Steven Spielberg (67 page)

“In response to your request, I was never at the Indian Dunes location of
Twilight
Zone
on the night of the accident or at any other time.

“I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct, executed at Los Angeles, California, this first day of December, 1982.”

Throughout the five-year investigation and ten-month trial, no evidence was ever found or presented directly linking Spielberg to any criminal act relating to the accident. But despite the fact that he produced the
Twilight
Zone
movie with Landis, Spielberg was never interviewed about the accident by any governmental agency, he was not called to testify at the trial, and he did not even have to give a deposition in the civil suits resulting from the
accident. Explaining the seeming lack of interest in Spielberg displayed by the Sheriff's Department, the lead homicide detective investigating the case, Sergeant Tom Budds, said, “There is no indication that Spielberg even knew anything about the hiring of the children.”

Spielberg's ability to distance himself from the case, and his almost total public silence on the accident, were enough to raise lingering questions in some people's minds. “Was the NTSB following commands from Washington in order to protect some powerful individual in Hollywood?” Stephen Farber and Marc Green asked in their 1988 book
Outrageous
Conduct:
Art,
Ego,
and
the
“Twilight 
Zone”
Case.
“Rumors to that effect were bandied about when it was learned that Steven Spielberg had managed to avoid being questioned by the Safety Board.”

The fact that some of Spielberg's closest associates—including his right-hand man, Frank Marshall—were involved with the hiring of the children was the principal reason such questions continued to be raised. In 1985, Landis's defense attorney Harland Braun publicly demanded that the district attorney's office investigate Spielberg's possible involvement in the hiring of the children, even though the statute of limitations had expired on that matter. Charging that the office's investigation of the crash was “consciously truncated,” Braun wrote in a November 20, 1985, letter to chief deputy district attorney Gilbert Garcetti that Spielberg “was able to deflect the investigation away from himself by simply submitting a letter stating that he was not on the set the night of the accident. His full and complete knowledge and approval of what was to take place must be assumed and never has been disputed.

“What other major witness could avoid questioning by signing a piece of paper? Your office never asked Spielberg a single question about the accident or the hiring of the children. Your claim that Spielberg was ‘unavailable' is simply false.”

Braun later declared, “If Frank Marshall went out on a Spielberg movie and hired kids illegally who ended up being killed, and Spielberg didn't know about it, he would can Marshall immediately. It's clear that Marshall and [Kathleen] Kennedy [who was associate producer on Spielberg's segment] told Spielberg.” Folsey, Landis's associate producer and codefendant, similarly insisted, “We wouldn't have hired the kids on a Spielberg picture unless either Spielberg or his people knew it. I mean, that would have been a terrible thing to do, put them in that position. The fact that Frank agreed to do it made me feel that it was OK, that it was really his responsibility, too.”

The complicated hiring process began five weeks before the accident, when Landis and Folsey described the scene involving the children to casting directors Mike Fenton and Marci Liroff. Liroff, who had worked on
E.T.
and
Poltergeist,
told the filmmakers that working children late at night was illegal under California labor laws. She added that the scene “sounded kind of dangerous.” Since the children did not have speaking parts, Fenton told
Landis and Folsey, “Then they're extras, and our office doesn't hire extras.” “The hell with you guys,” Landis gruffly replied. “We don't need you. We'll get them off the streets ourselves.” Liroff subsequently repeated her objections to Marshall, who told her, “I will check it out.”

According to Folsey, Kennedy, at Marshall's request, called the state labor commission and asked if waivers could be issued for children to work at night. She was told children that young would not be allowed to work late at night. As a result, Landis admitted in court, “We decided to break the law. We decided, wrongly, to violate the labor code…. I thought, and we discussed, that we would honor not the letter of the law but the spirit of the law. And I thought, and we discussed, that we would find children whose parents—we would explain to them that we were doing a technical violation, that we were working them without a teacher on the set—explain to them what we were going to do.” The parents, he said, would “be the guardians, be there with them on the set…. Frank and George volunteered to try and find people.”

Three days before the accident, Marshall's accountant, Bonne Radford, who worked out of Spielberg's offices, asked veteran Warner Bros, production manager James Henderling if child extras could be hired outside of the auspices of the Screen Extras Guild. Henderling said any children hired, whether through the guild or not, would require work permits from the labor commission. After speaking to Marshall, Radford told Henderling no children were going to be hired after all.

The two children, who had no acting experience, were recruited through Dr. Harold Schuman, the psychiatrist husband of Folsey's production secretary, Donna Schuman. The money to pay the children's parents came from the production's petty cash funds, on a check made payable to Folsey and cosigned by Marshall and Henderling. Henderling later said he had suspicions about what the money might be used for, but was told by his superior, Edward Morey, to sign the check on the grounds that a producer could not be refused petty cash. The check was cashed by Radford (a longtime Spielberg aide, she still works for him today). A sealed envelope containing twenty $100 bills was picked up at Spielberg's offices by a Landis assistant, Carolyn Epstein, who passed it to Folsey for payment to the children's parents.

The parents testified that they were not told work permits for their children were required by law and that they were not informed how dangerous the scene might be. That did not stop defense attorneys from trying to shift part of the blame for the accident onto the children's parents for allowing the youngsters to participate in the scene. In response to a wrongful-death suit filed against Spielberg and others by the parents of Renee Chen, Spielberg's attorneys filed a legal brief stating:

“Spielberg is informed and believes and thereon alleges that at the time and place of the events complained of, plaintiffs [the Chen and Le families]
and each of them were not exercising ordinary care, caution or prudence to prevent the injuries sustained by them or by decedent and that, therefore, the injuries alleged were proximately caused by the negligence or comparative negligence of the plaintiffs.”

