcohol in May 1987.
"I did some bad things."
Municipal Court Commissioner Juelann Cathey sentenced the actor to 60 days in jail for
the assault and reckless driving charges, and imposed an additional two years' probation.
The incident would be Penn's last visit to court until 2009, when he was given 36 months
probation and 300 hours of community service for assaulting a photographer.
A chorus of mixed and dismissive reviews wasn't the only indignity Ryan Gosling
experienced as a result of his 2014 directorial debut with the experimental feature Lost River.
Gosling was arrested while scouting locations for the project in Detroit,
Michigan, where he had recently filmed George Clooney's 2011 feature The Ides
of March. Gosling remained in Detroit after that film wrapped to shoot footage of empty
buildings throughout the city that appears in the opening of Lost River.
"We're gonna be fine. We have to do it. It's the right thing to
do. And nothing bad happens when you're doing the right thing."
Unfortunately, Gosling ran afoul of Detroit police. According to the actor,
he was arrested for allegedly trying to steal copper wire from an abandoned
location. Gosling told the Los Angeles Times,
"I'm not proud that I was arrested,
but it did give me one of the central pieces for the main character [in Lost River]."
In the film, Iain De Caestecker plays a teenager who scrounges
burnt-out buildings for wire in order to help his mother make ends meet.
The 2014 death of camera assistant Sarah Jones on the set of Midnight Rider made
director Randall Miller the only filmmaker in motion picture history to receive a
prison sentence for an on-set fatality. Jones was struck and killed by a train
on the first day of filming on Rider, a biopic of rocker Gregg Allman. Charges
of criminal trespassing and involuntary manslaughter were filed against Miller,
his wife, producer Jody Savin, and two other members of the production team.
"He had been told, 'Don't go on those tracks,' and he did anyway."
In exchange for dropping the charges against Savin,
Miller agreed to a plea deal that sentenced him to two years in jail and eight years probation.
Miller spent a year behind bars before his release in 2016,
though he returned to court in 2021 for violating one of the terms of his probation,
which was to refrain from directing films until the completion of his sentence. Miller directed
the 2019 feature Higher Grounds, but avoided returning to prison because he thought he
was only forbidden from overseeing any safety precautions on the production.
According to Deadline, more than 80 people have died due to on-set accidents in the past hundred
years. But prior to Miller's conviction, only two people had been prosecuted on such
charges. Pathé Film Studio vice president John C. Flinn and production manager Harry Lalley,
who were indicted for second-degree manslaughter in 1929, when a fire at
their studio killed 10 people. The charges were later dismissed by the New York Court of Appeals.
Before he helped to revolutionize the modern horror movie with his zombie films,
including Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, writer-director George A. Romero was
a New York City boy dreaming of a career in the movies. He was inspired in part by
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's vibrant fantasy Tales of Hoffman, of which he later said,
"That made me feel that, gee, maybe I could figure this medium out."
"Everyone says, 'What?' But that's my favorite film of all time. It's a fantasy film."
Like countless other would-be filmmakers,
Romero borrowed a camera and began experimenting. One of his earliest efforts,
an 8mm science fiction film called The Man from the Meteor, led to his first arrest. He told NPR,
"The man from the meteor was ultimately shot with
his own ray gun and fell flaming off the roof where I lived."
To get the shot, Romero lit a dummy on fire and threw it off the top of a building
without obtaining permission from the NYPD, who quickly arrested the 14-year-old. As he recalled,
"I was hauled away by the police and my parents were called. It wasn't
a serious arrest. I didn't have to spend the night in jail or anything."
Director Ruggero Deodato's 1980 horror-exploitation film Cannibal Holocaust
helped create the found-footage subgenre. It presented an extremely convincing, but entirely
fake documentary about a team of rogue filmmakers tormenting indigenous people and animals in
the Amazon jungle before receiving a gruesome comeuppance at the hands of a cannibalistic tribe.
"It's unbelievable. It's – it's horrible."
