15 Classic Movies That Were Dangerous to Film
As filmmaking increasingly relies on digital effects and trained stunt performers have long been an industry staple, there’s rarely any reason to put a movie crew in danger unless some jerk auteur who thinks the verisimilitude of real blood is necessary to tell his little story wants them to be. Back in the day, however, sometimes the only way to film someone on fire was to set them on fire, so to speak. That meant a lot of your favorite classics were just hilariously dangerous behind the scenes.
The Wizard of Oz
It may look like a fairy tale, but making The Wizard of Oz was more like the Old Testament. Margaret Hamilton was badly burned in a scene when Elphaba is engulfed in flames, her stunt double needed a hysterectomy after the broomstick exploded during the skywriting scene, and the original Tin Man actor was hospitalized with aluminum poisoning before the makeup team realized the dangers of powdered metal. Also, that snow? Pure asbestos.
Apocalypse Now
Between relentless typhoons and reckless helicopter pilots, shooting Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic was about as risky as war itself. Star Martin Sheen even had a heart attack in the middle of filming, forced to crawl along the side of a road before he was picked up by a random bus.
The Exorcist
All that thrashing around left Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair, who played Chris MacNeil and her demon daughter, with lifelong, debilitating back injuries. Also, a mysterious fire destroyed nearly the entire set at one point.
Rosemary's Baby
For a scene when Mia Farrow’s character wanders into traffic, director Roman Polanski convinced her to actually step into Fifth Avenue traffic, reasoning that “no one would hit a pregnant woman.” Anyone else, they might decide to let it roll, but drivers acquire superhuman reaction speed in the presence of reproduction.
Macbeth
Polanski isn’t exactly known to be a reasonable guy. For the bear-baiting scene in his 1971 Macbeth, he put a stuntman in a bear costume and sicced three wild dogs on him. After the stuntman expressed fear for his life and asked to fight only one dog please, Polanski agreed and then did it again. Then he cut the fight, just to be a maniac.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick’s space opera might have been an achievement in special effects, but for the leopard attack scene, he used the time-honored method of letting a leopard attack a guy. It very nearly ended in tragedy when the leopard got distracted by someone it wasn’t meant to attack, but not for Kubrick. He’d locked himself in a leopard-proof cage for the shot.
Deliverance
After Warner Bros. “got cold feet” about John Boorman’s controversial 1972 classic and throttled its budget, the untrained actors were left to do their own stunts, including Burt Reynolds, who insisted on plunging down a 25-foot waterfall. The next thing he remembered after hitting his head and shoulder on some rocks was waking up in the hospital.
The Public Enemy
As a gangster movie, The Public Enemy has its share of violence, but it was entirely too real. For a scene when James Cagney narrowly misses being gunned down, the studio hired a random war vet to fire a machine gun at a wall a split second after Cagney passed. Cagney also broke a tooth during a fight scene.
The War of the Worlds
The Oscar-winning 1953 adaptation of H.G. Wells’s alien invasion story was basically one big fire hazard. The heat rays and shields required literally a million volts of electricity, and crew members were constantly dodging sparks from the leg beams and avoiding the incredibly hot lights needed to hide the wires.
The Evil Dead
Sam Raimi shot his debut effort with as ragtag a crew as it featured, so people were constantly getting injured. The budget-rate “demonic” contact lenses actors wore were incredibly thick and painful, running through the woods in the cold left everyone sick and broken, and Raimi loved to literally poke their sore spots. He even loaded live ammo into the shotguns.
Carrie
Everyone’s favorite telekinetic wasn’t the only one who got hosed. During her wave of destruction, the firehose she used to blast Norma Watson, played by P.J. Soles, was powerful enough to rupture Soles’s eardrum. The firefighter on hand said as much and even refused to wield it, so the stunt coordinator took over. When she falls down, she’s actually passed out.
Grease
For the most dangerous prom scene outside of Carrie, the gym got perilously hot thanks to a lack of air-conditioning and inability to open the doors without messing up the lighting or even the windows due to the smell of a nearby meatpacking plant. Michael Tucci, the actor who played Sonny, was hospitalized after collapsing in the heat.
Rocky IV
For their big fight, Sylvester Stallone decided he and Dolph Lundgren should spar for real, telling his opponent, “Just try to clock me.” He ended up in intensive care for nine days after Lundgren punched him in the chest so hard it made his heart swell, and not with pride.
A Clockwork Orange
In the scene where Malcolm McDowell's eyes are pried open for aversion therapy, that's a real doctor standing by to drop saline in his eyes and prevent injury to his anesthetized eyes. Unfortunately, “he was more concerned with his stupid line of dialogue,” McDowell said, and he ended up with a scratched cornea that left him briefly blind.
Ben-Hur
The crew of 1959's Ben-Hur learned their lesson from the fatally reckless 1925 production, but the chariot race scene was still disastrously complicated. Charlton Heston had to be fitted with special contact lenses to keep all that dust out of his eyes, an HR mixup with thousands of extras caused a riot, and the chariot and axles really were destroyed -- with dynamite. It's a wonder only one stuntman only got a boo-boo on his chin -- in a take that was used in the final cut.
