How To Avoid Workplace Accidents: Don’t Work On The Hobbit or Anything With Spider-Man
Vital Information for Your Everyday Life
We don’t believe in curses here, but we do enjoy pointing out strings of almost certainly unconnected events that nevertheless approximate a pattern to our highly-evolved-in-pattern-finding simian brains because it itches that need in those aforesaid highly-evolved-in-pattern-finding simian brains.
So, after months and months of horrible accidents in the production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark broadway show, some workers on The Amazing Spider-Man film reboot ran into some trouble up a… well not a creek, but a building. Six stories up a building, for three hours, when their cherry-picker malfunctioned.
The grips were trying to build a platform for a camera on the roof of a building at Market and Madison streets in Chinatown around 11:15 a.m. when the malfunction occurred, workers said.
They got stuck near a six-floor fire escape. But they weren’t close enough to climb onto it – and wound up trapped for three hours before they were rescued by the FDNY.
Worst of all, they’d drunk a lot of coffee that morning. Not joking.
On the other side of the world, in what we’re guessing was not the first time that nostril hair has been a concern for someone on the production of a Lord of the Rings movie (I just mean they do a lot of makeup an prosthetics, come on), two craftspersons were hospitalized after what the fire department called an “explosion.”
Ceris Price, a publicist for “The Hobbit,” told The Herald that the incident had occurred in a production workshop when “a couple of the guys” were drilling on a statue, and they sustained “mild burns but nothing serious.” She said it was a “slight overstatement” to say an explosion had occurred.
Ms. Price said one of the workers “had some burnt nostril hairs and, apparently if that’s the case, there is always the risk of inhalation so they get checked out.”
After a studio fire, labor dispute, and Peter Jackson’s ulcer, we’re glad it was just minor injuries on The Hobbit set, because if anything really bad did happen in The Hobbit, it would take about half of England’s acting population with it, not to mention half of Flight of the Conchords and the BBC’s Sherlock.
(Spider-Man story at the New York Post via Bleeding Cool, Hobbit story at ArtsBeat via Flavorwire.)
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
