Hollywood Didn’t Have Any Safety Regulations In Place Until This Movie Killed 3 People
What To Know
- The 1928 silent film caused a deadly on-set disaster when 600,000 gallons of water were unleashed on unprepared extras.
- The tragedy exposed the lack of safety regulations in early Hollywood.
- This incident directly influenced the creation of industry-wide stunt and on-set safety protocols.
Back in the golden age of cinema, before computers could make the impossible possible and before organizations existed to protect everyday Joes from killing themselves on set, directors were gods, and producers wielded near-absolute power over life-or-death situations. Everyone wanted a job and would do almost anything to keep it, which sometimes meant being placed in perilous positions where danger and even death were accepted as part of the price of making movies.
And that was very much the case with 1928’s Noah’s Ark, a silent film marred by a largely avoidable tragedy, one that helped spark the creation of early stunt and on-set safety regulations in Hollywood.
Created by film titans Darryl F. Zanuck and Michael Curtiz, the ambitious project retold the biblical story of Noah while weaving in a parallel narrative centered on World War I soldiers. For the massive flood sequence, the filmmakers wanted the extras to appear genuinely terrified, and to achieve that level of realism, they released an estimated 600,000 gallons of water onto hundreds of performers without warning or confirming whether they could swim.
According to reports, cinematographer Hal Mohr walked off the set due to the disregard for the safety of the extras. But the production marched forward. And the results were catastrophic.
The force of the water was so extreme that it caused the extras to crash into the concrete sets, breaking bones in the process. According to reports, one extra had to have his leg amputated, while star George O’Brien lost several toenails. According to several accounts, three people died in the flood, and dozens of ambulances were called to the set.
Everett Collection
Among the hundreds that battled for their lives in floodwaters was a young Marion Morrison, who would later be known as John Wayne.
The disaster influenced the establishment of early, industry-wide stunt safety protocols, helping formalize on-set safety practices and guidelines for planning and protecting dangerous stunts and large crowd scenes. In the aftermath, productions began to increasingly rely on trained stunt performers, improve on-set medical readiness, and deliberate risk assessment standards.
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