Talk:Randall Miller

Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School
Can some wise editor explain why a page describing this delightful movie was removed and redirected here? There are billions and billions of trivial pages on this site, and there is enough information to at least form a plausible skeleton.

As it is now, one is more or less left lost in hyperspace by the redirect to this page, which buries the short and the full length film in the text. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Treethinker (talk • contribs) 14:03, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Lead section
I believe the lead is now well-balanced, neutral, and appropriate to the content, but someone else please give it a look. If it meets with approval, please remove. --Threephi (talk) 05:35, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Dude is in jail for manslaughter
Is there any reason that every attempt to add the above about this dude straight up letting a woman get killed are being removed over and over? Even sourced stuff is getting deleted as if it was vandalism. Is Randall's mom a wikipedian? 71.232.25.76 (talk) 16:50, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Go back and look at history. Miller said at one point this is his page and he has a right to edit it. He clearly repeatedly vandalized MR page, adding information that was not yet public knowledge before trial only he or vixtims would know. And we know victims woukd not edit in his favor.  They intentionally put their crew in a deadly situation and now they act like they are the victims.  These people are sick so you can expect they will do anything to try and change reality.DFinmitre (talk) 00:55, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The fact that the man has been convicted of a particular crime is quite apparent in his biography. You may not use inflammatory statements and accusations against the man on this talk page — Wikipedia is not a forum or a soapbox for you to express your displeasure or hatred of any person, no matter what they may or may not have done — and I have redacted a specific statement which is a provably-false criminal accusation. Wikipedia is a place to build encyclopedia articles, not grind your ax. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 06:07, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * It looks too good to be true—the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, so it's a great place to right great wrongs and tell the world who is evil. The problem is that there are hundreds of people trying to do that on different articles every month, so their efforts are quickly reverted in order to have neutral articles which record due information in a reasonable manner. Efforts to undo WP:BLP will not be effective. Johnuniq (talk) 07:11, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * @NorthBySouthBaranof You need to go read the articles at Midnight Rider (film), your accusations against me are not correct. This is the talk page, not the article, and these comments are in response to the subject of the article having a well documented pattern of editing his own wiki page and now that he is in jail, continuing to have someone do so, deleting factual and well sourced information and adding fluff to the article which has not been reported in any article.  Wiki is not imdb and it is not a personal resume.


 * A neutral article does NOT mean not including well sourced information. If you want to talk about WP:DUE there are hundreds of articles about Miller being the first director in history to be indicted and convicted of a serious felony for a death on a film set.  CLEAR FACTS.  Repeating his imdb filmography in the body is WP:UNDUE.


 * I think an OSHA report and hearing, NTSB report, felony criminal conviction are a little it more significant than an imdb page. Listings for TV shows he directed one episode for are not notable, they do not belong on wiki, they are not in souced articles.  If we use imdb as a source and consider it notable, wiki will need to drastically expand.


 * Your concepts of POV are greatly outweight by heavily souced articles and substantial undisputed facts. DFinmitre (talk) 02:14, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia article talk pages are not places for expressing personal opinions about the subjects of articles — they're a place to discuss improvements to the articles themselves. My statement as to your apparent motivation is self-explanatory. You are right that it is inappropriate for the article subject to edit the article in a biased manner, but similarly, editors who have demonstrated a particular personal bias against article subjects are also discouraged from editing such articles. Bias against the subject of an article is no more acceptable than bias for the subject of an article. We must write a complete, neutral biography of this person, discussing them as a whole person, not merely as someone who has been held criminally responsible for a tragic workplace death. We must write this article from a detached perspective, not from the perspective of an aggrieved party. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 04:51, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
 * I repeat myself: Wikipedia is not a soapbox for arguing about the article subject, and talk pages are not a forum. There are many places on the Internet for people to vent and rant and rage about things; Wikipedia is not one of those places. As Johnuniq noted, Wikipedia is not a platform for righting great wrongs, it is an Internet encyclopedia. Please refrain from using this talk page as a place to express your anger with Randall Miller's actions. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 00:15, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Outside comment
I was brought here by a request for outside input at the Biographies of Living Person's Noticeboard. This is where we discuss whether article-subjects are treated fairly, in compliance with special policies for living people. Those policies do require that we create a balanced page about a person, as oppose to one that focuses exclusively on this one event in his life, without covering his decades of life prior.

There are a few ways to handle this kind of situation. The content below can be re-incorporated, once the rest of the article is expanded. If there is no way to expand the rest of the article using credible, independent sources, because he is not famous for anything else, than you need to delete this article and create a standalone article about the incident, presuming the incident is notable. CorporateM (Talk) 03:56, 8 April 2015 (UTC)
 * All of that is just fine -- but what isn't fine is to delete a reference and install a "citation needed" template. Can't quite figure out why someone would have done that.  Nomoskedasticity (talk) 08:12, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Storage
Storing the "Train collision with crew on set and felony conviction" section here. Will discuss why in the discussion above. CorporateM (Talk) 03:52, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

On February 20, 2014, while shooting a scene on an active railroad trestle bridge, high over the Altamaha River in Wayne County, Georgia, second camera assistant Sarah Jones was struck and killed by a passing CSX freight train, and seven others were injured. Production was suspended the following week. Miller was charged with involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespass and faced trial in state court in Wayne County, Georgia. On March 9, 2015, he pleaded guilty to counts of felony involuntary manslaughter and criminal trespassing, and was sentenced to ten years, pursuant to a plea agreement under which he is expected to serve two years in jail followed by probation. As part of his plea agreement he will be precluded from working as a director or assistant director or in any supervisory role that includes safety responsibility of a film production. Miller subsequently released a statement accepting responsibility for the accident.


