WI/AHC John Landis found guilty in "Twilight Zone" movie case.

The 1983 accident on the set of "Twilight Zone: The Movie" is notable for not only being one of the worst tragedies in American film history, but also for involving some of Hollywood's biggest names at the time.

While directing a segment for the movie John Landis (Animal House, Blues Brothers, American Werewolf In London) through a shocking degree of negligence and incompetence led to a helicopter crashing on and killing 3 actors, including two illegally hired children. Somehow Landis was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter. The film industry went on to introduce new safety standards.

Would Landis being convicted change anything?



(Extremely long if gripping article on the case here

https://web.archive.org/web/2012011...ious_murders/not_guilty/twilight_zone/1.html?

Shorter article focusing on the long term effects

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...w_s_death_changed_the_way_films_are_made.html

)
 
Would Landis being convicted change anything?

With Landis being found guilty of the charges of involuntary manslaughter and violated the California law regulating employment of children, by using the children after hours and directing them near explosives.

Landis' profits from the film "Trading Places" would be placed into a foundation set up by the two parents of 7-year-old Myca Dinh Le and 6-year-old Renee Shin-Yi Chen in honour of their children.
 
Reading this the easiest way to do to convict John Landis is to indict him for the underlying violation of the law and make the instructions to the jury a bit clearer.

Landis violated the law in hiring the actors. This isn't a matter up for interpretation. But he wasn't indicted on that count.

Had he been he would have spent at least ten days in Jail. But Landis didn't even pay the penalty for that.

It might well have helped the rest of the Prosecution's case had Landis been facing a certain conviction on that violation.

But the other major problem appears to have been instructions to the jury.

The jury thought that Landis had to have known that the children's death was a likely possibility. Not just that there was a reasonable expedition of danger-but that Landis had to have known how likely the outcome was.

The Jury did not believe he did. But the Judge's instructions apparently were more along the lines of reasonable expectation than conscious active awareness.

I'm not a lawyer-and I'm not familiar with the law in question or what you need to prove to obtain a conviction. But if the burden of proof regarding how aware Landis had to be in an active sense then the jury was always going to acquit. That standard is a difficult threshold to meet since Landis and his legal team can always argue that he didn't know what the danger was-in effect that he was just that ignorant.

From what I can tell Landis was either innocent of manslaughter full stop or he could have been convicted on the reasonable expectation guideline.

At minimum he should have spent his ten days in jail.

As for the effect the broad impact on film is probably similar.

Some ideas on what could change:

If Landis is indicted and convicted for what he unquestionably did-rather than what he arguably did there might be some larger impact on the hiring of child actors-hard to see what that would be-but seeing someone go jail for breaking the child labor law might discourage other directors from doing what Landis did.

The other more immediate impact is that Landis' most significant films after his acquittal were Eddie Murphy vehicles. Coming to America, Beverley Hills Cop III. So the immediate question is where Murphy's career goes without Landis around.

Three Amigos was finished around the time of his acquittal so that's the last Landis film.

I'd say the sales of his work would suffer-but I doubt anyone is going to not buy the VHS tape of Animal House because John Landis is in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

The press around Three Amigos might center around Landis' conviction which can't help the film-but at the time that was a flop. Not sure how much news of Landis' conviction would hurt immediate ticket sales. But there might be a small effect there.

What was the sentence Landis was looking at? How long is he going away? Five years? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Life?
 
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