MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: The tragic fatal accident during the filming of The Twilight Zone erased a redemptive ending for one of the stories in the film.

In 1983, a film adaptation of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was released, with different directors handling different sequences within the film (sort of mini-episodes of the series). John Landis was the main director on the film, which was produced by Steven Spielberg. Landis directed the opening and closing framing sequences of the film as well as the opening "episode" in the film, called "Time Out."

It is about a man (played by Vic Morrow) who is hanging out with his buddies getting drunk after the man was passed over for a promotion at work. The guy who got the job was Jewish and so Morrow's character begins to rant about black people, Jewish people and Asian people.

After a black bar patron asks him to leave, he angrily storms out, at which point he finds himself in Nazi-occupied France in World War II, being hunted by the Germans...

When he escapes, he finds himself in the United States, where the Ku Klux Klan is trying to lynch him, as they see him as an African-American man...

he escapes from the Klan only to find himself in the Vietnam War, where he is seen by U.S. soldiers as Vietnamese...

He escapes from there, only to be rounded up and sent on a cattle car to a concentration camp by Nazis who seem him as Jewish...

The man can even see his friends outside the bar as the train pulls out, but they cannot hear his shouts for help.

Okay, the film did not include one scene that was in the midst of being filmed when explosions caused a helicopter to crash and then kill Morrow and two child actors while he was doing a scene set in Vietnam...

Morrow's character was risking his life to save the kids, so lots of people over the years have believed that the story was ultimately goin to be a redemptive one, like this one site noted, "However, 'Time Out' was not meant to end this way. Instead, Morrow's character was written to rescue two Vietnamese children (played by Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen) from an attacking U.S. helicopter in the middle of the Vietnam War, redeeming himself and changing his ways. "

It's a common belief and it makes some sense, as Morrow's character wasn't a good guy in the other timelines, so perhaps he learned a lesson.

However, when asked about the story in John Landis by Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, Landis explained, ""The episode ends the way it always ended, but it's missing a third of it because we decided not to use footage of the children." What ended up changing was, as Landis notes, "The intercutting between the actions of the KKK and American GIs and the Vietcong and the Nazis became more and more frenetic as [Bill] tried to protect the children. Finally, the Nazis take the children away and shoot them and load him up on the train. We decided not to use any footage of the children. It was a very difficult situation. Do we keep it in the movie? ...And, ultimately, we decided it would be really outrageous to Vic Morrow if we just cut it out of the movie completely."

The legend is...

STATUS: False

Thanks to Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan and John Landis for the information.

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