Harrison Ford's leg, in the Star Wars film, with the Millennium Falcon door A subsidiary company of Disney has admitted criminal breaches of health and safety laws after a door of the Millennium Falcon almost crushed Harrison Ford to death in a Star Wars film. Ford, best known for playing CSO Jack Stanfield in the 2006 cyber-thriller Firewall, was reprising his role in the the Star Wars franchise when …
"and hit a button before starting to walk back through it, believing the set was not live and that it would not close"
So, in effect, he closed the door on himself by being a careless twat.
And some bunch of legal fuckwits compensated him for doing that??!!11!!
So this is how it all ends, not with a bang, but with a lawsuit...
>He pushed the door close button and the door closed. Shouldn't have been a surprise. It doesn't matter if it was closed by gravity, pneumatics or a stage hand.
Wonder how long a door that could crush somebody without safety features would last in an office building. I maybe can buy the argument if he was a stunt man or doing his own stunts but work place safety laws apply to Hollywood as well and thus the guilty verdict.
"Wonder how long a door that could crush somebody without safety features would last in an office building."
It's not an office building is it? Loose cables wouldn't be acceptable in an office either, but are commonplace on film sets. As are hot lights, carpenters, pyrotechnics, firearms etc.
But in general there are loads of big, heavy doors in industrial situations. Sliding hangar doors are notorious for taking people's fingers off, for example. And have you seen the Sandbanks ferry?
"
But in general there are loads of big, heavy doors in industrial situations. Sliding hangar doors are notorious for taking people's fingers off, for example. And have you seen the Sandbanks ferry?
"
In all cases such doors should not be accessible by people who have not had relevant training. If they are accessible and a person is injured as a result, the organisation responsible could indeed face H&S charges.
Actors are made aware of the normal hazards present on a film set, and are not permitted unfettered access to certain areas of the set. Had Harrison Ford been given specific training on the hazard presented by the door, I doubt this case would have been brought.
Wonder how long a door that could crush somebody without safety features would last in an office building.
Not quite the same, but the place I worked at had a rotating "air lock" door which - supposedly - detected when someone had passed through one door, closed that and opened the other. When it failed to do so, which it did frequently, you got trapped in it because there were no controls on the inside. Fortunately it was a high traffic area, but more than once a victim had to use their mobile to telephone the switchboard for help!
"
He pushed the door close button and the door closed.
"
Sure, but that is irrelevant. Automatic doors should not be capable of closing with sufficient force to cause an injury unless they are fitted with appropriate safety devices that ensure they cannot close unless the doorway is clear. Think of how many people would be crushed by train doors and lift doors if that was not the case.
There may be exceptions for situations where such an arrangement would be impractical, but in that case all personnel who might use the door would have to have training in the use & risks. I doubt that a case could be made that a mock spacecraft on a film set could not have been fitted with safe automatic doors. IIUC in the original StarTrek series, the doors were operated manually by stage crew off-camera, and in any case the doors of a stage model can be made of cardboard made to look like thick steel.
in any case the doors of a stage model can be made of cardboard made to look like thick steel.
I do wonder why they went to all the effort and cost of building this door which turned out to be pretty dangerous. I watched the film - really enjoyed it (including the plot holes and other nonsense) - but I don't recall even noticing it. If it was there I guess I thought it was CGI.
Apparently your attention span is comparable to that of the guy who was operating the door, because if you had bothered reading the next paragraph, you would have read...:
"The door was remotely operated by another person..."
- also, there's no mention of compensation. This is a criminal case, not a civil one.
"The real crime is that Ford was bumped off in Episode VII. Gonna miss him!"
"The real crime is that Solo was bumped off in Episode VII." FTFY
Else this would be a murder case, not a H&S one.
And rumours of Solo's death may not be entirely accurate... but we'll have to wait and see.
I'm with you BillG. Never heard of the character or film. Perhaps it's just a blip in my movie knowledge but Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones, yes, Han Solo, yes, Jack Ryan yes (runs like a girl in that too). I liked Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan in Red October, still my favourite sub film. I wonder why he didn't get the subsequent Jack Ryan roles? PP
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Ford, best known for playing CSO Jack Stanfield in the 2006 cyber-thriller Firewall...
Really?
My reaction exactly. Best known by whom... that was one of the more mediocre films he made. I think "Best known" for playing - well, Han Solo in the 1979 sf-thriller Star Wars perhaps...?
Perhaps El Reg is aping Richard Herring's recurring joke of introducing fairly-well-known guests as being "probably best known for his/her appearance as <insert the most obscure and little-known credit from their past here>"
Quite funny when you hear some of the things now-famous folks starred in.
Nobody told the HSE about JJ Abrams (claiming, at least) to have broken his spine in the same incident.
