Nick Gant — executive producer of the Gregg Allman biopic “Midnight Rider” — posted a comment Thursday, about the death of camera assistant Sarah Jones, that was so callous and inconsiderate he quickly removed it from his Facebook page.
Jones, 27, was hit by a freight train a week earlier as she, other crew members and William Hurt (as Allman) were filming on a train trestle in Jesup, Ga.
The tragedy has sparked accusations of negligence, calls for stricter safety standards and a campaign to have Jones included in the “In Memoriam” segment at the Academy Awards telecast Sunday night.
I didn’t see Gant’s post, but a source who did said, “He wrote that young women die of a lot of things. He linked to a Huffington Post article about a woman dying after a bikini wax. So many people told him how sick and stupid it was that he took it down within an hour.”
Gant couldn’t be reached for comment, and his voice mail was so full it couldn’t take my message.
It is unclear if Gant attended the memorial for Jones on Wednesday in Columbia, S.C., with 20 crew members from the film and about 1,000 other mourners.
Jones was killed setting up a dream sequence where a hospital bed was placed on the tracks after two trains had gone by. “They didn’t know about the third train,” said one source in Savannah, Ga., where Gant’s Meddin Studios occupies a converted meat-packing plant.
Director Randall Miller and others rushed to remove the bed from the tracks, fearing it could cause a derailment, but they weren’t in time. “When the train hit the bed, it was like a bomb went off,” said my source.
Jones was hurled under the train wheels, while seven other crew members were injured.
Production was indefinitely postponed on the film, based on Allman’s memoir, “My Cross To Bear,” the uplifting saga of a rock icon as he finds his way through the darkness into the light.