As you no doubt have heard by now, Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman was seriously injured in a car accident today. As you probably heard from Mark McGrath by now, Freeman's accident is now being lumped in with a supposed “Curse of The Dark Knight,” a spate of recent tragedies suffered by others involved in the production of the monster hit Batman movie that still reigns as No. 1 at the box office.
For those keeping score at home, special effects technician Conway Wickliffe died while working on the film last October, when his camera truck crashed into a tree during the shooting of a chase scene. Most famously, “Joker” Heath Ledger died in January of a drug overdose. “Batman”/”Bruce Wayne” Christian Bale was arrested for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister shortly before the film's London premiere. And now we have Freeman's brush with death just as the latest box office tallies were released.
Curse chasers have brought up other bedeviled films, including 1955's A Rebel Without a Cause and 1982's Poltergeist. Rebel's three lead actors suffered horrible deaths: James Dean by car crash the same year the picture came out, Sal Mineo by stab wounds in 1976 and Natalie Wood by drowning in 1981. Death also befell Poltergeist's two young cast members: Dominique Dunne was strangled into brain death by her ex-boyfriend the same year the Tobe Hooper-directed/Steven Spielberg-written movie came out, while Heather O'Rourke looked into her final light six years later, succumbing to intestinal stenosis at the tender age 13. The spooky horror film and its assorted sequels were also said to have been beset by strange, on-set accidents.
But it must be noted that with those films, many of the tragedies happened years after the films hit the theaters. Can anyone name another star-crossed production that's been beset by such bad karma before it even leaves the theaters? Okay, not counting Care Bears: Big Wish Movie.
The curse we all live under in Orange County will not be lifted until an Arrested Development movie is in the can, of course.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.