00:01Anton Yelchin
00:03June 19th, 2016. Studio City, Los Angeles.
00:08It's late at night and friends of a 27-year-old rising Hollywood star are getting worried.
00:13He was supposed to show up for rehearsal. He never did.
00:17When they go to his house to check on him, they find him pinned between his own Jeep Grand Cherokee
00:22and a brick mailbox pillar at the bottom of his driveway.
00:26Anton Yelchin, Pavel Chekov in the rebooted Star Trek films,
00:30widely considered one of the most talented young actors of his generation,
00:34had parked his SUV on the steep incline outside his gate,
00:38stepped out, and walked in front of the vehicle for reasons that will never be fully known.
00:43Then the Jeep started rolling backward.
00:46The gear selector in that model was already under recall.
00:49It had a notoriously confusing electronic shift system.
00:52Multiple owners had reported thinking the car was in park when it wasn't.
00:57Anton was one of them.
00:58The SUV rolled back down the slope, pinned him between its rear bumper and the solid brick pillar,
01:04and held him there.
01:06Legal filings describe him as having lingered alive for some time, trapped and suffocating.
01:13Blunt traumatic asphyxia.
01:15The chest compressed so completely that the lungs simply cannot expand.
01:20There was no way to wiggle free.
01:22He was alone.
01:23It was dark.
01:25His parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler over the defective gear shift.
01:31The case settled confidentially in 2018.
01:34The Jeep Grand Cherokee recall affected over a million vehicles.
01:40Jeremy Renner.
01:41Okay, I'll just say it up front.
01:42He survived.
01:43That's probably not news to you.
01:45But it came so close to not being true that there was no way I was leaving this one out.
01:52January 1st, 2023.
01:54Washoe County, Nevada.
01:56New Year's Day.
01:57Deep snow.
01:58And a Marvel actor is operating a six-ton piston-bully snowcat to help pull his nephew's truck out of
02:05a snowbank.
02:06This is peak, I'll handle it energy, and it is about to go extremely wrong.
02:12Jeremy Renner, Hawkeye, the Hurt Locker, a guy known for doing things himself, successfully towed the truck onto the road.
02:19Then, the snowcat started sliding sideways down the hill.
02:23The parking brake hadn't been properly engaged.
02:25Renner stepped out of the cab to check the situation, which is the moment the situation became catastrophic.
02:32The machine kept moving, heading toward his nephew.
02:36Renner tried to climb back in.
02:38The tracks, the wide, flat, steel treads that a snowcat uses to move across snow, caught him and pulled him
02:45under.
02:46The vehicle rolled directly over his torso.
02:49The 911 call log is hard to read.
02:52Right side of his chest collapsed.
02:55Torso is crushed.
02:57Neighbors and his nephew got to him immediately and held him together, essentially, until emergency crews arrived and airlifted him
03:04out.
03:05Doctors counted more than 30 broken bones.
03:08His chest, his legs, his entire right side.
03:12The snowcat weighs several tons.
03:14Being under its track means being squeezed between steel and frozen ground with no give on either side.
03:21The sheriff's report noted no impairment, just an unengaged parking brake and a split-second decision to step outside a
03:29moving vehicle.
03:30Jeremy Renner survived.
03:32Multiple surgeries, months in recovery, and a documentary about the whole ordeal.
03:37But for a while on that driveway, on New Year's morning, the guy who plays a superhero was lying in
03:43the snow with a crushed chest, being held together by his nephew.
03:47Sometimes, real life doesn't bother with the superhero part.
03:53Astroworld Festival.
03:54November 5th, 2021.
03:57NRG Park, Houston, Texas.
04:00Travis Scott is headlining Astroworld.
04:03His own festival, his own crowd, his own name on the ticket.
04:0850,000 people are packed into the grounds.
04:11And by nightfall, people in the front sections can't move their arms.
04:16The warning signs had been there since 2pm, when fans stampeded through security gates, injuring people before the main acts
04:23even started.
04:25Nobody stopped the event.
04:27By the time Scott took the stage, the crowd had compressed into something that stopped being a concert audience and
04:33started being a single mass of pressure.
04:37Survivors described it as being squeezed in a human vice.
04:41You couldn't raise your arms.
04:43You couldn't turn around.
04:44The people next to you were pushing.
04:46Not because they wanted to, but because the people behind them were pushing them.
04:52Ribs compressed.
04:54Diaphragms couldn't expand.
04:56And around 9.30 to 9.40pm, sections of the crowd began chanting,
05:02Stop the show, while unconscious people were being crowd-surfed overheads to reach security.
05:08The show did not stop immediately.
05:11The music kept playing.
05:13The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled all 10 deaths as compressive asphyxiation.
05:20Chests physically unable to expand under sustained crowd pressure.
05:24The victims ranged in age from 9 to 27 years old.
05:30Some were stepped on repeatedly and sustained severe facial injuries.
05:35Lawsuits in the billions of dollars followed, targeting Scott, Live Nation, and the event organizers.
05:43The disaster triggered industry-wide reckonings about crowd density limits and real-time safety monitoring.
05:49Ten people went to a concert.
05:52The crowd itself became the thing that killed them.
