Actor Norton to Give Deposition in LODD Blaze
By Stephen Rex Brown
Source New York Daily News
Actor Edward Norton will be grilled under oath about the blaze on a Harlem film set that killed an FDNY firefighter last year, new court papers reveal.
Norton was filming the star-studded “Motherless Brooklyn” on March 22, 2018, when the fire erupted at a former jazz club that’d been converted into a set on St. Nicholas Ave. FDNY smoke eater Michael Davidson was killed while putting out the inferno exacerbated by highly flammable movie set materials.
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A one-page agreement in a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit brought by Davidson’s widow and five tenants displaced by the fire shows Norton will be deposed Feb. 20.
In addition to playing the lead character, Norton directed and wrote the movie based on a novel written by Jonathan Lethem about a detective with Tourette’s syndrome. Alec Baldwin and Willem Dafoe also starred in the film released in November.
Davidson’s widow, Eileen Davidson, argues the production company, Class 5, is liable for Davidson’s death because the FDNY had not been informed of alterations made to the building for filming.
“These movie set walls created voids which initially concealed fire. The first units were unaware that these false walls were not (part) of the fire building," the FDNY concluded in a report.
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