You seem to be overreacting a bit to the Twilight Zone accident, if that is what you guys are referring to. Yeah, it was horrible that the people died, and from what it says on Wikipedia, it sounds like he was reckless, but you're making it sound like he killed them on purpose, but from what it says on Wikipedia it sounds like the whole thing was an accident. Calling him a "unrepentant child murder" just sounds a big extreme to me, I mean you're making it sound like brought a gun and shot them all in the head onscreen or something.
Bringing a gun to the set and shooting them would've been putting less effort into creating a situation where three people died than he actually went to. John Landis hired the kids under the table, lied to their parents about them not being around pyrotechnics, sent an on-set firefighter on wild goose chases because he'd worked as a child welfare officer on other movies and Landis was worried he'd report him if he saw there were kids there, and designed an unnecessarily dangerous stunt that wouldn't even read on film then ordered the pilot to take it further even after the aircraft went out of control. Landis was cavalier in disregarding every possible safety measure and regulation so he could play with the biggest, baddest toys, pursuing some ideal of raw, real filmmaking for a story that was basically
A Christmas Carol, but with a racist instead of a miser.
People like to bitch and moan about regulations and red tape making everything harder, but those rules are written in blood, and a grown man in his thirties who'd been directing movies for ten years had no excuse for not understanding that, acting like a dumb teenager driving a hundred miles an hour through a suburb because car crashes are things that happen to other people. He certainly doesn't have an excuse for continuing to avoid taking responsibility for another forty-five years. It wasn't a freak accident, it was willful negligence, and Landis has never acted like it was anything other than bad luck that could've happened to anybody.
There are eight billion people on this Earth, I think we can afford to be a
little choosey about who gets multi-million-dollar screenwriting and directing gigs. That's one of the most infuriating things about this post-me-too backlash, the idea that people are entitled to one-in-a-million elite positions and it's some kind of offense against them to rule them out for any reason. The opportunity cost of black-balling either Landis is essentially zero, they aren't so singularly ingenious that no one else could be recruited to make a movie who hasn't dropped a helicopter on an old man and two kids or beaten up enough of his girlfriends that everyone in greater L.A. knew immediately which accusations were about him before he was even named.
There's not even ambiguity with Max! He was more overt about talking about how he treated women publicly than Bill Cosby was. Why are people acting like it's some kind of he-said, she-said thing with him when
these words came out of his own mouth: "I’ve been in some super fucked up things. The most fucked up thing was that I cheated on a girl who I also gave a crippling social anxiety, self-loathing, body dismorphia, eating disorder to.... After we broke up, she came out of it like a trance and decided that she hated me forever, which even now I don’t know is really fair because there was a lot of moving pieces of that relationship. That said, I’m the bad guy in that relationship 100%. Looking back at it I totally destroyed that girl and I really loved her."
Aw, poor widdle nepo-baby, doesn't think it's "fair" that someone hates him even if he "totally destroyed" her. Won't someone please give him a pile of money to come up with an idea for a movie about judo-chopping action figures to wipe that hang-dog look off his face?
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