I'm not sure that HSE covers "trying to lift stuff crushing your mate in an urgent manner so as to minimise further injury", unless you're a member of the emergency services.
Yes, doing the manual lifting course would of course be required of anyone expected to lift heavy objects as a part of their job, but I suspect the heaviest thing JJ needs to lift is the shooting schedule or script (which are no doubt on an iPad nowadays)
They can't have been that fast, given one of the stormtrooper extras famously managed to smack his head on one.
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>It's good that we have managed to get out of caves without getting sued to death for "reckless egress".
What does this article have to do with anyone getting sued? Its a criminal proceeding. I guess we could get rid of all the pesky labor and safety laws and go back to the Gilded age where when an 8yo kid sorry employee at the end of a 16 hour shift fell in the meat grinder you didn't even have to throw out the meat.
when an 8yo kid sorry employee at the end of a 16 hour shift fell in the meat grinder you didn't even have to throw out the meat
Nasty, exploitative capitalists and their dark, satanic mills!
Well, in that age, said kid would likely have died of hunger or a random encounter with a malady in case he had decided to stay safely at home in his cottage with his 7 siblings.
Of course he could always have decided to get a job in the navy. Very safety-conscious, the navy... still is, in a sense (one of the rare places in civilization where you are situated in heavy industrial environment that will kill you in a jiffy if you don't pay attention and other people are deploying heavy gear to make that environment MORE unpredictable and nasty to you)
>Of course he could always have decided to get a job in the navy.
Or some other branch of service as Gangs of NY showed so clearly when the Irish would arrive. That movie did a great job of showing how lovely 19th century urban living was.
What happened to LOTO or personal responsibility for your own safety?
For all we know they could have been doing a rehersal of a scene which included him hitting that button. And because things weren't life maybe he expected to be able to walk out and redo the rehersal again.
There's not enough info in the article to draw conclusions such as yours.
When it comes to work safety there is no such thing as personal responsibility, it is always a lack of training or supervision.
As far as the law goes if he had been trained to push the button while not being in the way there would have been no accident.
But even if he had been trained, as far as the law goes there should have been a supervisor checking that people didn't push the button without following proper procedures.
And no, I am not kidding.
And they pleaded guilty in case a trial would have been even worse for them.
By the sounds of it, Ford assumed that the door wasn't operational yet. The operator assumed that when Ford hit the button, he wanted the door to close.
What should have happened was when people came on set, someone should have pointed out "hey, these doors are hydraulic and fully operational, so you really don't want to be under them when they close, so be careful".
The idea is that you can't be responsible for your own safety until you've been informed of the risks to your safety.
"Door was operated by a person. Door was stopped by a safety. Door was probably operated because he signalled by hitting the damn button.
What happened to LOTO or personal responsibility for your own safety?"
It may depend on why you assume this sequence of events happened.
A) Ford randomly wanders around the set hitting buttons because he's bored;
B) Ford is practising a scene that involves him hitting the button, understanding that nothing will happen because the set is turned off for practice.
In the former scenario, I'd certainly assign at least some blame to Ford since pressing random buttons in an industrial setting is generally a bad idea. In the latter, Ford would appear to be entirely blameless. No doubt other scenarios could be constructed in which all, some or none of the blame is assigned to various different parties. The details haven't been made public, but a court appears to have decided that it was, in fact, the fault of the company managing the set and not Ford's. Unless you have access to information not in the article, blaming Ford seems a little odd.
As for the more general question of what happened to personal responsibility for your own safety, there's a reason health and safety laws exist in the first place. You might as well complain that it's child labourer's own fault when they get their arms chopped off in a mill. As a society we've decided that actually not all accidents are entirely the fault of the person involved in them, and that employers have the responsibility to minimise risk to their employees (and anyone else on site) as much as is practical.
A court in Milton Keynes was told today that the 78-year-old had passed through a door of the spacecraft
"Pretend Spacecraft", please ... "Fantasycraft" is more appropriate, even.
pinning him to the floor with "the weight of a small car"
A small European or a small American car? And why does the door need that many Newtons?
Oddly on my two car wide garage door the automatic closer is able to reverse direction with only a few pounds of resistance thanks to the door weight being largely counterbalanced by springs and it has an optical safety that prevents the door closing if the beam is broken. It's really hard to understand why such cheap and simple safeguards weren't in place. I suppose it comes down to the set being designed by movie people and not engineers.
Fortunately the carbon freezing process I had undergone during the production of Episode V created very dense crystalline calcium bone structures in my pelvis so I was able to bear the weight until the crew reacted and lifted the door.
I don't know what JJ is talking about either, I'm out of it for a little while and everyone gets delusions of grandeur
..for playing CSO Jack Stanfield in the 2006 cyber-thriller Firewall.
Not part of my memory but he still pulls the same faces. Just another one trick horse like Brian Blessed.
