In the long, sad, completely avoidable continuum of on-set accidents, which includes but is not limited to the death of Vic Morrow and two small children during the filming of “Twilight Zone: The Movie;” the lethal shooting of Brandon Lee on “The Crow;” and cinematographer Halyna Hutchins’ death on the set of independent western “Rust,” what happened during the filming of “Midnight Rider,” a biographical feature about Gregg Allman remains unique.
After second assistant camerawoman Sarah Jones was struck by a train on the set in 2014, the movie’s director, Randall Miller, pled guilty to felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing and received a 10-year probationary sentence, with a year to be served in custody. He wound up serving 382 days, entering a plea on March 9, 2015 and leaving prison on March 23, 2016. But his case remains historic. Miller, 62, is the first – and so far only – director to go to jail following a fatal on-set accident.
Now after being exonerated on March 11 after a petition for a first offender, he’s ready to tell his story – what happened on Feb. 20, 2014, what came after and what he’s learned.
Miller isn’t looking to be absolved. For him, there’s a newfound determination to tell stories of hope after so much personal darkness. And perhaps the saddest thing, in the wake of what happened on “Midnight Rider,” is that these kinds of deadly set accidents still occur.
The accident
The way that Miller tells it, he wasn’t desperate to make a Gregg Allman movie.
Sure, he had made the rock ‘n’ roll movie “CBGB,” and written a script with his wife Jody Savin called “The Drummer,” about the life of Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys. It was enough to get the attention of Allman and his managers and agents, who had the rights to the book about the singer-songwriter and Allman Brothers band member’s life and served as producers on the movie. Together, Miller and Savin had developed the script with Allman, even though, Miller says, Allman “had hepatitis and liver disease and was dying.” Throughout the meetings with Allman, one story stood out. It was after Allman’s second heart attack. “He’s in the hospital and he wakes up and he’s on a train track. He looks across the river and on the other side is Duane, his brother who had died 40 years before in a motorcycle accident, basically beckoning him,” Miller explained. Miller and Savin, who would co-write and produce “Midnight Rider,” talked with Allman and they agreed – the scene needed to be in the movie.
“What’s interesting about it is there have been other scenes prior to this when we were getting ready, that we couldn’t get a location. We rewrite it, we change it. It didn’t matter that it was a train bridge other than that’s where it was written in the book,” Miller told TheWrap during an exclusive 90-minute interview last month. “It could have been in the middle of the ocean. It could be somewhere else.”
But that didn’t happen.
Two weeks before they were set to shoot, in early 2014, Savin and Miller were in Los Angeles. They had assembled “an amalgam of great musicians from all these different bands that had played all the tracks that were going to be the Allman Brothers band.” Still – they knew they needed to shoot the train tracks scene. A location manager in Savannah, Georgia, where the rest of the movie was meant to shoot, announced that they had found a bridge. The location manager, the assistant director, line producer and cinematographer then traveled to Jesup, about an hour-and-a-half outside of Savannah. “It’s really hard to describe the property,” Miller said. The bridge was in the middle of a wood pulp mill called Rayonier, a multibillion dollar company that basically “owns everything,” according to Miller. In order to get to the train track and the bridge, you had to go through the locked gates of Rayonier.
The small team went to scout the bridge, since Miller and Savin were still in L.A. They were there with representatives from Rayonier. “The DP lies on the bridge, taking pictures,” Miller said. “The executives from Rayonier are there on the bridge with them, taking pictures.” When Miller returned to Savannah, he was told that the team would try to secure rights to shoot there. Miller was placated. “I had never been there before. These are people I’d done other movies with. I figured it was copacetic,” Miller said.
This is where things start to get fuzzy. The day the accident happened was before principal photography was set to begin, which has led to endless speculation in the more than 10 years since. Miller said the decision mostly came down to money.