The film's extreme violence, which unfortunately included some real
animal deaths, looked so convincing to authorities in Deodato's native
Italy that he was charged with murdering his cast members and faced a 30-year sentence.
Charges were dropped after Deodato produced the actors who played the four slain filmmakers in
Cannibal Holocaust, though he still received a four-month suspended sentence on obscenity charges
and was fined for animal cruelty. Cannibal Holocaust was banned in Italy until 1984,
and remains available only in edited form in many countries,
including the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
Before filmmaker John Waters inspired the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical
Hairspray with his 1988 film of the same name, he was known for a
string of transgressive underground films like Female Trouble, Polyester, and Pink Flamingos.
"Could you give us some of your political beliefs?"
"Kill everyone now. Condone first degree murder."
Waters's early films skewered notions of gender, class, and politics with a gleeful mix of bad
taste and anarchic humor, which often ran afoul of censor boards. His vision landed him in hot
water with the police in his hometown of Baltimore during the making of his 1969 film Mondo Trasho.
"I thought, 'What can we do that isn't against the law yet?'
Something that will really freak people out."
In his hilarious 1981 memoir Shock Value, Waters explained that Trasho,
his first feature-length film, featured a scene in which his frequent star,
the formidable drag performer Divine, ran over a nude male hitchhiker. Waters decided to film the
scene on the campus of Johns Hopkins University, which resulted in his arrest for conspiracy to
commit indecent exposure and accusations that he and his friends were making pornography.
The ever-shrewd Waters contacted the American Civil Liberties Union for his defense,
and the resulting trial earned coverage in Variety and other major publications.
Waters torched the district attorney's case by screening one of his early films,
Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, which proved trashy and self-consciously
arty but definitely not obscene. Waters told the Johns Hopkins Hub,
"They were so disappointed."
Indie filmmaker Timothy Christian characterized his decision to use a quiet neighborhood in St.
Paul, Minnesota as the setting for a major action sequence in his 2013 action-drama, The Minnesota
Delivery, as spur of the moment. Unfortunately, Christian's burst of inspiration also caused
him to forget two important facts: permits are required to shoot a movie in a residential area,
and homeowners tend to freak out at the sight of armed strangers running amok on their lawns.
The St. Paul police were summoned to the North End neighborhood on September 27,
2013, where, according to investigators' reports:
"[They found] four individuals [...] some armed with handguns,
taking cover behind a vehicle while pointing the weapon."
Christian and three of his actors were held in jail for about 48 hours but were never
charged. They eventually recovered their equipment, including his digital camera and
footage of the action scene. Christian told the Twin Cities Pioneer Press,
"We ended up using the shot. I think it was worth it."
The footage wasn't the only souvenir from his run-in with the police:
Christian also used a quote from a police officer on the film's promotional material. It read,
"It did create a lot of fear in the neighborhood."
As co-founder and CEO of Death Row Records, Marion "Suge" Knight was a powerhouse in
the 1990s gangsta rap scene, overseeing chart-topping releases by artists like
Dr. Dre [dray, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur. Knight had a reputation for ruthlessness and
was reportedly linked to the deaths of Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.,
two groundbreaking rappers whose murders remain unsolved to this day.
"Not guilty, not guilty, not guilty."
In 2015, Knight was charged with murder, attempted murder, and hit-and-run after
an altercation with two men that began on the set of Straight Outta Compton,
a feature about the influential rap group N.W.A. After feuding with record label
owner Terry Carter and Cle "Bone" Sloan, a consultant on Compton, Knight got in his car
and followed the men to a restaurant near the set. Video taken at the scene showed
Knight's car running over Sloan twice and then hitting Carter, who later died of his injuries.
Knight was out on bail in a robbery case at the time of the accident that,
in addition to previous convictions, subjected him to California's notorious "three strikes"
law. In 2015, facing the possibility of a life sentence, Knight pleaded no contest to the
manslaughter charge and agreed to serve 28 years in prison. According to the California Department
of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Knight will not be eligible for parole until 2034.