A prop isn’t supposed to be a weapon though.
Let’s try another example. I’m handed a grenade for a scene, told to remove the pin and throw it over a wall.
Am I responsible for telling whether it is a real grenade?
Don’t forget: a grenade is a weapon
Just a reminder that the day before crew members had walked off set because of unsafe conditions. The whole production was a shit show.
And another reminder just in case it needs to be said: OSHA ruled that Baldwin’s producer role was limited to things like casting choices. He was not in charge of anything.
EDIT: Also, I had forgotten this fact, but regarding the guy (David Halls) who handed the gun to Baldwin and said it was cold. He was fired from a previous job a couple years before because a gun went off, injuring somebody but not killing them.
For some reason, everything I’m finding says that the standard procedure on this set was for the armorer to demonstrate the gun was safe to Halls, and then Halls would give the gun to the actor. Halls admitted he did not check the bullets in the gun before handing it to Baldwin. He also insisted that Baldwin never pulled the trigger. (He was standing right next to him when the gun went off.)
See here:
“Rust” assistant director David Halls told authorities he should have checked the gun used on set last week more thoroughly after noticing a difference in the ammunition rounds, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Halls told investigations in an interview that he did not check each individual round of ammunition in the gun before handing it back to the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the day cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died, the court document said.
After the shooting, Halls took the gun to Gutierrez-Reed and recalled seeing at least four “dummy” casings with the hole on the side, and one without the hole, when she opened the gun, according to Halls’ interview. The round without the hole did not have the “cap” on it and was just the casing, according to the warrant.
This is why he pled no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon.
And he did inform people that the gun was safe, including Baldwin.
In response to questions about safety protocols on set, Halls said that he is in charge of yelling “cold gun,” which indicates the firearm doesn’t have live ammunition. He announced it was a “cold gun” Thursday, indicating to everyone on set that the firearm was safe.
Because that worked so well this time.
This movie was his personal passion project, and he is a notorious micro-manager. I find it difficult to believe there was any aspect of the production that he was not tyrannizing.
OSHA disagrees with your assessment.
And on a different topic, the article had the following to say regarding who was responsible for safety on the set:
The D.A. also faulted Baldwin for not ensuring that safety meetings were held, contributing to a “climate of recklessness” on set. But in his deposition, Halls said that it was his job to oversee safety meetings.
I’m inclined to trust OSHA. Avoiding accidents is what they do, and analyzing accidents is part of that.
What is this worthless gotcha-like comment supposed to mean? Are you disagreeing that safety on a movie set should be managed by specialist safety experts, and that actors should be working under their close supervision and carefully following their instructions?
Of course this all went disastrously wrong this time. But unless you understand what is supposed to be happening, you cannot understand where the failures were and who bears responsibility.
From the perspective of someone who knows how movie sets are organized and run, I personally believe David Halls is the real scumbag in this story.
The assistant director is (typically) the one who’s in charge of the day-to-day. The director is the creative boss (give or take the political reality from show to show where there’s a powerful actor or hands-on producer), but the director is frequently swamped with endless creative decisions, so the assistant director is usually the one with the actual job of running the set, minute by minute.
In this case, it would almost certainly have been Halls who decided it was okay for Gutierrez-Reed (the armorer) not to directly supervise the firearms, and to prep them for himself to retrieve and bring to the actor. This kind of set organization question would likely have been in his purview. If Baldwin as the actor accepted the weapon from Halls, it’s because this was the (COVID-influenced) protocol on that set. In other words, the armorer failed on that specific day by preparing a weapon with a live round, but Halls failed generally by instilling and supervising the sloppy culture that made it possible for that dangerous weapon to be delivered to the actor on the day.
I strongly suspect, but cannot prove, that Halls pled so quickly because he knew that an objective and methodical investigation and analysis into how the set was organized and who was actually responsible would have wound up incriminating him at least as much as the negligent armorer, and because he recognized that law enforcement didn’t understand the movie industry and his role on the set. He saw that the investigators, being human, were starting to sniff after the celebrity, which created an opportunity for him to dodge accountability and run away.
I have come around on a small amount of responsibility attaching to Baldwin; with the misfires and other issues on the set, he could have forced the production’s hand, insisting that safety should be reconsidered and reprioritized. But this would have brought the shoot to a standstill, for days at least, and more importantly, from a perspective of set politics, Halls was in charge of this stuff. It would have been easy for Baldwin to just keep his head down, trust Halls as a professional, and let the machine work. Obviously, in hindsight, this was a fatal error. But it does not mean primary responsibility adheres to Baldwin.
If my suspicions are correct, then the accountability breakdown is 50% Halls, 45% Gutierrez-Reed, and 5% Baldwin. And law enforcement was seriously derelict in their duty by allowing Halls to plead out before they had a clear picture of how a movie set is actually run and who’s really in charge, and thus who is truly responsible for a hot gun to slip through the usual controls.
Right-o. I get where you’re coming from.
I think Halls bears most of the responsibility. He is the one who called out that it was a cold gun. It is inexcusable to do that without double checking.
Especially because he apparently didn’t have it handed to him by the armorer; he just picked it up where it was left for retrieval.
Which is why, when he realized the law-enforcement folks had no idea about roles and responsibilities on a movie set and didn’t understand his level of culpability, he pled as fast as he could and scampered away.
I mean, allegedly. Like I said, just my strong suspicion.
Now, it’s unclear whether prosecutors are continuing to go after Baldwin because they realize they fucked up by letting the primary party escape without sufficient scrutiny and now they need to deliver a high-profile trial to cover up that error, or if they have no idea that they fucked up and simply continue to be blinded by celebrity the way they were from the beginning.
I mean, Hall is guilty, but he was also convicted. “No contest” is not all that different from “guilty”.
I guess he pled “negligent use if a deadly weapon”, not “manslaughter”, though.
That last is my point. The charges should be inverted. Negligence for Baldwin seems fair, while manslaughter is what Halls should have faced.
And some of the blame goes to covid. If they weren’t trying to keep staffing low because of covid, the armorer would have been there, and who know, maybe she’d have actually done her job if she’d been allowed to.
I don’t see her as very guilty. If she wasn’t allowed on the set, it’s hard for me to understand how she could have enforced any rules.
She was guilty of mixing live ammo with blanks and dummy rounds, IIRC because she and other crew members were using some of the film guns for after-hours plinking. That should also not have been permitted. If there had been no live ammo on the set – and there was no official need for any – none of this would have happened.
I want to say that although I have nothing like @Cervaise’s experience, I was tangentially involved in the filmmaking business for decades, and was actually once on a set where a prop gun was used. (It was actually a recreation of the assassination of Lincoln, filmed in Ford’s Theatre.) It was the first time I had seen a film armorer at work, and I was very impressed with how serious the whole process was taken by everyone on the set.
So I agree with pretty much everything @Cervaise has said in his last few posts, especially about the unjustly light treatment Halls has gotten.
But if the armorer hadn’t brought live ammo to the set, Hutchins would still be alive.
Even with Halls’s negligence, the ultimate problem is live ammunition anywhere within 39½ miles of that set.
It goes beyond that. The idea that someone blesses a gun and all responsibility falls on that person does not fulfill any kind of legitimate safety protocol. The entire crew has to be involved in the process.
This did not happen.
So the gopher who gets coffee for the director gets a turn at inspecting the weapon?
The last person who handles (and inspects) the weapon before the actor should be the armorer.
The people involved in the filming should be part of the process.