“Midnight Rider” had a budget of $5.5 million. On a movie of this size, Miller said, “you generally try to keep your hub where you’re going to be.” Anything that’s outside of your hub, “you either put at the front or end of the shoot, or maybe at the beginning of a week, because as you get later in the week, your day keeps getting later.” Since the train track was so far away, an idea was proposed that instead of doing a camera test on this day, “let’s just do a half-a-day, after we do our production meetings,” Miller said. “We’ll drive out there and we’ll do that little scene and then we’ll come back. That was the idea.”
Miller pushed back against the idea that this was a splinter crew shooting unlawfully, which has been reported and repeated since the day the accident occurred (including in a widely watched episode of “20/20“). There were trucks and actor trailers and tons of equipment.
When he arrived at the location, Miller said, the crew was greeted by a Rayonier security guard, who unlocked the gates to the property. He went through another gate and was waved through. By the time he got to the tracks, “most of the things were set up.” The actors trailer, a make-up trailer and a wardrobe trailer were all there.
Again, the description of it in the press as “a strange side shoot,” Miller said, was untrue. “It was a full-on crew of people,” Miller recalled.
He was also greeted by Tina Kicklighter, the VP from Rayonier in charge of the event. He asked her about the scene, saying, “What’s the deal with this train track and this bridge?” They had been shown the script and the insurance. “We had a contract to be there. They had signed contracts with us,” Miller said.
Then, he said, things started to feel shaky, when Kicklighter told them that two trains would go down the tracks and then they’d be “all clear.” Miller remembers thinking, That was a little bit weird. Miller figured there would be no trains at all. He thought to himself, Why am I here? The director describes this as “the beginning.”
Charlie Baxter, the movie’s location manager (who Miller noted avoided scrutiny in the aftermath of the tragedy), had talked to Kicklighter about this before they had arrived. After Miller was sentenced, he and his lawyers got depositions and he had seen Kicklighter’s hand-written notes about the sequence – Greg Allman wakes up, bed on tracks. “These are all written things that she had then talked to her boss about,” Miller said.
The “first misunderstanding” was that Kicklighter said that Rayonier was handling the shoot, instead of CSX, the railroad company that unloads 20,000 rail cars on Rayonier property every year. Miller described Rayonier as being excited to have the “Midnight Rider” team shoot the scene on the bridge. The GM of the plant was sitting on a golf cart, watching them set up. Guards from the company were also milling around.
William Hurt, one of the actors in the scene, told the Canadian Press in 2015: “I just had an unsettled feeling from the very time I got there. I stopped everything and I said in front of everybody, I said, ‘Stop.’ And I asked [assistant director] Hillary [Schwartz] in front of the whole crowd, ‘Are we safe?’ Because it’s her job as the first AD to tell us that. She said, ‘Yes.’”
The two trains rolled by; the actors and crew waved to the conductors. The conductors waved back. Later, Miller found out, the trains had been issued a “slow order,” “which means they saw us.” The trains told the office that they had seen the crew and the office had told the trains to slow down.
After the second train, Miller turned to Kicklighter to ask if that was it. She told them, “No more trains.” The crew moved onto the bridge. While photos from the accident show a trestle bridge, Miller insists that it was actually a drawbridge. Miller was on the bridge, underneath a steel girder drawbridge portion of the bridge, “between 30 and 100 feet out from the edge.” They started shooting, with Hurt asking for “another take and then wants another take.”
In the middle of another take someone – Miller doesn’t remember who — yelled, “Train!” Miller remembered thinking, What did she just say? He looked and saw a light shimmer on the horizon. People started moving off the track in an orderly fashion, which is what first assistant director Hillary Schwartz instructed people to do. She had said that they would have 60 seconds to get off the tracks.
“Then people start running,” Miller said. There was also the bed on the tracks, which Miller claimed “the dressers hadn’t put together correctly, it was falling apart.” Miller went to move the bed off the track and saw that the train was coming. At some point, Miller said, he started hyperventilating. He blacked out. He fell on the tracks. He was later told that the still photographer pulled him off, but he was underneath the overhang of the train. And the train was going over him.