 * I bracketed the above stored code in nowiki tags to prevent generation of live references, which were messing up adding a new talk section. --Threephi (talk) 05:42, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Midnight Rider and Manslaughter Conviction section header
Hi Smartse, please expand on why you feel the header for this section needs changing. There is precisely one sentence referencing the production of Midnight Rider for context; the rest is entirely about the manslaughter conviction and related events. If anything, the most representative header would remove the movie title, not the manslaughter conviction which composes the vast bulk of the content.

Further, I think the most notable thing about Mr. Miller to most people is his status as the first film director in history to be jailed for an on-set death. A google search of his name is dominated by news articles relating that element of his biography. IMO the manslaughter conviction is an important detail to include in the header to help focus the attention of a researcher seeking to learn more about that element.

I would also offer as an indication of common practice John Landis, Wesley Snipes, Martha Stewart. I'm interested to hear your (and anyone else's) thoughts, but I feel that the section header should reflect the content, and not shy away from it. I am not deeply versed in WP policy, but I would hope and expect that principle is supported. --Threephi (talk) 15:42, 7 June 2020 (UTC)


 * As I said it just seems unneccessary to me. We detail in the lead about what film he was working on when the death occurred and so having a section with that as a title makes it easy for a reader to find. Including manslaughter in the header makes it overly long, but admittedly I'm not too bothered if you want to change it back. SmartSE (talk) 08:34, 8 June 2020 (UTC)


 * The point about brevity is a good one. I changed it back to a shorter version.  --Threephi (talk) 17:05, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Opening Paragraph
User:Willantonius has made some edits to the header and other sections that I feel aren't reflective of the article. These edits mostly consist of removing the section in the opening paragraph about the Midnight Rider incident, generally deprioritizing it's significance in the article, and mentioning the unrelated legal issues of a district attorney that is involved in the Higher Grounds controversy. I feel the parts removed are significant enough parts of his public life to stay, and the parts added are unnecessary information. Given that I don't want to start an edit war, I'm bringing it to the talk page. I feel it is also worth mentioning that the aforementioned user has disclosed they have received third party payment from the production company UNCindie for edits regarding Higher Grounds, so I think COI issues might be worth mentioning here. JellyMan9001 (talk) 22:22, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Special:Contributions/JellyMan9001. Johnuniq (talk) 00:32, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll admit that as a new user and this being my first article, it doesn't look good. I could tell you that I'm a retired user from 5 years ago getting a clean start, but talk is cheap. That being said I feel the edits made by the abovementioned user are COI interest and I'd rather discuss the changes here than start any sort of edit war. JellyMan9001 (talk) 02:06, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * This is obviously a continuation of the long-running attempts to remove and downplay information about Midnight Rider from the article. SmartSE (talk) 09:29, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Fully agree.  has clearly violated WP:PAY as they are employed by the subject of this article's business to promote the subject's recently produced movie, itself the subject of a section included in this article, and have failed to provide adequate disclosure in multiple ways: failing to announce themselves on this talk page; and by making direct and controversial edits here without prior discussion.  The required disclosure on the user's talk page also seems inadequate to what the policy demands.  I've never faced this kind of situation before, but I am inclined to escalate this to admin attention if it persists. --Threephi (talk) 23:13, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Edit request for Sarah Jones wikilink
I was given some kind of sanctions notice on my talk page, so I'll err on the side of caution and not edit directly. I think there should be a wikilink to Sarah Jones (camera assistant), although it is a redirect to the Safety for Sarah movement which came about as a result of the tragedy. Would it be more appropriate to only link from within text referring to the actual movement versus the person alone? Thanks Strangerpete (talk) 14:53, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I am not deeply versed in wikipedia policies on the link target question, but intuitively I would think it's better to link to an actual article instead of a redirect. I have been considering adding  as a hatnote to the midnight rider/manslaughter section, but IMO the section would need to be fleshed out slightly with a relevant, sourced mention of the safety movement for it to make sense.  If you are up to doing that, I have no objection.
 * I do not speak for Johnuniq but I believe the the notice on your talk page was just boilerplate to alert you to the fact this article falls under WP:BLP, and to put you on notice that editing sanctions may be applied if you are deemed to have broken policies or other page restrictions. As the template on your talk page says, It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.  We have had a few minor edit wars here recently so it wouldn't surprise me if this article has drawn admin attention.
 * On the original point, IMO the whole constellation of pages surrounding the Midnight Rider incident and Sarah Jones' legacy would benefit from reorganization. The current article names are the result of a consensus reached soon after the original events which judged that Jones did not pass WP:1E.  Some time has gone by since then however, and I think her individual notability could be reevaluated.  I have been planning to work on it but admittedly there is no externally-viewable progress yet ;) --Threephi (talk) 22:25, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Upon reflection, your idea was a good one and there's really no reason to hold off. Hope you don't mind --Threephi (talk) 23:24, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Not at all, and thank you. Seems like a better way to reference both links to me. Strangerpete (talk) 23:29, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

COI again
@Smartse just a heads up, seeing your reverts of Special:Contributions/138.229.211.141; this appears to be a continuation of Special:Contributions/138.229.231.148 and Special:Contributions/138.229.220.3 who previously identified themselves as the article's subject. Strangerpete (talk) 23:14, 8 March 2022 (UTC)