during the filming of “Rust.”
Fortunately, there have been relatively few instances of such incompetence over the last couple of decades, but during the silent and early talkies eras, fatal accidents were much more frequent. Airplane stunts went awry, fires got wildly out of control, and people got thrown from or trampled by horses. Similarly, three pilots were killed during the filming of Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels” in 1929, three horsemen were killed while performing in a cavalry charge on the set of “They Died with Their Boots On,” and let’s not get into how routinely horses were offed in the process of shooting Westerns.
Set safety gradually became more of a priority for studios and producers (because lawsuits), but stunt people still took massive risks to deliver a spectacular or bruising bit of action, and these bits could occasionally go south. One such mishap occurred on the set of an underrated Western from director Alan J. Pakula that starred Jane Fonda, James Caan, and Jason Robards.