“It’s a blur of metal right over my face, inches from my face,” Miller said. His wife was far away, up by the trailers, about 100 yards from where they were filming. She ran over and the DP was shaking his head “like I didn’t make it.” Miller said the moment was “surreal” and that he was clearly in shock (“I felt like my head was inside of a water balloon”). He didn’t know where he was. Finally, the train passed. “I sit up and I look over and about six feet away from me is Sarah Jones’ body,” Miller said. “I don’t know how that happened but she was gone.”
While it was reported that a piece of the metal bed propelled Jones into the train, she was actually struck directly by the metal box on the side of the locomotive. Miller speculated that she might have gone back to retrieve camera boxes and maybe lost her balance.
The train that struck them didn’t heed the “slow order.” In fact, Miller said, it was speeding. A “20/20” episode called “The Deadly Take” reported that the train was going 58 miles an hour when it hit the area of the tracks where Miller and the crew were filming.
In the immediate aftermath, Miller said, Kicklighter had been “whisked away.” There was media everywhere, with the trades reporting on the accident 30 minutes after it had happened. Miller searched around and said, “I need to call the parents.” He dialed Richard Elizabeth Jones and told them his daughter was gone. “I was crying the whole time trying to explain what happened. I wasn’t sure what had happened,” Miller said.
Soon after, the police showed up. The crew answered the police officers’ questions. Miller provided a written statement. Looking back, he said, “All the things I did were probably not the right thing to do. But I felt, as far as I understood, this was a terrible mistake and that Charlie Baxter and Tina Kicklighter and Rayonier had really messed this up.” Later, Miller said, Baxter, who didn’t come to the shoot that day, “changed his story,” saying that he didn’t come “in protest” of what he deemed unlawful shooting, even though there was text message evidence that showed he was just really busy.
Miller knew he was sunk.
“You’re an independent film, doing the best you can, and you’re in a small town that is run by the landowners of the company that is going to get sued, plus the railroad, which is going to get sued,” Miller said. The CSX actually “ended up being more responsible than me.” Not that it mattered. Miller still went to jail.
Jones wasn’t even supposed to be there that day. She had come in from Atlanta to help the camera team. Another assistant cameraperson was supposed to come that day, but he had stayed back to prep the cameras for the more substantial chunk of shooting. When asked what his relationship with Jones was like, Miller said that he had “only met her that day.”
The accounting
Randall Miller is talking about the worst day of his life, on a sunny Friday afternoon, via Zoom. He’s dressed in a black sweatshirt with a black cap, the Quicksilver logo faintly visible. His chocolate-colored rescue dog Tevi is lolling in a mission-style chair in the background.
Miller should have never been on that bridge. He grew up in Pasadena, the son of two professors, his mother an internist, his father a microbiologist. He went to UCLA and initially wanted to be an actor, before becoming a director. He directed episodes of 1990s stables like “Parker Lewis Can’t Lose,” “Thirtysomething” and “Northern Exposure,” before directing big studio movies for Disney (“Houseguest” with Phil Hartman and Sinbad and “The 6th Man” with Marlon Wayans). Afterwards, he continued directing television, including an episode of “The Wonderful World of Disney” called “H-E Double Hockey Sticks.” More recently he returned to independent film, working with Alan Rickman on “Nobel Son” and “Bottle Shock” and on the aforementioned “rock ‘n’ roll” movie “CBGB,” about the legendary New York club. It was shot mostly in Savannah.
As he speaks, Miller oscillates between looking towards the future, on projects that he really cares about, and returning to the accident. Yes, he’s moving forward, but he also is working on a memoir that recounts the details in his own words and he is telling his story in a documentary about the case called “The Trial of Midnight Rider: Railroaded in the Deep South.” In some ways, Miller seems stuck on that bridge, even now, the clang of chrome still roaring overhead.
