Crew member dies on the set of Marvel’s Wonder Man series
The unnamed rigger fell off a rafter on set this morning
Aux News Wonder Man
A very sad incident occurred on the set of Marvel’s upcoming Wonder Man series this morning. As reported by Deadline, a rigger (who has not yet been named) fell to his death from the rafters at CBS Radford Studios where the show is being filmed. Nothing was being shot at the time.
In a statement, Marvel confirmed the news and added: “Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with his family and friends, and our support is behind the investigation into the circumstances of this accident.”
The series was set to go into full production next month following a delay due to the actors and writers strikes this past summer. It’s not clear how this incident will affect that schedule. A premiere date for the series has not yet been announced.
Wonder Man will star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, a DC veteran in his first role for the rival studio. (He has played both Black Manta in Aquaman and Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen.) Abdul-Mateen plays Simon Williams, who is, at least in the comics, a former arms dealer à la Tony Stark. Simon goes on a brief stint with the bad guys after the evil Baron Zemo endows him with ionic powers—a.k.a. super strength, super speed, super stamina, immortality, and a whole host of other really super things you wouldn’t want to see on the opposing side. Eventually, Wonder Man turns around and joins the good guys, finding himself a place on B-tier squad the West Coast Avengers. It’s unclear how much or how little of Wonder Man’s story will actually find its way into the series.
Wonder Man also stars Ben Kingsley, who will be reprising his Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings role as Trevor Slattery, a washed-up actor hired to play a notorious terrorist leader. The series will be produced by Shang-Chi’s Destin Daniel Cretton, along with head writer Andrew Guest (Brooklyn 99 and Community).
41 Comments
This is sad to hear. A lot of people don’t realize how rushed a lot of these productions are and how often people skip certain safety measures. I hope whatever happened, people learn from it.
That studio is going to get a very expensive visit from OSHA to remind them about harnesses and tie offs and shit. My company got hit with fine (I want to say it was $7K) because one of our service techs was too close to the edge of a roof and when the inspector popped in (because it just so happened that there was a damn OSHA convention happening down the road and some of them were out for a walk) he didn’t know who the “safety coordinator” was since he was just visiting to help out our customer. It ended up with the entire company having to do a 10 hour training, and the next violation would be a $70K fine. I’m guessing a worker death triggers even worse penalties.
It’ll definitely trigger a bigger fine but I highly doubt Disney will have any trouble paying it.
I figure they’ll just lobby Congress to make it legal to kill no more than, say, 15% of your film crew or 25% of your cast during a film.
I have some friends who work in the industrial services industry in TX (think refinery maintenance and repair, etc.) and the emphasis on safety is absolutely neurotic, but you still get people who don’t appropriately tie off, wear their personal protective equipment, etc. no matter how much training they go through. One had to go fire a guy while he was recovering from a broken leg because he decided to climb over the side of a scaffold instead of taking the marked but less convenient route down, and fell 30 feet. Nearly got the service company thrown off the job and yes, a big OSHA fine as well.
Service companies in that industry are generally super neurotic about safety because many contracts included injury ratios that need to be met. Depending on a few factors, a company can lose a contract for having too many incidents, even if they aren’t at fault for them.
That’s somewhat ironic as Texas has probably the worst reputation in the oil industry for lax safety regulation!
The fines have gone up a lot. I was a Fed but the California OSHA functions very similarly. Hard to spend a lot of time investigating a fatal accident and conclude everything’s okay.
