Movie Scenes That Almost Killed Crew Members

It takes a lot of work from a lot of people to make a big Hollywood blockbuster. From writers to actors to directors and special effects specialists, a movie is only as good as its crew. While long days and arduous labor are par for the course, the vast majority of the time, a film set is a well-oiled machine, and every expert does their thing without a hitch.

But humans are imperfect, and life is unpredictable. Sometimes, things go wrong, and movie sets are no exception. On rare occasions, tragedy goes down — a stunt pilot for an aerial scene might lose control of their plane, or a stuntman horrifically fall to her death. Movie shots are painstakingly planned, but in spite of all that preparation, accidents do happen. Actors get injured, stuntmen pay the ultimate sacrifice, crew members end up in harm's way. Here's a look at some of the times when crew members walked away with their lives...as well as a couple of painful souvenirs from being in the Hollywood trenches.

It's a common Stephen King plot: An inanimate object becomes haunted and tries to kill all humans (e.g. the possessed car in Christine). In Maximum Overdrive, it's all kinds of evil machines, including trucks, steamrollers, and lawnmowers. King directed the movie himself, which was utter chaos. "The problem with that film is that I was coked out of my mind all through its production, and I really didn't know what I was doing," King later admitted, referring to how he'd never directed a movie before.

And then the crew had enough to worry about a seemingly actually haunted (but radio-controlled) lawnmower. Director of photography Armando Nannuzzi set up his camera at the edge of a driveway to shoot a scene where the power mower rapidly speeds toward the camera, metal blades spinning as it goes. To make the mower look more imposing, the camera was angled up toward it, with some wood blocks placed underneath. Safety features of the mower were removed to show off those blades, and it was rigged to move faster than normal. The mower, set loose, zoomed toward the camera...and hit one of those wooden wedges.  That rapidly sliced off flying wood slivers, which hit Nannuzzi in the eye and face. Nannuzzi says that it lead to a permanent loss of some eyesight, which is quite tragic for a photographer. (That's why he sued King, and Dino De Laurentiis Productions, for $18 million.)

The 1988 film The Bear is not your typical family movie. It's about an animal — a bear, obviously — traipsing about the wilderness, except the production didn't use guys in bear suits, or puppets, preferring the realness of an actual bear. And this isn't a documentary, either — it's a narratively structured film. The star of The Bear was a 9'2" Kodiak named Bart. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud said he and his crew made every concession to ensure that Bart was pleasant and easy to work with, plying him with a daily diet of six chickens, 13 cans of fruit, three loaves of bread, three quarts of milk, five pounds of produce, and five cans of "good salmon." But still, actors get temperamental now and again, and so do bears. Bart was well-behaved except for one day when he got angry and assaulted Annaud, reaching out to swat at the director and leaving him with scratches and permanent scars on his backside.

One wouldn't think there'd be the potential for dangerous explosions and a safety threat for the members of the crew of a Tom Hanks movie, particularly a Tom Hanks period drama like Charlie Wilson's War. The 2007 film, which earned Golden Globe nominations for Hanks and costars Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman, concerned congressman Charlie Wilson's secret drive to fund the CIA's hush-hush anti-Soviet Union tactics in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Most of the movie consists of conversations (Aaron Sorkin wrote the screenplay, after all), but there is a little bit of titular "war" activity, including a scene in which some stinger missiles were supposed to shoot off a helicopter. While testing the device at Downey Studios in Los Angeles, one of those stage missiles unexpectedly exploded, injuring the special effects assistant handling it. The crew member (whose name was not released to the media) underwent immediate surgery and was listed in critical condition for a spell.

Tippi Hedren, best known for starring in Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds, later shifted away from a movie career and into a life advocating for big cats. She even founded an 80-acre animal sanctuary in California called the Shambala Preserve. Hedren apparently didn't harbor a grudge against lions and other large kitties after the disastrous, somehow not-fatal shoot for the 1981 movie Roar.

Ironically, that film is about a family terrorized by wild animals, and it's legendary in Hollywood for being extraordinarily dangerous. That lore was salaciously exploited in the marketing for Roar: "No animals were harmed in the making of this film," posters promised. "70 cast and crew members were."

It was a harrowing time, to say the least. "I don't know how we survived it," Hedren told Variety. "Our nine-month shoot turned into five years. We were one on one with those big cats. They're dangerous animals and they're big." However, Hedren stresses that the "70" people hurt on Roar is a bit overstated. "Maybe they're talking about people who hit their thumb when they were pounding on a nail. In the five years, I think there were seven people that were hurt, but not seriously." Hedren herself got hurt, as did her daughter and costar Melanie Griffith. She added that her husband, director Noel Marshall, "was in the hospital so many times they were going to name a wing after him."