I don’t know about @ASL_v2.0, either. But I wouldn’t consider it just about laws. Knowing what happened in this case would be relevant morally in determining how to have proper, reasonable safety procedures and how these need to be ensured to be followed.
I don’t really think or morality in terms of ways you “pay.” Sure, you try to make amends, but that just is about trying to minimize the damage. The actual breach still occurred. Hence what Baldwin has done afterwards isn’t really relevant to me about the morality of what happened.
Hence what moral obligations that Baldwin fulfilled after the action don’t matter in determining the moral implications of the action.
Sure, that’d be an issue if there were a systemic safety problem in moves. But there isn’t, or at least I’ve seen no evidence there is. Personal responsibility seems to be the scope of the problem in this case.
I couldn’t find a better verb than “pay”. Maybe “fulfill”?
Morality is something that exists between people, but not merely between individuals. I think Rust, as a production, is but one of many economic efforts that is representative of a system whereby corners are cut and people are put at unacceptable risk for the economic gain of a few. The public as a whole is harmed by the class of employers who pursue such ends. To me, it’s not about individual moral redress alone because I don’t think there can be a redress in this public sense–at least not from Baldwin alone. But I think it’s important to recognize the harm extending beyond just the victim here, the harm Baldwin has done not so much as a person but as a representative of an exploitative system. That’s why Baldwin’s relative salary and his position as a producer is of moral significance to me: it tells me where he fits into the hierarchy of this system. He is not scraping by on wage*, he is prime mover with outsized power and influence.
By contrast, the armorer is merely an individual to me, and I think the moral questions around her could be reduced down to something between her and Hutchins’ estate, of no greater “public” significance.
Honestly, I’m trying really hard here to avoid channeling any particular political theory.
*ETA: And he’s also not someone taking great strides to disrupt the system, either. Had this production been run more democratically, with all participants having a stake in the outcome beyond their wages alone, that might change my perception of Baldwin and other “producers.”
Jon-Erik Hexum was the lead in the show Cover Up. He was fooling around with a prop gun while bored, taking out all of the blanks but one, and playing Russian Roulette. (He would spin the chamber, point it at his head, and pull the trigger, though I am not sure if he was repeating that process or just did it once and got “lucky”.) He was under the mistaken impression that a gun with a blank was harmless like a cap gun. However, when placed against a person’s head, even though it isn’t firing a bullet, it still fires a muzzle blast of gases and in his case it fractured off a piece of his skull and propelled it into his brain, probably not too different from the injury a bullet might have caused. He didn’t die immediately, but they were unable to fix the damage in surgery and less than a week later he was brain dead.
For both Hexum and Lee, it was an accident involving a prop gun with non-lethal ammunition; a blank and dummy round respectively.
What happened to Lee was a bit more complicated. They attempted to create a dummy round by taking a real bullet and removing the powder, which in theory would make it fully inert. However, there was still a primer (the part that helps ignite the powder to cause the explosion that propels a bullet), and while the primer wasn’t enough to fire the bullet from the gun, when the prop gun was used the primer ignited which was just enough to push the bullet out of the casing and into the barrel. Later they replaced the dummy round with a blank, which has the powder but no bullet, so it is supposed to make the sound and smoke of a gun being fired without a projectile. Except, with an unseen bullet stuck in the barrel, that blank pushed the bullet out of the barrel at Lee, and he was struck fatally in the abdomen. The gun was fired at close range (within 15 feet) and it was like being struck by a live round.
Both situations seem like there were safety violations. Hexum shouldn’t have been allowed to fool around with a dangerous prop. It’s not a toy and he shouldn’t have been holding onto it if they weren’t filming. (Reportedly they were trying to film a scene but it was delayed, so Hexum was sitting around waiting for it to be resolved. I would think whoever was in charge of firearm safety should have retrieved the gun until they were ready to film.) In Lee’s case you had at least two failures; the dummy rounds were improperly made, and nobody checked that the barrel was clear before loading a blank.
Clearly there have been people shot and killed on a filming set, but those were not situations where a full live round was accidentally put into a gun. Not until Rust.
As director Cecil B. DeMille was making the 1915 film “The Captive,” an extra was shot dead because, DeMille wrote in his autobiography, “One of the players had neglected to make the change I had ordered from live ammunition to blank.… No one ever knew, officially, who had carelessly omitted to unload one of the rifles; but there was one of our soldiers who failed to appear for work at the studio again, whom no one ever saw again in Hollywood. The widow of the man who was killed was kept on the studio payroll for years.”
Interestingly a film was made with live ammunition on purpose in the 80s.
Fascinatingly, the guns in the film were also often loaded with live ammunition as opposed to blanks, with many actors in the film reporting that bullets would pass mere inches above their heads while filming.
Though reportedly nobody was shot by anything other than a camera.
Also, this was in the Soviet Union, not Hollywood.
