ACCIDENT & EMERGENCY

      Have you ever found yourself in A & E late on a Friday night? If so, you’ll know that it can be quite a sweary, violent and unpleasant place. Rest assured that the Movie Doctors’ A & E is nothing like that. True, our clinic is full of action, drama, glamour and movie magic: car chases, heroes who survive ridiculous injuries, real-life accidents on set. But ours is safe – you could watch the goriest, most violent scenes in our clinic and it wouldn’t add up to an hour spent in an actual A & E. Go on, collect a ticket at reception. The Movie Doctors will attend to you shortly.

      ON-SET A & E

      A Clinical Examination

      Film sets are really dangerous places to work. In August 2014, the Independent newspaper reported that gruff-voiced action star Jason Statham (of whom both the Doctors are huge fans) had ‘narrowly avoided death on the set of The Expendables 3’. According to the story, ‘the actor was forced to leap from a truck he was driving before it plunged 60ft into the sea after a stunt went horribly wrong’. ‘He faced death,’ declared Expendables co-star Sylvester Stallone with a straight face (or at least a face as ‘straight’ as Sly can actually manage). ‘He was test driving a three-ton truck and the brakes run out. It went down 60ft into the Black Sea and was impaled.’

      For anyone else, it would have been catastrophic – but not for The Stath. Luckily, before becoming everyone’s favourite shirtless, oil-wrestling screen star, Jason was a champion diver (he competed for England at the Auckland Commonwealth Games in 1990) and was thus able to leap nimbly from the crashing vehicle, presumably performing a perfectly executed pike en route, before swimming briskly to safety. ‘If anyone else had been in that truck he would have been dead,’ Stallone told the Indie. ‘But because Jason is an Olympic quality diver he got out of it.’ As for The Stath himself, he proved as cool as his on-screen persona, playing down the allegedly life-threatening incident, and insisting that the worst thing that happened to him during the shoot of The Expendables 3 was the fact that ‘I snapped a shoelace in the very first scene.’ You can see why we love him.

      Jason’s on-set accident made for acres of lively news coverage, all of which helped to publicise the movie. But the fact remains that (if the story is true) Statham had a very lucky escape. Others have been less fortunate. Indeed, over its hundred-year-plus history, the art of moviemaking has often proved injurious and occasionally lethal, with cast and crew risking life and limb in pursuit of a good shot.

      Michael Curtiz’s disaster epic Noah’s Ark (1928) was billed as ‘The spectacle of the ages!’, using a reported 600,000 gallons of water to bring the image of a massive biblical flood crashing onto cinema screens. Audiences were awestruck by the results, but few contemporary viewers knew that such overwhelming spectacle had been achieved at an extremely high human cost. According to popular folklore, three extras drowned during the climactic flood sequences, while another lost a leg from injuries incurred on the set. Indeed, so high was the casualty rate on Noah’s Ark that Hollywood promptly instigated new stunt-safety regulations with the specific aim of minimising the risks which had become an everyday part of moviemaking. Yet even with such apparent safeguards in place, lives have continued to be lost while making movies.

      Glancing back over the last forty years of film-making, we find a litany of tragic accidents which demonstrate just how perilous the profession can be. Most distressingly, in the early eighties seasoned performer Vic Morrow and youngsters My-ca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen were killed on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) when an action sequence involving a helicopter went horrifyingly wrong (the ensuing scandal and lawsuits would last a decade). In the nineties, rising star Brandon Lee died of a gunshot wound during the making of The Crow (1994), an accident blamed by many upon cost-cutting measures which led to a breakdown in standard safety procedures (a props master, rather than a weapons expert, was left in charge of the gun). In 2007, set dresser David Ritchie was killed when ‘a frozen piece of sand and gravel’ fell from the wall of an outdoor set during the making of the sci-fi thriller Jumper (2008). As recently as 2015, Randall Miller became the first film-maker to be jailed for an on-set fatality in the US. Miller pleaded guilty to the involuntary manslaughter of camera operator Sarah Jones, who died when a train hit a metal-frame bed during the filming of a dream sequence on the Gregg Allman biopic Midnight Rider (the film has since been abandoned).

      While such horrendous cases become headline-grabbing news, far more common are the stories