LY #123 Death and the Movies

Maybe you missed the pop-up Sunday night, the one that appeared right after Bette Midler sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" and right before a commercial.  This announcement of the death of Sarah Jones was added in this afterthought to the In Memoriam sequence of Oscar's broadcast.

Why add the name of a minor player, a mere second camera assistant, lowest of the low, to this august list the recently dead?

Maybe it has something to do with the massive online campaign by others in the industry, especially other p.a.s, to get her name added.  A social media movement called Slates for Sarah pushed for Sara Jones to be remembered publicly.

And maybe it has something to do with the long film-making tradition of considering the injuries and deaths of crew folk and actors just collateral damage in service to the "vision" of directors and producers.

For those who haven't heard yet, Sarah Jones was killed on February 20 when a train struck her while she was setting up a shot on a trestle in Georgia.  It sounds as though the director and producer did not have the proper permissions nor had they established proper safety precautions for the crew but that issue will, of course, be settled by investigation and in a court of law.  Bloggers in the industry have responded with horror and warnings.  The Anonymous Production Assistant tells all people working on a movie set to "just say no" if they think the conditions are unsafe, all the while admitting that this is a very difficult thing for young people in the business to say.  Scout, producer and photographer Jamie Vesay considers anyone putting others in harms way unprofessional.  Writing "An Open Letter to Young Filmmakers," Vesay calls on producers, directors and photographers to "Stop putting people in harms way" and noting that

"My plea is not exclusively to moviemakers. I have seen many photographers shooting local fashion or the next music video – draping their models on train tracks or having them swim in a polluted, high current river. Graduation and engagement pictures are being taken on rickety fire escapes or in abandoned private properties that have weak floors, broken glass, and numerous environmental hazards."

It's that vision thing, I think, the idea that what's cool is what's right, no matter the risk.  And there's also the concern among some that it's time consuming, difficult, and occasionally expensive to get permissions and take safety precautions.  So lives are put at risk these days in the name of "guerrilla filmmaking," independent work done on shoestring budgets.  But lives have also been put at risk time and time again on big budget works as well, ever since the beginnings of the trade.

A brief glance at the history of the film industry shows that budgetary need and creative vision have often trumped safety.  A quick google brought up a few lists of accidents, including a well researched Wikipedia article going back to the 1920s and a recent Australian News list of "horrific accidents" that happened to important stars.  Anthony Slide's book Hollywood Unknowns

A History of Extras, Bit Players, and Stand-Ins, reveals the hard lives and unsafe working conditions experienced by those who were necessary but expendable in Old Hollywood.  

One of the most famous "visionaries" who put his workers at risk on a regular basis was Cecil B. DeMille.  A 2014 article by Anton Karl Kozlovic in the European Journal of American Studies makes a very interesting point about one of the planets most famous producer/directors.  In "DeMille and Danger: Seven Heuristic Taxonomic Categories of His Hollywood (Mis)Adventure," Kozlovic found that DeMille expected his workers to embrace personal discomfort as danger and risk-taking became "normalized" aspects of his film sets.  He writes that DeMille

"was professionally enamoured with the pursuit of sensationalism, authenticity and realism for his crowd-pleasing productions. Whilst pursuing this filmic quest, many of his crew were subjected to real danger, distress and injury, sometimes mortally."

But DeMille was also cheap.  Like contemporary guerrilla filmmakers.  And he also encouraged long hours and pushed people past their limits, like many producers in today's film industry, both independent and studio.

The problem of film people doing more work than they should and not getting enough sleep is the focus of Haskell Wexler's 2006 documentary, Who Needs Sleep.  Wexler talks about his own near-death experience, wrecking his car after working 14 hours, as well as the deaths of others caught on the high demand treadmill.  Sometimes the people who work too hard are their own masters.  At other times they are subject to the people in charge.  Who often just don't care.

The issue for those of us who consume the products of the entertainment industry is, do we care?  Should we care?  And how can we show our caring?

As for Sarah Jones, I'm happy to hear that her death is being treated by the Wayne County, Georgia, Sheriff's Office as a homicide.