The aftermath
In the immediate aftermath of the accident, Miller said, he never felt like he personally had done something wrong. “Obviously, I still feel bad that this horrible thing happened but it wasn’t like I caused that,” Miller said. There were a number of factors that led to the accident, including that the production staff had perhaps made a “wrong assessment” and that Rayonier and CSX had screwed up. But already he was starting to feel the narrative congeal around the portrait of Miller as a “hard-driving director.”
Miller began suffering from nightmares and delusions following the accident. He thought that trains were going to run him over in the middle of the night and that FBI agents were hiding outside his house, trying to kill him. He saw a psychiatrist twice a week, who said that Miller was suffering from PTSD. “I’m not trying to say my situation was more difficult than the Joneses. Obviously that’s far worse. But my situation was not easy,” Miller said. When you suffer from a near-death experience like that, “every detail, every moment being on that track, keeps happening over and over again.” Even now, 11 years later, Miller finds it hard to talk about the particulars.
By early July 2014, Miller and several other crew members were charged with involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass; they were also cited by OSHA for “serious” and “willful” safety violations. Usually, Miller noted, involuntary manslaughter is for a drunk driver who kills someone or a homeowner who shoots someone by mistake. Miller was not driving the train and he was nearly run over himself.
In March of the following year, Miller was scheduled to go to trial.
The night before the trial, Miller and his attorneys had experts, actors and other director colleagues ready to come in and explain what the role of a director is on a production like “Midnight Rider.” Miller was with his lawyers in a small apartment right next to the court, ready to go. That’s where they got a call from the district attorney, who offered to drop the charges against Miller’s wife if he’d do three months in a probation camp and have another two years of probation. “I was very upset but that seemed reasonable,” Miller said. Miller and the lawyers canceled the flights for all the people who were supposed to be coming in.
The next day, they got to the courtroom and prosecutors told Miller that the deal was off, without any explanation. “I didn’t think that was legal to do to a person,” Miller said. He was sitting in the court while things like jury selection were happening, while he and the attorneys were also attempting to get people to come back to argue his innocence. (It was going to cost a fortune to re-book tickets and travel.) After a while, the prosecutors ask them to go into the other room to renegotiate. The D.A. told Miller that they had enough evidence to put him and his wife away for 13 years and they wouldn’t see their children grow up. Miller remembers asking one of his lawyers what the chances were for a guilty verdict. “You’ve done a lot of cases, give me the odds,” Miller asked. The lawyer responded, starkly, “50/50.”
Miller couldn’t believe it. The D.A. came into the room and said things like, “His kids will be grown up and they’ll hate them both.” He remembered thinking that he was just going to take it – whatever it was – for the sake of his wife and kids. I’m just going to do it, Miller thought. “I had to take the plea because the two of us were indicted and I had two little kids and I was far away from home,” Miller said.
The sentence was spending a year in jail and another 10 years on probation, although his time in jail would count towards his probation. Miller pled guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing. “Midnight Rider” executive producer Jay Sedrish also pled guilty and got 10 years’ probation.
The ordeal was over. Mostly.
The incarceration
Miller was sent to the Wayne County Detention Center in Jesup, Georgia. “This is not a good place,” Miller explained. “The cell that I was in was a cement room that was 10 feet by 16 feet, with two sets of bunks attached to the floor. There’d be at least four, sometimes six people there. Two people would sleep on the floor,” Miller said. The door attached to the cell was something you could not see through. Many times when the door would shut people would “get beat up, killed, shanked, raped, whatever” in the room. “I was fortunate enough to be able to talk my way out of bad situations,” Miller said. He would order more food from an overpriced vending machine, with inmates ordering on a little iPad-like tablet. “I realized pretty early on, you have to order a lot of stuff, because you’ve got to be able to defuse the situation,” Miller said. Just being able to hand somebody a candy bar or give them a Cup O’ Noodles and say, “Hey man, we’re cool,” went a long way.