05:55No stage collapse.
05:57No explosion.
05:58Just other human bodies, pressing in from every direction until there was no room left to breathe.
06:06Yevgeny Kulesh
06:07October 9th, 2021.
06:10Moscow, Russia.
06:11The Bolshoi Theater, one of the most famous opera houses on the planet, is mid-performance of Sadko, a grand
06:19Russian opera with elaborate moving sets.
06:21The audience is watching what they assume is a flawless, perfectly rehearsed production.
06:27And then, something goes wrong on stage.
06:30And for a moment, nobody in the audience is sure if it's real.
06:35Yevgeny Kulesh had been a performer at the Bolshoi for nearly two decades.
06:38That night, during a set change, a large, mechanically operated ramp, a massive piece of moving stage architecture, began descending.
06:48Kulesh stepped in the wrong direction.
06:51One wrong step into the path of several tons of descending scenery.
06:56The ramp came down on him in full view of the stage.
07:00Fellow performers started shouting. Stage hands scrambled.
07:04From the audience, witnesses later described hearing someone scream,
07:08Call an ambulance! There is blood!
07:10And that's when the realization hit the house that this was not part of the performance.
07:16People had been sitting there, watching what they thought was very convincing acting, while a man was being crushed to
07:22death.
07:23The curtain came down. The audience was asked to leave.
07:27Emergency services were called, but Kulesh died from his injuries before they could save him.
07:33Witnesses described seeing blood and frantic attempts by cast members to lift the structure off him.
07:39Moscow's investigative committee opened an inquiry into safety violations at the theater.
07:44International outlets picked up the story, and it reignited long-standing conversations about stage machinery safety in major productions.
07:52At the Bolshoi Theater, a place that represents the absolute pinnacle of artistic precision and control.
07:59A man died because of one wrong step and a ramp that didn't stop.
08:05That's the thing about multi-ton moving objects. They don't care about your resume.
08:11John Eric Hexum. October 12, 1984.
08:16A television set on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles.
08:21Production on the CBS series Cover Up has hit a long delay.
08:24The cast and crew are bored, restless, waiting.
08:28And a 26-year-old model-turned-actor named John Eric Hexum picks up a prop gun, spins the chamber,
08:35presses it to his right temple, and pulls the trigger as a joke.
08:40John Eric Hexum was the kind of person Hollywood builds careers around. Tall, absurdly handsome, genuinely charming, and completely at
08:48ease on camera.
08:49He'd landed the lead on cover-up and was being positioned as the next big action star.
08:55He was also, by all accounts, a prankster who liked to keep the mood light on set.
09:00The revolver was loaded with blank cartridges. No bullet. Totally safe, right?
09:06A blank cartridge has no projectile, but it still generates an enormous pressure wave.
09:11Hot, expanding gas, and a paper or plastic wad, all of it accelerating out of the barrel.
09:16At contact range, pressed directly against the skull, that's enough to shatter bone.
09:22The shock wave drove fragments of his own skull deep into his brain.
09:27John Eric collapsed immediately.
09:30Crew called emergency services and he was placed on life support.
09:33Doctors found massive skull fractures and catastrophic brain damage.
09:38The pressure hadn't pierced the skull so much as it had crushed a section of it inward, driving bone into
09:43brain tissue.
09:44He was declared brain dead several days later. His organs were donated.
09:50He was 26 years old.
09:52The incident became one of the most cited examples in Hollywood firearms safety training, alongside Brandon Lee's death a decade
10:00later.
10:00A blank. A joke. A gun pressed to a temple because nothing bad was supposed to happen.
10:16A film crew is shooting a Vietnam War sequence for Twilight Zone the movie.
10:22There are real explosives.
10:24There's a helicopter flying low over a shallow water set.
10:27And there are two child actors, six and seven years old, working illegally in the middle of the night because
10:34director John Landis wanted them for the shot.
10:37Rene Shin Yi Chin was six years old, hired to be carried by veteran actor Vic Morrow as his character
10:43fled through a war zone.
10:45The sequence called for the helicopter to fly low overhead while pyrotechnics detonated around them.
10:51Dramatic. Cinematic.
10:53Completely.
10:54Completely.
10:55Catastrophically.
10:56Unsafe.
10:58The explosives were detonated too close to the aircraft.
11:01The blasts destabilized the tail rotor.
11:04Pilot Dorsey Wingo felt the machine change, the vibration, the control going wrong, and the helicopter began spinning downward, fast,
11:13directly toward the people standing in the water below.
11:15The rotor blades struck Vic Morrow and seven-year-old Micah Din Lee.
11:21Rene Chin was crushed beneath the falling fuselage.
11:25Three people died in seconds.
11:27The cameras were still rolling.
11:30All of it was captured on film.
11:33Landis and several crew members were charged with involuntary manslaughter.
11:37After a lengthy trial, all were acquitted in 1987, a verdict that produced widespread outrage.
11:45Civil suits resulted in multi-million dollar settlements for the victims' families.
11:49The Twilight Zone accident became the moment Hollywood's stunt culture was forced to reckon with itself.
11:55The Twilight Zone is a bit of a