I was IATSE, although in a smaller market, and stagehands are also notorious for drug issues. Partly it’s the long days – they drink to sleep and use uppers to wake up. I worked a convention center gig with a guy trained as a rigger. He smelled like beer and was panhandling on the floor. Literally asking other hands if he could borrow a couple bucks. After that, saw him on a theater job, he seemed drunk again & almost followed me into the ladies room (it’s not a trans situation). IATSE is also the only union I know of where people provide their own safety equipment. If you work through an IBEW hall or something, on normal sites, the employer provides a harness for you. You literally can’t bring your own. You can buy your own steel toes but the employer provides all other safety gear. IATSE hands OTOH get fitted for their own harnesses. They like it because it gives them more control, but it’s also possible that paying out of pocket for that leads them to hold onto things like harnesses longer than they should. It could be a lot of factors in this, and that includes user error or drug use. IATSE was a good way to make a lot of money, but a lot of the people who do that work are attracted to risk and make some of their own problems. After my experiences in the union I’m honestly pretty jaded about some of the leadership and standards. Other unions take things like steering people into rehab/not letting them use heavy equipment on site if they’re fucked up far more seriously. At least in my experience. In IATSE people were laughing about getting pee-tested 3x in a day (after crashing a forklift into things) etc. It wasn’t funny to me, though. And I don’t understand how even if they peed clean they were allowed to keep operating, like maybe it’s eyesight or whatever. I saw a guy almost hit two older women working deco, they were laughing about it – not funny IMO.
I used to hang lights for theater, and when we did it, there was absolutely NO dicking around when it came to hanging them. These were 30 lb lights we were attaching. Hell, even out adjustable wrenches were tied to our belts before we climbed the ladders. One of the lights fell and killed a dancer in one of the Nutcracker shows around 12 years ago.
Fuck people who don’t take this stuff seriously.
Yeah. I don’t want to name my old local but they largely did not take it seriously enough. The first time I worked load-out at a theater they assigned me to lighting. They had me up in the catwalk like “can you tie a bowline hitch we need to lower this viper” which are also heavy lights. I had already worked a convention center gig that morning – I was tired and like trying to learn all these new skills/knots as we did it. They seemed annoyed that I wasn’t confident instead of like, grateful that I wasn’t trying to do stuff I wasn’t properly trained for. Because if one of those things falls, it’s (1) expensive and (2) someone definitely could die. All the stuff people in the industry worry about – is there enough turnaround time etc – they didn’t care. They’d be like “we’ll suspend you, you have to go to this second call.” And then it wasn’t like, oh you’re a pusher (fairly easy & low stakes – pushing things that are on casters) it was like “have fun navigating a catwalk you’ve never been in, hope you know some sailing knots.” Just insane.In that city, the best stagehands are honestly through a private company that’s NU. Which sucks for those hands, because the pay & benefits are not as good for those workers – they deserve more & better. But that IATSE local just does not take training or safety seriously. And all the leadership, it’s that old-school thing where it’s guys who aren’t very bright or motivated but their dad was in that local, so they feel entitled. I tried reporting the local to OSHA, nothing happened. I’d talk to someone at an agency like OSHA or NLRB and they’d be like, “Well it sounds like a bad workplace but it doesn’t rise to the level where we can do X or Y about it.” So I just transitioned out to a related trade.
And I mean: the locals in NYC, Burbank, Vegas – they’re far more professional from what I’ve seen. But there can be problems even on a big production, depending on who is running things and how seriously they take it.
It’s really shameful. I’m lucky I went to a school that properly trained us in tech safety. Even people who didn’t major in tech were required to take the proper courses for setting up heavy equipment on the off chance they would be doing it.
Kristin Chenoweth was almost killed on the set of The Good Wife by falling lighting equipment. 7 inch skull fracture and cracked teeth and ribs, so, yeah, fuck those guys who don’t take it seriously.
The Cal-OSHA rules require the employer to pay for all PPE needed by employees such as harnesses and ensure it’s maintained in good condition. It doesn’t matter if the employees are short-term out of the union hall, full-time hires or on individual contracts as long as the employee’s work is controlled by the employer, if that makes any sense. I am pretty sure riggers are considered to be employees regardless of how they’re hired or paid.
Wasn’t Simon Williams an actor in the comics, and a stunt man (a la The Fall Guy), and presumably that portion of his background and NOT the arms dealer bit will have him intersect with Slattery?Also, it was his brainwave patterns that were the basis for the original Vision, right?
sure…also a crew member died RIP
He became an actor after gaining his powers. He was also best friends with Beast. And the Vision thing is accurate.(And portrayed by Nathan Fillion in deleted scenes in Guardians Vol 2.)