<rant>
I thought a Firewall was that thing you stuck between sections of Forests... Oh hang on it's that iptables thing you use to stop some script kiddie twat face from connecting to your mail server 20 times every second.
Perhaps Jack Stanfield can sort that one out for me. Can someone implement IPv6 sometime soon. I realise I will be totally identifiable but it will force a rewrite of that 'Yo Scan The Internet in 20 seconds' shite that lives on github.
Oh and whilst I am on the case.
FUCK OFF Umich.Edu, and the rest of the twats. I did not ask you for a 'security/research scan' and you did not offer me any 'results'. Go get your students to practice on your own network.
</rant>
<sarc>
I, for one, will be glad when the IPBill is passed because it will nip all this script kiddy shit in the bud as our Security Forces swing into action and prevent people taking £600 out of my bank account via Western Union for the privilege of having my computer fucked over some more or having to buy more storage for my log files. Go Theresa.
</sarc>
Otherwise I am inclined to agree with Health And Safety at Work... even if it involves pretend movie security experts..... What? You mean the character has been adopted and promoted by GCHQ? Perhaps I'll just go to bed and wake up when this bad dream is all over.
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So the scene is the Millenium Falcon. A leathery, wrinkly creature is loose aboard the ship. Crew members are running away from it, desperately closing bulkhead doors to escape from it, eventually disabling it when they manage to close one of the doors and crush one of its appendages.
Hmm. Yep, definitely sounds familiar.
Can't fault him too much for cashing out one last time. IMHO the guy has kind of earned it (not to mention he got badly injured as well doing it) unlike a lot of the hacks that pass as the next big thing today. How can you not love:
The President: How dare you come in here and lecture me!
Jack Ryan: How dare *you*, sir!
The President: How dare you come into this office and bark at me like some little junkyard dog? I am the President of the United States!
The President: You'll take the blame. Cutter and Ritter will take some too, but it won't amount to much. They'll get a slap on the wrist and $20,000 an hour on the lecture circuit. The rest, you'll dump on Greer. Yes, you'll take him down with you. You'll *destroy* his reputation. But it won't go any further than that. It's the ol' Potomac two-step, Jack.
Jack Ryan: I'm sorry, Mr. President, I don't dance.
"Can't fault him too much for cashing out one last time."
Actually in several interviews he has said he didn't want to do the film at all but was offered such a large bucket of cash that he decided he couldn't refuse. But he did insist that he actually die this time as he had wanted to do in Return of the Jedi, as he has also said many times.
"But he did insist that he actually die this time as he had wanted to do in Return of the Jedi, as he has also said many times."
- Guess he had it in his contract then, but the wrong name, and someone tried their best to honour it, kind of 'create a hologram to outwit data' mistake.
More leathery, more wrinkly, more door-closey ... more deadly!!
***Harrison Ford in "Pak Protector" ***
Now in movie theaters worldwide ... should you choose to be in the same room as popcorn-munching, texting, chatting, fighting, Pokémonning, annoying and uncough yoof!!!
(OTOH the odd ISIS adherent or depressed up-armed youngster might make this an unforgettable near-death experience or beyond!!! FEAR!!)
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>A subsidiary company of Disney has admitted criminal breaches of health and safety laws
>Foodles Production has pleaded guilty to two of four offences brought against it.
Don't know seems like these two El Reg article sentences pretty much make the doubt only in your head. Perhaps read the story a second (first?) time.
The "talent" is treated differently at this "job site." And paid quite a bit differently too. It's all in the contracts, and they are quite wordy. Many talented young actors are forbidden to play extreme sports for fear of harming their looks or limbs, in case they need them for action movies and whatnot. The movie studios don't want to pay for giant insurance claims in case their star actor falls out of the sky on their own time, let alone on set. Better to keep your talent safe from harm's way, only because it's cheaper to do so. Same thing with the big sets; everything is made fairly safe and proper. This was a freak accident, to be sure.
Good on Ford for getting another Star Wars paycheck. He's wanted out since VI, so let him be. Let's be thankful for Episode VII and let's forget all this unpleasantness about this incident, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That too.
"best known for playing CSO Jack Stanfield in the 2006 cyber-thriller Firewall"
Huh? Best known for a fairly obscure movie? Not for the titular character in the Indiana Jones series of films or as dashing-yet-scruffy bad boy in a little franchise known as Star Wars (you know, the franchise mentioned in this article). Please tell me that statement is a bit of cheeky trolling in the way only Brits can cajole.
Yes, it was a joke. The way it works is :
- This website is (ostensibly) dedicated to IT related news.
- The author therefore picked the one film where HF plays an IT guy, despite it being a B-movie that most people have never heard of, let alone seen.
This is what we British call 'humour' (with a 'u').
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