This Physician Saw Countless Preventable Injuries on Film Sets, So He Made a Doc About It
When he first became a physician for film and TV sets in Massachusetts as a side gig in 2006, Paul Heinzelmann admits he was star struck by the energy and excitement of the lights and cameras.
But in the years that followed, he got a firsthand look at the physical wear and tear that many entertainment workers suffer, which triggered a decades-long fight among members of IATSE for stricter safety rules to curtail preventable accidents.
“I’ve seen plenty of concussions,” Heinzelmann told TheWrap. “I’ve gotten requests for medication to stay awake for late night shoots. I met a gaffer who completely tore his quadricep and continued to work for a month to finish the shoot despite needing surgery.”
And after the 2021 death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust,” Heinzelmann decided he needed to do something. The result is “Safe Sets: Dying to Work in the Film Industry,” his documentary exploring the dangers that actors, filmmakers and especially crew workers face on sets, and the long history of fatalities that have occurred behind the scenes.
The film, which will screen on Nov. 17 at the Secret Movie Club as part of the Los Angeles International Film Festival, features interviews with Jon Hamm and John Malkovich and recounts several infamous fatalities on film sets, including the death of camera assistant Sarah Jones on the 2014 film “Midnight Rider” when she was hit by a train while filming on an active trestle.
The film also discusses last year’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and how they are part of a larger revival of labor organizing in Hollywood, as workers push for a grassroots cultural change around safety issues.
Heinzelmann spoke to TheWrap about this new movement and what he has seen and heard from his time working on the documentary and behind the scenes on film and TV sets for the past 18 years. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Do you remember the exact moment, after seeing all these injuries over the years, that you knew you wanted to make a documentary about this?
I became a member of the Massachusetts Production Coalition, and they had an expo for businesses. I convinced my bookkeeper to go with me, and we set up a table next to companies that were selling equipment or studio time. We set up a table to do blood pressure checks and sleep disorder screening, because I knew that those are at least two things that were going unaddressed.
At that Expo, I met a film director who had a small independent film production company that did primarily documentaries, and I ended up joining their board. At first, there was an idea of doing something to help health and safety in the film industry. We talked about doing a YouTube channel or something like that for things like sleep hygiene or how to pick up a heavy object. And that idea evolved into an educational series as I started to talk to more people and I started getting people willing to go on camera. We did 48 interviews with hours and hours of footage.
Then in 2021, the whole industry was rocked by the “Rust” incident, and IATSE nearly went on strike shortly after. I felt like that really brought these accidents and on-set dangers into the mainstream conversation. I decided to make a documentary with the footage that we already had, along with some new B-roll and interviews. I found an amazing archival producer that got all kinds of camera footage from police cameras and interrogation rooms and accident scenes, and ultimately, we put together an 85-minute feature that I think is educational and informative, but also entertaining enough that it captures people’s attention.
There have been past documentaries like Haskell Wexler’s “Who Needs Sleep?” that have explored the accidents that happen on these sets like the death of Brent Hershman. Did those have an influence on your work?
I had seen “Who Needs Sleep?” and I felt like our film could be kind of the next chapter. At one point, we thought about focusing on sleep again, but instead, we decided to broaden the lens a bit and look at other things like stunts and exposures and accidents. We wanted to give each of those issues a segment focused around an incident that drew public attention. So in our film, we end up retelling Brett Hershman’s story in part because it gave us a chance to give a nod to “Who Needs Sleep?” and sort of elevate that story again. We have a sleep expert from Canada who goes into some of the details of what happens when people don’t get enough sleep, both sort of short term and long term, and we end up using Brent’s story to highlight that.
How did John Malkovich and Jon Hamm get involved?
I was doing medical exams on Jon Hamm and John Malkovich as part of the process that productions go through to get approved for insurance. I sort of had to work up the courage to tell them about what felt like a silly little project compared to what they were doing. You know, with Jon Hamm, he left my office, and he was down the hall at the elevator, and I almost had to dare myself to get up and run down the hall and stop him before he walked away.
But they both were interested and willing to go on camera, which greatly surprised me, and I’m extremely grateful that they were willing to do that. We talked a lot about the dangers of stunt work and the long hours, and how often times crew workers feel pressured to do whatever needs to be done because, you know, there’s a sense of working as a family together on the production, and then all of a sudden, the production is over, and you don’t know if you have another job coming or not.
As part of the new IATSE bargaining agreement, productions now have to pay workers double if a shoot day exceeds 12 hours and triple if it exceeds 15 hours. What are your thoughts on this new structure?
It’s a bit of a perverse incentive system. I mean, on the one hand, you might assume that studios don’t want to pay that kind of money and that might limit the hours and the subsequent accidents, but it’s unrealistic to assume that money isn’t attractive for union workers, because, in a weird way, it incentivizes the long hours, because the pay is so much better. It’s not a good trade-off.
We have heard from some IATSE members who say they are grateful for the extra pay, especially after being out of work for so long due to the strikes, but that they’d much rather be able to see their families during shoots instead of being away from them while on set.
I have a producer friend who tells me that she mandates that her shoots not go past 11 hours per day and that they fight for that in the pre-production phase so that there aren’t surprises on shoot days where they might go long. What it takes is producers that are hired by the studios to have the guts to set those limits before the filming even starts. And those kind of producers are hard to find, but they’re becoming more common.
This past summer, there was also a candlelight vigil in Burbank for Spike Osorio, who died at Radford Studios on the set of “Wonder Man” after falling from a perm. There was a lot of talk there about establishing a culture change from an individual level on set. Are you seeing that unfold in Massachusetts?
It’s happening everywhere. There’s a producer by the name of Amy Green who also is a stunt performer and coordinator, and she said something to the effect of, “I assign myself the role of being a safety champion in the production, and so I make it my business to speak up.” There’s also a number of organizations that I’m discovering, now that our film is getting out, that are trying to change the industry from the grassroots level. I just had a conversation with a woman named Akima Brown, who has a group called Reel Families for Change, and their mission is to help create a more humane workplace.
It’s also happening outside the U.S. with groups like the Mark Nelson Foundation in the U.K. He was a camera guy that was killed on set in an accident, and his wife started this foundation. There’s a woman by the name of Tomei Levi who has this injury prevention consultancy, and she’s now doing a survey about injuries. She’s based in the U.K. as well.
There’re also pilot programs now that ensure that safety supervisors are present. We interviewed John Lindley in our film, who is the former president of the International Cinematographers Guild, who did a lot of work on getting that legislation to pass, and he made a very compelling case for having a dedicated safety person on the film that doesn’t have other jobs, like being a first AD or a stunt coordinator, or even a safety person hired from the studio, who still has kind of a built-in bias.
I’m hopeful that those kind of pilot programs will demonstrate that making safety a priority is good for the unions.
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