Yes, almost definitely, and yes. There is an interesting possibility that they can ultimately have Wonder Man die in some kind of heroic sacrifice (wouldn’t be the first time) and then keep Abdul-Mateen as the new Vision. That might be a stretch, but I’m honestly still trying to figure out why Wonder Man even made the cut at this point.
I like Wonder Man but he certainly wasn’t a popular hero.I guess they could do that with Vision but White Vision is still out there somewhere too…
That’s what I meant. White Vision is Vision with no personality, so dead Williams brain patterns is a sensible way out that also gives a good explanation for recasting.And yeah, Wonder Man is fine, but hardly first- or second-string. I don’t really see him sticking around for too long.
Actually, thinking about it, they have the FF rights now too: Not sure if the rights for the OG Human Torch go along with that but they could go with the original Vision angle there. Was Human Torch in the background of one of the movies though…?
True, but that was the explanation for where the actual body came from, and that’s already been covered in the MCU (vibranium, Amadeus Cho’s mother for some reason, lighting, etc.).But it wouldn’t make sense at all for the original Torch to be considered part of the FF IP. I mean, Namor made his first official silver age Marvel appearance in the FF and has always been way more tied to them than Jim Hammond, but he wasn’t part of that Fox deal.
It wouldn’t make sense for the Torch to be covered under that IP but you never know.Just spitballing, I’m interested to see what ends up happening. Simon fighting against his crazy ass brother should be interesting at least.
If I remember correctly, you see a quick shot of robot Human Torch in ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’ when Steve and Bucky are at the big science fair, just before they see Howard Stark show off his flying car. I always thought it’d be fun to have a little retro superhero adventure for him somewhere in the MCU.
It’s almost as if Wonder Man is there as connective tissue for Zemo and Trevor Slattery only.
Wonder Man made the cut because Forbush Man was busy.
Yep. He also started off as a member of the original Avengers team and was a member for several years—like dozens of issues (most issues from #152 through #210) before the West Coast Avengers limited series was ever published. It’s like the writer read a snarky comment somewhere questioning why he got his own series and is just repeating the incomplete info. Also, according to Stan Lee himself, Wonder Man’s original appearance—way back in Avengers #9 in 1963)—was supposed to kick off a bigger story arc (he might have even joined the team back then), but DC sued because his name was too close to Wonder Woman, so they put him on ice. Then DC kept coming out with characters whose names were similar to Marvel’s, so they finally got around to bringing back Wonder Man.
yeah, I was about to say that. A BIG Deal about his 90s solo comic was he’s a movie star. It was very much, “Oh this film making is so fake, not like real super heroes!” That was enough to go for 29 issues…. not good ones, and even at the time DC comics was doing a better job with the same premise.
This is a major reason to have strong unions, ones that don’t allow safety compromises when the major money players demand them in order to “speed things up”.
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, was illustrative, but by no means, not the only one, with examples of workers being fed through whatever machine the big boss had going, just because operations were required to go faster so his income would go up.
and now we live in a world where teenagers still get killed at meat processing plants, but we successfully got rid of all the upton sinclairs. progress!
We have certainly not gotten rid of the Uptons Sinclair. Today’s Uptons Sinclair and Ralphs Nader have more tools to draw upon to get change going, but they also have some more devious opposition.
WONDERMAN!FIGHTING EVIL AS IT COMES!
As they are coming is a rude time to fight a person.
Hey, some people are into that.
And Disney says Desantis is the one killing people.
…do they, though? I thought it was a dispute about local control over some land disney owns. Like is it even really a joke if you just invent the thing you’re joking about?
Forget it, Bad Kuchi Kopi, it’s LowEffortTrolltown.
C’mon gang, we suffer for art; we shouldn’t have to die for it.
Yes but will Alex Baldwin be charged?
B-tier squad? They’re led by Hawkeye!!!
Wonder Man, Wonder ManFills evildoers with a sense of dreadWonder Man, Wonder ManGets his powers from Wonder BreadThat’s all I’ve got, I’m sorry.