Hello, my name is Justin the Klu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're talking about John Landis, the guy that made Animal House, American Werewolf in London, Sylvester Stallone's Oscar, and tons of other stuff.

Twilight Zone the movie.

Yes, Twilight Zone the movie. Okay, so John Landis, I thought I was going to have more fun this week. That's what I'm going to start with right off the bat. John Landis, you know, he's made all of these wacky comedies that people remember fondly. He's made a couple of horror comedies that people also remember fondly. You know, you see him interviewed and he's kind of a

fun raconteur. And watching these movies this week, I didn't have as good a time as I hope that I would.

Yeah. Also, the specter of Twilight Zone the movie hangs over John Landis' career in a way that

became more apparent to me this week.

So for people that don't know, during the making of Twilight Zone, the movie, of which

John Landis directed one of the segments, there was an accident that happened where a helicopter

was blown out of the sky by an explosion, and it landed on three actors that were in the scene.

Vic Morrow and two Vietnamese children, and they were decapitated.

And from there, a big kind of media circus exploded around the idea of whose fault was it.

And John Landis, and a number of his collaborators were actually on trial, a nine-month

trial for involuntary manslaughter

that ended with their acquittal. You know, I have to say I read a lot of the book Outrageous

Conduct this week because I kind of wanted to figure out what was my attitude towards this case.

That book being about the case and the events that led to it and what happened afterwards.

And I think that Landis got off easy.

From what I was reading about it, that he was pretty obviously guilty of criminal negligence.

And he could have been brought up as well on child endangerment laws because the two

Vietnamese actors that were in the film.

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