Okay, I guess I just don’t understand your point. It sounds like we are talking about totally different issues. I don’t really think there is any overall moral issue that needs to be solved in the movie business.
This is exactly what I see this case as. Personal responsibility is a great way to phrase it.
Not sure why they needed live rounds, but apparently everyone on the set knew about it and was okay with it. Times were different.
The Rust shooting is also different. Nobody on the set knew there were live rounds on the set, including the freaking armorer who had the ammo on the set locked down.
In a 1915 movie called The Captive an actor was shot when “One of the extras inadvertently left a live round in his rifle which discharged, shooting another extra, Charles Chandler, in the head, killing him instantly”
DeMille’s obsession with realism backfired when an extra, Charles Chandler, was shot and killed by a gun used as a prop on set
It’s also worth noting
DeMille encouraged extras to use real bullets instead of blanks to create more realistic battle scenes
The Evil Dead dvd has a commentary track with Sam Raimi and the actors.
There’s a scene where a window is shot out. Sam said they cleared the set and used a real gun. He mentioned they could have never done that on a union set. Everyone involved would have been fined. Raimi didn’t know it at the time.
Bringing a live round on set is a serious violation.
If the ammunition supplier provided a combination of dummy and improperly labeled live rounds, unbeknownst to Gutierrez Reed.
and:
If Gutierrez Reed wasn’t present on set because she was also handling the job of key props assistant, and Halls failed to inform Gutierrez Reed that Baldwin had returned on-set as she told him to do.
Then this is a pretty compelling defense: If I was on-set, I would have found the live rounds that were mislabeled by the supplier. I was not on set because I was not informed that Baldwin had returned.
If that’s true and the defense can convince a jury that it’s true, I believe Gutierrez Reed’s culpability is reduced to nearly zero.
I agree that Baldwin, the actor’s, culpability is way down the list of people who should be charged. And if Baldwin’s producer title was little more than a non-functional title for screen credit, then he should also be way down the list in that capacity, too.
But, it appears AD Hall should be way up the list.
The problem with that she has not claimed, as far as I know, that she didn’t load the gun or was not responsible for the putting other live rounds that made it on set in actors gun belts/bandoleers. The odds that she hadn’t personally handled all the ammo seems slim to me.
This one amazes me. It was his set, he was directly involved in the live round making it on set, and he walked. As I said before, I wonder if his willingness to tell the DA what she wanted to hear about Baldwin/Reed was the deciding factor. Whether it’s the truth or not.
And yet, the way the burden of proof works, is it is the prosecution’s burden to show (beyond a reasonable doubt) that she did personally handle the ammo, not her burden to prove that she didn’t.
So, unless she’s already pulled a Baldwin and given a self-incriminating statement to the police, the prosecution might have to actually put on some evidence to that effect.
Or not. Juries make inferences all the time. Drawing a line from the title of “armorer” to handling of the ammo seems like child’s play. Calling a couple of armorers to the stand to testify to their job description would get that done.
Prosecutors in New Mexico charged Alec Baldwin last week with a gun allegation that was not on the books at the time of the “Rust” shooting.
Baldwin is facing a charge of involuntary manslaughter as well as a “firearm enhancement” in connection with the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. The enhancement carries an additional five-year penalty for discharge of a firearm in the course of a felony.
But that enhancement did not become law until May 2022, seven months after Hutchins was killed. That raises a question about whether a judge would allow prosecutors to pursue that additional five-year term.
First Judicial District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies and her appointed special prosecutor, Andrea Reeb, are reviewing the issue, said a spokeswoman for the office.
“The District Attorney and special prosecutor are actively reviewing all applicable laws to ensure they have the strongest case to secure justice for Halyna Hutchins,” said the spokeswoman, Heather Brewer.
Baldwin’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors filed the same charge and the same enhancement against Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the film’s armorer. Her attorney, Jason Bowles, said the D.A. is seeking to apply the enhancement retroactively, in violation of her constitutional rights.
“We will be addressing this with motions,” Bowles wrote in an email. “They have clearly charged an enhancement that is barred by the constitution and ex post facto law.”
There’s inference, and there’s supposition. “It’s in the job description to handle guns and ammo, therefore, she handled the ammo that wasn’t even supposed to be on set” strikes me as more like supposition, which I do believe juries are not supposed to engage in.
I’m not saying it should be particularly difficult to establish that she very likely handled the ammo in question, I’m just saying it’s the prosecution’s job to present that evidence, not the accused’s job to prove the negative absent any actual evidence of guilt (beyond mere supposition).
That goes a bit towards my overcharging theory. Not that overcharging is that rare.
I can’t imagine that not being ruled against. It seems like it would open the doors on allowing prosecutors to go back and charge a murderer with a hate crime enhancement or something similar.
It sounds like we are talking about totally different issues. I don’t really think there is any overall moral issue that needs to be solved in the movie business.