When Miller got to jail, he would help guards fix their computers, do laundry, write things for people. But soon he found a more permanent job – making a movie. The local sheriff, John Carter, who ran the jail told him, “We get ourselves a plumber, they do the plumbing here. We get ourselves a mechanic, he fixes the police vehicles. You’re a movie director. You’re going to make a movie.” Miller remembered responding, “OK?” And immediately got on the phone with his wife. They got donations “from some friends in and out of Hollywood” to buy equipment for filming and editing. And he was soon partnered with an older detective, to make a documentary about the drug court system. Together they’d interview people, attend trials and then Miller would be deposited back into jail to edit.
And every time he returned to jail, he had to be strip-searched. By Miller’s count, the strip searches happened over 250 times. This would also happen when he would leave his cell and go to another room to edit his movie.
Miller eventually finished the movie, entitled “Drug Court: A Better Way” and handed it into the local drug court judge and, Miller said, they still use it in Georgia today. (You can watch it here.) “I’m the only DGA director in the history of the DGA to go to jail and be in jail and make a movie for the people that incarcerated me,” Miller said.
Miller was eventually released – after a year and 17 days on March 23, 2016. At home in Los Angeles, his probation officer, according to Miller, was mystified by his situation. “He was like, ‘I don’t get this,’” Miller said.
Three or four years into his probation, Miller asked the officer assigned to him if he could direct again. His probation officer said that, yes, as long as Miller wasn’t directly in charge of safety. He put together a movie that shot in England and Serbia and afterwards, he got a notice that he had violated his probation. Miller had to go back to court, this time over the internet, with his probation officer, who said that it didn’t seem like it was violating his probation.
Miller didn’t go back to jail. The movie, originally called “Higher Grounds,” was renamed to the more aggressive “Coffee Wars.” It’s streaming on Prime Video.
Epilogue
Sarah Jones’ death during the production of “Midnight Rider” remains the only instance in the U.S. in which a director was convicted on criminal charges for a fatal on-set accident.
Between 2011 and 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked 17 fatal occupational injuries within the motion picture and video production industry — and at least 25 since 2003. One of those was the result of a gunshot wound. And according to data from the Associated Press in 2016, there have been at least 194 serious injuries on film and TV sets in the U.S. between 1990 and 2014, with at least 43 deaths in that period.
And since the tragic “Midnight Rider” incident, there has been the equally-tragic shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins by Alec Baldwin in 2021.
Miller now sees his accident as “a combination of screw-ups.” “There’s an allure to movies and I think the Rayonier people were enamored with the movie business. They said, ‘yes, yes, come, come,’ which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Miller said. The company had been under fire for polluting in the river and, Miller said, wanted good press. Plus, Gregg Allman is a “hero of the South.”
Not that he is passing the buck. “I felt so devastated. Why had I not asked more questions? I should have been like, What? What the hell is this? Why are we here?” Miller said. They had rewritten other scenes in “Midnight Rider” to accommodate locations (or the lack thereof). Why were they so insistent on shooting a scene on an elevated train track? “I was on top of the music, I was on top of the casting, I was on top of the script, but I wasn’t as on top of the location, because I was like, Well, those guys will figure it out. I feel like that was a mistake.
“I’m making things that hopefully make a difference,” Miller said. He and his wife have been working on a documentary about a Holocaust survivor who is also an amazing tapestry artist. The documentary is about “how to instill tolerance in people.”
He’s also got a movie that he wrote and is trying to direct called “Super Crip,” which is about “a disabled actor, who goes up against a big star for the role of a lifetime” – an actual disabled person versus an actor who wants to play disabled, for the accolades.
“The kind of stories that we’re trying to do are about healing and in a weird way, they’re about healing this situation, this thing that we went through,” he said. “I’m 62 now. I’m not young. People will say, ‘Well, what are you doing?’ I’m like, ‘Well, I’m just trying to make a living.’”
Editor’s Note: TheWrap reached out to Sarah Jones’ family, via the Sarah Jones Foundation for set safety. We did not hear back.
