English | 2021 | ISBN: 1634243641 | 350 pages | EPUB | 3.1 MB

Not for thirty years could this amazing Hollywood story be told. It began as a contest between two top young Hollywood directors. Who could make the best movie and the cheapest? Confident he would beat Steven Spielberg, John Landis gleefully named his venture ""Fly by Night."" He even had the words painted on the nose of the helicopter. It was a joke - until the helicopter crashed, killing actor Vic Morrow, and two children who had been hired illegally. The crash occurred on the set of the Steven Spielberg/ John Landis coproduction of Twilight Zone: The Movie. The movie was made by Warner Bros. The question now became who is responsible. Steven Spielberg? John Landis? Or Warner? The internal conflict sparked by this question ended in a massive cover-up in which top studio executives and the highest paid L.A. lawyers joined to conceal evidence and create an illusion far more potent than anything that Hollywood conveyed on the screen. Only the unprecedented access to confidential sources within the studios - and to the private world of Steven Spielberg and John Landis, as well as to the DA's office, the sheriff's office, Interpol, and the FBI - enabled the author to penetrate the illusion Hollywood created to the ultimate end of protecting Warner Bros. and Steven Spielberg. Fly by Night is the real-life story of death and greed in the Twilight Zone. It reveals how a major studio, eager for ""Spielberg product"" gave a free hand to John Landis, Spielberg's partner and friend, even though this young director was known from Blue's Brothers for the economically unsound practices involving stunts and special effects. It tells the story of the cover-up which began with the erasure of the legend that read like a confession from the nose of the helicopter mere hours after the crash, never to be heard again in all of the five years of testimony and trial. It relates how real-life Century City's sharpest legal minds hatched a $5-million-dollar plan to keep John Landis out of jail and Steven Spielberg out of the headlines. It discloses the exclusive confessions of John Landis' private secretary, formerly Alfred Hitchcock's, who took streams of phone calls from famous people on the day of the crash and afterwards witnessed an incredible series of suspicious events in the office. Fly by Night tells the never-before-told story of the ""hush"" money Warner Bros. paid in its bizarre settlement with Vic Morrow's daughters. And it tells the story of James Neal of Watergate fame, the swashbuckling $5,000-a-day attorney from Nashville, who led a team of crack L.A. law firms to an unbelievable acquittal by a jury that like everyone else in this amazing true tale of the Twilight Zone, had fallen under the spell of Hollywood. Despite a 5-year battle in the courts, and a 10-month long trial, the true story of what really happened on the Twilight Zone set has never been told. Newly uncovered internal documents from Warner Bros. - 30 years later - allow the complete story to be told. It's a story of strange events and of a strange Hollywood period with a cast of characters rag from Jamie Lee Curtis to Dan Rather; from the Hollywood of Chevy Chase, George Lucas, Dan Akroyd, and Carey Fisher to the Hollywood of John Huston, Jackie Cooper, Ralph Belamey, and Don Ameche, both the old and the new Hollywood found themselves party to this unprecedented event where the first in Hollywood history, actors died on a movie set.