Hollywood Debunked: No, Unions Don’t Make Movie Sets Safer

Unions love nothing more than blaming problems on non-union operations.

So it was no surprise last weekend when the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, best known as IATSE, blamed the lack of union representation on the set of The Daily Wire’s new action film when movie star Jonathan Majors fell through a prop window and “nearly died.”

Well, not exactly. Majors only fell a few feet. He’s totally fine. In the video of the “accident” posted by Deadline you can hear Majors immediately asking, “Did we shoot it? Use it!”

READ MORE: Daily Wire 1, Hollywood Union 0: Production Wraps On Jonathan Majors Action Movie

Still, IATSE, the self-proclaimed “union behind entertainment,” wants people to believe that if they were there, nobody could have possibly gotten hurt.

Except, here’s the thing: IATSE is full of it. It’s all a game to twist producer Dallas Sonnier’s arm into entering a collective bargaining agreement with the union. And it’s a game the union lost, because Sonnier “doesn’t negotiate with communists.”

But let’s go back to the issue of the unions and safety.

Forget for a moment that a Screen Actors Guild representative was present on set the entire time and had no safety concerns. Forget, again, that Majors only took a small tumble and was totally fine. Let’s pretend Sonnier had caved to the union’s demands and given them everything they wanted. That would have prevented even this minor injury, right?

Well, sure. Nobody ever gets hurt on union-run Hollywood sets — at least if you don’t count the “Mission: Impossible” where Tom Cruise broke his ankle jumping off a building.

 

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Yes, IATSE was on set for that. It’s on set for every Hollywood movie. It’s unclear whether anyone walked off after that accident, which was so bad that they even included it in the film’s promo. Shout out to Cruise, who had the same reaction as Majors and immediately told the director to use the footage. He kept going after he knew he snapped his ankle, because he knew it was the perfect shot. 

IATSE was also probably on the set of “Django Unchained” when Leonardo DiCaprio slammed a table so hard that he smashed a prop glass and bled all over his co-star, Kerry Washington.

It’s unlikely that anyone walked off that set. In fact, it’s said the crew broke out into applause after director Quentin Tarantino called “cut.” And Tarantino put DiCaprio and his blood-soaked hand into the final cut of the movie.

 

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On the set of “Cast Away,” Tom Hanks ignored a small cut on his leg and developed an infection that nearly killed him. He was rushed to the hospital, and production was shut down for weeks as Hanks recovered. Again, it’s unclear whether any crew left the set in Fiji in protest.

George Clooney was so badly injured performing a stunt on the set of 2005’s “Syriana” that he considered suicide. It was during a torture scene, and Clooney flipped the chair he was tied to and cracked open his skull. He leaked spinal fluid out of his brain.

He won the Oscar for best actor, back when an Oscar really meant something. There were no reports of a union worker mutiny for an unsafe set.

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Sylvester Stallone got slammed so hard by wrestling legend Stone Cold Steve Austin in “The Expendables” — an awesome movie which he directed himself — that he broke his neck and dislocated both of his shoulders. He needed seven surgeries and ended up having a metal plate inserted into his neck.

Jackie Chan gets injured in almost every movie he does: cracked skull from a jump off a tree, legs crushed between two cars, and even one time where he almost lost an eye to a roundhouse kick. 

We can imagine that an IATSE production assistant advised Jackie Chan to take a few plays off, but I assure you that didn’t happen.

As Sonnier told Deadline, sometimes the people making action movies are just “too busy being bad asses, blowing sh*t up, flying helicopters, and killing movie terrorists to concern ourselves” with attention-seeking union assholes. 

So, no, unions don’t make film sets any safer. If anything, injuries on union-run sets are so common at this point that it’s almost malpractice to involve them.