Cameras were rolling when a chopper killed an actor and two kids. Was A-list director to blame?

In the last seconds of his life, the 53-year-old actor Vic Morrow was struggling through knee-deep water with a child in each arm. The funeral for 6-year-old Renee Chen, one of the two children killed with actor Vic Morrow on the “Twilight Zone” movie set. The jury forewoman echoed the defense’s main point, saying: “You don’t prosecute people for unforeseeable accidents.” Landis, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told a reporter afterward that the prosecutor was “grotesque” and her case “completely dishonest.” “I feel that accident very strongly,” he said, adding that he was grateful for the jurors’ wisdom and comparing the outcome to a Frank Capra movie. A year after his acquittal, jurors received invitations — along with their families — to a special preview screening of Landis’ new movie, the Eddie Murphy comedy “Coming to America.” Harland Braun, the acerbic attorney who represented one of the director’s co-defendants at trial, did not like how it looked. “I think it made people more conscious of safety concerns on film sets,” Stephen Farber, co-author with Marc Green of “Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego, and the Twilight Zone Case,” said in a recent interview.