VIDEO: Deaths on Movie Sets

Movies are awesome and their making must be fascinating! Most of us are not Hollywood actors, so we’ll never know. But as amazing as making movies must be, sometimes things can go very, very wrong. There have been many notable accidents that occurred during the shooting of films and television, such as cast or crew fatalities or serious accidents that plagued production.

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Let’s watch this video and remember some great actors who died on set, doing what they loved most, for our entertainment.

Have you watched “The Crow”? It’s honestly one of my favorite movies and I think we can all agree that Brandon Lee was an incredibly talented actor. Did you know he died on set?

According to Wikipedia, Lee died of a gunshot wound on March 31, 1993, at the filming studio in Wilmington, North Carolina, at the age of 28, after an accidental shooting on set of The Crow.

In the scene in which Lee was accidentally shot, Lee’s character walks into his apartment and discovers his fiancée being beaten and raped by thugs. Actor Michael Massee’s character fires a .44 Magnum revolver at Lee as he walks into the room.

A previous scene using the same gun had called for inert dummy cartridges fitted with bullets (but no powder or primer) to be loaded in the revolver for a close-up scene; for film scenes which utilize a revolver (where the bullets are visible from the front) and do not require the gun to actually be fired, dummy cartridges provide the realistic appearance of actual rounds.

Instead of purchasing commercial dummy cartridges, the film’s prop crew created their own by pulling the bullets from live rounds, dumping the powder charge then reinserting the bullets. However, they unknowingly or unintentionally left the live primer in place at the rear of the cartridge.

At some point during filming, the revolver was apparently discharged with one of these improperly-deactivated cartridges in the chamber, setting off the primer with enough force to drive the bullet partway into the barrel, where it became stuck (a condition known as a squib load). The prop crew either failed to notice this or failed to recognize the significance of this issue.

In the fatal scene, which called for the revolver to be actually fired at Lee from a distance of 3.6–4.5 meters (12–15 feet), the dummy cartridges were exchanged with blank rounds, which feature a live powder charge and primer, but no bullet, thus allowing the gun to be fired without the risk of an actual projectile.

Since the bullet from the dummy round was already trapped in the barrel, this caused the .44 Magnum bullet to be fired out of the barrel with virtually the same force as if the gun had been loaded with a live round, and it struck Lee in the abdomen, mortally wounding him.

He was rushed to the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he underwent 6 hours of surgery. However, attempts to save him were unsuccessful, and Lee was pronounced dead at 1:03 p.m. EST. The shooting was ruled an accident.