Sergei Bodrov Jr. – star of the popular post-Soviet crime movies ‘Brother’ and ‘Brother 2’ – was killed alongside 134 others in 2002 after an avalanche covered the area where they were filming in Vladikavkaz, Russia.
Bodrov was working on his latest movie, ‘The Messenger’, when tragedy struck due to an ice slide, which caused thousands of tons of ice and mud to fall down the valley where they were located.
After a large search by authorities for buried survivors, Bodrov was declared dead at the age of 30, cutting his celebrated career short at its peak.
Still from footage of the Midnight Rider production shoot before the train collided with the prop © YouTubeIn February 2014, 27-year-old camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed during the production of ‘Midnight Rider’, a biographical movie about musician Gregg Allman, after a train collided with a prop.
As the production crew recorded a scene on the tracks of a railroad trestle in Wayne County, Georgia, an approaching train could be seen. They were unable to evacuate the trestle in time, and the train hit a metal hospital bed prop, which sent shrapnel towards the crew, including Jones, who fell into the train’s path.
Jones was killed and seven others were injured and ‘Midnight Rider’ was never released.
Jones’ father, Richard Jones, told the Associated Press following the incident that the movie’s producers “did so many wrong things on so many levels, it’s just unbelievable,” and described his daughter’s death as “senseless.”
The film’s director, Randall Miller, along with several other members of the production crew were charged with trespassing and manslaughter and Miller was sentenced to two years in prison and eight years of probation in 2015 after pleading guilty to the charge of involuntary manslaughter.
Miller was the first American director to be sentenced to prison for a movie production death and he narrowly avoided more time in prison in February 2021 after he violated the terms of his probation, which prohibit him from working as a director or in “any other capacity in the film industry where you are responsible for safety.”
‘Top Gun’ Art Scholl flying his Super Chipmunk N13Y at an airshow in California in 1984 © Wikipedia / Wca42Pilot and cameraman Art Scholl was killed in September 1985 after his plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean while he was filming the Hollywood classic ‘Top Gun’ starring Tom Cruise.
Scholl’s Pitts S-2 plane went into a fatal spin while performing aerobatic moves for the movie and crashed into the ocean, and he was never seen again.
Authorities were unable to recover Scholl’s body or the wreckage of his plane and ‘Top Gun’ was dedicated to him when it was released the following year.
Scholl’s widow, Judy Scholl, told the Daily Mail in 2015 – 30 years after her husband’s death – that the Coast Guard had said “it was too deep to try and look for anything,” as the plane was such “a small target they said it would be too difficult to find.”
“Art didn’t say what the problem was. This is the one thing I’m not happy about with him,” she revealed, adding that she doesn’t know whether he experienced control failure or whether he became disorientated.
“It’s a puzzle. Most people think it was spacial disorientation but without the airplane we’ll never know,” she said.
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