5 Film Shoots That People Mistook for Real Crimes

5 Do Not Disturb

Pennsylvania’s George Washington Hotel is 102 years old. It’s hosted presidents and movie stars, and in 2010, the place caught fire. The firefighters managed to take care of the blaze easily enough, but during the process, they broke their way into a room and appeared to uncover something worse. Blood covered the walls. Someone had written on the wall in blood, and some unspecified severed body part lay on the floor. 

When they approached the manager with their prepared “we-found-a-murder-room” speech, he explained that they were mistaken. This room had been where a crew had filmed a murder movie, New Terminal Hotel, featuring Cory Haim. As for why no one had cleared the room out, even two years on, the manager said he’d left it in case they needed reshoots. This sounds absurd, considering that the movie had released in theaters eight months previously, but maybe it wasn’t such a crazy idea. The movie would come to DVD three years later, newly titled Do Not Disturb, now containing additional footage.

Haim could not be reached for comment, as he was dead. He had died just two weeks before the movie came out, of pneumonia. Everyone blamed the hundreds of pills he’d been stockpiling and abusing probably, but doctors determined that the death was what they called natural causes, so that’s one more scene falsely interpreted as a crime. 

4 Alien

H.R. Giger once found himself visiting the Netherlands, as all openminded people must. He went through customs, and if you heard that this country is very free about contraband of all kinds, you’ll be disappointed to learn that they searched him thoroughly. They even examined his artwork, and they demanded to know exactly where he’d taken these photographs. 

For reference, the artwork of H.R. Giger — who’s most famous for his work on Alien — looks something like this:

“Where on earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects?” he later wondered. “In hell, perhaps?”

Presumably, they suspected he was a serial killer and was carrying around recordings he’d made of his restrained victims. Either that or they just figured he’d visited some Amsterdam club the last time he was there, and they wanted the address so they could hang out there as well.  

3 Batman Begins

Those custom officials never voiced the obvious explanation for Giger’s sketches: They were of extraterrestrial origin. A man in Chicago in 2004 had no such reservations when he saw an unusual vehicle on the street. That’s an alien spacecraft, he concluded. 

It was really a custom car serving as the Batmobile in the upcoming Batman Begins. The insides of the stunt car held a Chevy V8 engine, while the rest was custom engineered by the production team, aiming to look like a cross between a Lamborghini and a Humvee. On this day, it wasn’t taking part in a scene with the streets cleared but was being driven by a stunt performer who was just transporting it from one spot to another. 

It moved on the road like a car all right, but the man intuited that it wasn’t truly a car. For starters, the front wheels had no real axles but just spun on their own. So, he did his duty and drove his own car into it. Needless to say, he was drunk at the time. Studio officials failed to get his name because he had no license. 

Fortunately, the stunt car lacked any of the crumple zones essential to most consumer vehicles, so it emerged from the collision unscathed. Unfortunately, the incident convinced the man to abandon his alien watch in the future, so when the real attack comes, no one will be there to defend us. 

2 Breaking Bad

You never know how an episode is going to start when you put on Breaking Bad. Maybe it’ll be an in-universe ad for a chicken restaurant. Maybe it’ll be a mariachi band doing a song. Maybe it’ll be a montage about a motel sex worker’s long day of oral chores.

That montage from Season Three lasts just two minutes but naturally took a bit longer to film. The string of clients were 10 actors in 10 cars that lined up near the motel so they could drive close and approach actress Julie Minesci one-by-one. Then a van that didn’t belong to any of the cast managed to worm its way in. “What’s going on?” said the driver to Minesci. “How ya doing?”

He thought she was working the spot for real and was propositioning her accordingly. Others in the crew needed to step in and say, “Julie, he’s not with the show. He’s bogus. Send him away.” Of course, they couldn’t actually let him through. That would count as non-union labor. 

1 The Godfather

In 1971, the FBI suspected Carmine Persico of a variety of crimes. For starters, he was nicknamed “Junior,” which strongly suggested that he was a part of the mafia. Also, they had an inkling that he’d entered a barbershop in 1957 and shot another mobster in the face, which was illegal at the time. The key to arresting him would be to monitor all his associates and then to try to form a RICO case around them and nail them all. 

One of these associates was a man named James Caan. Clearly, this was someone either connected to the mafia already or trying to join, or else he’d have no excuse for all these furtive meetings with this gangster from the Colombo family. It took a while for them to realize that Caan was really just an actor researching a role in some upcoming movie called The Godfather. 

The feds did manage to arrest Persico in 1973. They sent him to prison for eight years, and he went on to be convicted for further attempts to bribe the government from behind bars. Then he got out, went on the run, was arrested again and this time decided to represent himself in court. This resulted in several additional sentences, one for 100 years, and he died in prison in 2019. 

Caan, meanwhile, died in 2022, never having once gone to prison. Not even for the time in the 1990s, when he phoned a friend in the Mafia to exact a little retribution on a friend who owed him money. This friend was Joe Pesci, and the FBI intercepted the call but did not act. “He’s probably just researching another role,” they figured. He was not. 

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