In its response to the suit filed by the parents of the same six-year-old victim, Warner Bros. Inc. went even farther, arguing with stunning callousness, “That if the plaintiffs suffered or sustained any loss, damage or injury … the risk, if any risk there was, was knowingly assumed by the decedent, Renee Shin-Yi Chen.”

As the circuitous trail of responsibility for the hiring of the children shows, although the money for their payment was routed through Spielberg's office, and although some of his closest aides were involved in the hiring, no direct involvement by Spielberg was found in those processes. That still left open the key question posed by Farber and Green: As one of the movie's producers,
“shouldn't
Spielberg have known that his associates were planning to violate the child labor laws? Whether Spielberg intentionally turned a blind eye to the illegal hiring of children or was too busy to keep himself informed, his behavior did not reflect well on him.”

The
Los
Angeles
Times
reported in 1985 that according to Gary Kesselman, the first prosecutor assigned to the case, “Investigators attempted to interview Marshall and Spielberg but were unsuccessful because the men were either unavailable or out of the country when the grand jury was conducting its deliberations.” The investigation was hampered by Marshall's repeated evasion of attempts by Budds to question him about the hiring process and about what he had seen as an eyewitness to the accident. During much of the investigation, Marshall was out of the country producing the next movie Spielberg directed,
Indiana
Jones
and
the
Temple
of
Doom,
and the Amblin Entertainment production
Who
Framed
Roger
Rabbit.
While the trial was underway, Marshall was out of the country with Spielberg, making
Empire
of
the
Sun
in China, Spain, and England.

In June 1986, Detective Budds traveled to London to arrange for Marshall to be served with a subpoena at the St. James Club, where the producer was staying during the preproduction of
Roger
Rabbit.
When an employee of the U.S. embassy went to the club to deliver the subpoena, Marshall said he was not receiving visitors that morning, but would see her if she came back later in the day. In less than half an hour, he checked out of the club and left for Paris on a private jet operated by Spielberg's film company, Amblin Entertainment.

Marshall made no public comment on the
Twilight
Zone
accident until he told the
Los
Angeles
Times
in 1990 it was “terrible and horrible for everybody. But it was an accident. Which is eventually what the jury decided.” He also said he had been in Los Angeles for two years after the accident, “and nobody ever talked to me.” After that, he said, he was “inaccessible” making movies abroad, “And I didn't really feel that I had anything to add that wasn't
already out there [other] than what had already been revealed.”
†††
Marshall's evasiveness during the
Twilight
Zone
investigation, Farber and Green wrote, “was not illegal. But, as [sheriff's detective] Tom Budds says, ‘it certainly is less than meeting your civic responsibility.' The actions of Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg lent credence to what cynics have long suspected, and what the
Twilight
Zone
trial would attempt to refute: Some people in Hollywood may indeed be above the law.”

T
HE
acquittals in the criminal cases against Landis and the others came as a shock to many observers. In media postmortems, prosecutor Lea Purwin D'Agostino was singled out for heavy criticism. A lengthy analysis by Gay Jervey in
The
American
Lawyer,
“Misfire in the Twilight Zone,” carried the subhead, “How the Los Angeles D.A.'s office—and prosecutor Lea D'Agostino—blew the case against John Landis.” D'Agostino's flamboyant, often abrasive courtroom style was considered a liability by many observers, as was her tendency to make provocative statements to reporters. She was accused of overtrying the case by calling too many witnesses, muddying the impact of the basic allegations, and acting as if she were prosecuting a murder case, not a manslaughter case. The district attorney's office was faulted for what Jervey called its “critical decision … not to charge the defendants with the one crime of which they were indisputably guilty: illegally hiring the children.” One of the jurors, Lauretta Hudson, commented, “I still say and will always say that their asses could have been in jail, and should have, but not for what they were accused of.”

Shortly after the verdict, D'Agostino said, “You've got a situation where three people died because they were placed twenty-four feet under a helicopter which has a main rotor blade that's four feet longer than the courtroom, forty-four feet, with gigantic bombs going off a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet in the air at 2:20 in the morning. How can anyone tell me that it is not reckless? If I live to be a thousand years old, I will not accept that.”

In the final analysis, however, the case may have been decided by the testimony of James Camomile, the special-effects technician who set off the explosive charges. Under a grant of immunity that backfired against the prosecution, Camomile testified he was wearing a welder's hood at the time of the accident and did not look up at the low-flying helicopter just before he detonated an explosive underneath it in the set of the Vietnamese
village. The resulting explosion hurled debris from the set and sent a fireball into the path of the helicopter; according to differing theories of the accident, either the debris or the fireball could have caused the helicopter to crash.

Camomile's immunized testimony made him a handy scapegoat, enabling Landis to blame him for the crash. The jury was not swayed by testimony by crew members that Landis, in staging the scene, had behaved in reckless disregard of safety considerations. Crew members testified Landis had joked before the accident, “Well, we may lose the helicopter,” and that during the scene he had shouted over a bullhorn to the helicopter pilot, “Lower! Lower! Lower!”

Reaching for a cinematic comparison to describe the jury's action in acquitting him, Landis told the press it was “like a Frank Capra movie.” But he added more soberly that the crash “changed everyone's life connected with it. No deceptions, no lies, no overt chicanery is going to change the fact that three people died in a terrible accident.”

Although Spielberg and Landis had to confer occasionally during postproduction on the
Twilight
Zone
movie, it became increasingly obvious as time went on that Spielberg wanted to distance himself as much as possible from Landis.