The death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust came as a shock to many outside the film industry, but the tragic truth is that this was just one of many untimely deaths associated with the motion picture business.

Statistically, those from the camera department are losing their lives in even greater numbers than stunt people – in the USA, twice as many in the ten years to 2021. Famous faces are not usually involved, as was the case with Alec Baldwin, and the names of the victims are not well-known.

On-set deaths are often put down to accidental causes, but in reality commercial pressures are often implicated, at the expense of safety. In 2014 camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed by a speeding freight train while filming a scene for Midnight Rider, which was later abandoned. In 2005, the cinematographer who made his name with The Blair Witch Project, Neal Fredericks, died in a plane crash while filming CrossBones. In recent years, crew members have died shooting everything from commercials to reality TV to documentaries.

These kinds of tragedies have a long and awful history. In 1930, four cameramen died when two camera planes collided and crashed into the sea while filming Such Men Are Dangerous. A year later, camera operator Alexander Penrod and 26 other crew members were killed in an accident involving dynamite, off the coast of Newfoundland.

No one died shooting the chariot race in the 1959 Ben-Hur film, as is commonly thought, but a stuntman did die while making the 1925 version, along with five horses.

More recently, numerous crew and cast members have been killed at work in helicopter and car accidents. There is the famous case of The Twilight Zone, in which three people died in a helicopter crash while shooting at 2am, including two children who shouldn't have even been on the set. Director John Landis was eventually exonerated, in spite of damning testimony from witnesses and experts.

In Australia, camera operator David Brustoff lost his life at Parramatta Raceway while filming Midnite Spares in 1983 (the coroner acquitted the producers, despite evidence of negligence). George Miller's business partner, producer Byron Kennedy, crashed his helicopter into a lake and died while scouting locations for Mad Max 3.

Australian director Alex Proyas was behind the lens when Brandon Lee was shot by a malfunctioning blank on The Crow. The actor later succumbed to his wounds, and had his part in the film completed digitally.

In the Chinese film industry, hard numbers about cast and crew safety lapses are hard to find, but anecdotally at least, things are worse. In Hong Kong, cinematographer Chan Kwok-Hung drowned in 2014 while working on the Jackie Chan vehicle Skiptrace. The Indian TV drama The Sword of Tipu Sultan went into the record books in the worst possible way when 62 cast and crew died in a set fire.

On the 1981 film Roar, no humans died, but 70 cast and crew members were injured, some seriously, mostly by the animal co-stars.

Is any movie worth dying for?

It's important to remember that not all deaths happen on set. In 1997 the second assistant cameraman on Pleasantville, Brent Hershman, died when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a power pole, having just worked a 19 hour day, following four other very long shooting days.

This tragedy briefly brought an ongoing problem into the spotlight, when it inspired the famous cinematographer and union activist Haskell Wexler to make a film about fatigue issues in his industry, called Who Needs Sleep? Ironically, while he was making that, Wexler also had a fatigue related car accident.

Since then, there have been some improvements for some film workers in some jurisdictions, but horror stories continue to emerge, including among writers in the current strike. Increasingly, crew members on the post-production side of the industry are also suffering, with over 100 animators reportedly walking off the recent Across the Spider-Verse film due to impossible, non-unionised working conditions.

As well as the official and rising number of deaths on movie sets (350+), there are less clearcut associated tragedies, such as those of the numerous cast and crew members of The Conqueror who developed cancer after shooting on a nuclear testing site in the Utah desert.

Those who died before their time included Susan Hayward (brain cancer, at 57) and John Wayne (stomach cancer). While Wayne was also a heavy smoker, his sons came down with tumours after being filmed playing with radioactive rocks on the location. Ninety-one out of the 220 people who worked on the film developed some form of cancer.

The Conqueror's only other claim to fame is being regularly named as one of the 50 worst films of all time, made worse by the fact that producer Howard Hughes knew the site was potentially dangerous and decided to film there anyway.

While producers and directors usually wriggle free of all liabilities in cases of cast and crew deaths, due to having the best legal representation, there has been some incremental progress in the courts. The director and producer of Midnight Rider, Randall Miller, went to prison for a year after pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter. The Safety for Sarah movement is continuing to fight for the right of crew members to be safe at work, and gun safety protocols have been tightened since the deaths of Brandon Lee and Halyna Hutchins.

The underlying problem remains however, with the surface glamour of the film industry disguising the meatgrinder of capitalism beneath. The fact is that the dream factory is largely operated by poorly paid and exploited technical workers, whose lives are made more dangerous by the illusion (common to almost all film makers in creative and business roles) that what they are doing is the most important thing in the world.

While that fantasy remains, almost anything can be excused.

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I wrote this essay in July 2023. Artwork created with Midjourney AI.

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