Just to touch back on the general thrust of it all, I believe the general agreement could be…
A: The filming of Rust was a shitshow of cut corners, cheaping out, unsafe practices and shambolic assignment of responsibilities.
B: If that had led to a fatality, it would have hardly made the news if it had not been by gunshot.
C: Even then it would have long faded from the public radar if it weren’t Baldwin involved.
The back-and-forth is about exactly how (A) came about.
That the problem was due to the armorer not being allowed on set.
Do you disagree? If so, why? It certainly was a large part of the problem. You mention her checking guns and placing them on a cart outside the set and a director who was supposed to check them. That scenario is not proper procedure.
AFAIU, an armorer must be on the set and personally show and hand the prop to the actor. This did not happen and that is a huge problem that allowed a woman to be killed.
The director thing is a red herring because AFAIK, a director (or asst. director in this case) is NOT authorized to act as an armorer. If an asst. director is declaring a prop gun safe and handing it to the actor something is very wrong. Something that could (and did) result in injury or death.
If you have a cite that the AD was authorized to act as armorer I’d be interested in seeing that. Otherwise, it certainly seems that keeping the armorer off the set directly contributed to this awful accident.
A prop gun, or real guns capable of firing a projectile?
Can’t mix and match here in an argument like that. It (obviously) makes a difference. Still to your point, i can envision personnel being in the line of fire so to speak, at times, but what I can’t envision are real guns being used on a set like that. That’s just stupid, and it’s not difficult to understand why. Even “blank” firing handguns have killed people.
And I can envision taking a “prop” gun out and plinking cans. Vintage firearms are interesting, and fun. I think it’s stupid, but I can understand it. It’s just evident that there was a serious breakdown in all sorts of protocol and basic common sense. People quitting due to alleged repeated safety violations is kind of a tell.
Has it been established whether this incident was recorded? Then people don’t have to try and deduce what might have happened.
Well yeah, if someone is dumb enough to park on railroad tracks, they might get hit by a train.
Somewhere in the dim recesses of my memory, some dumb fuck actually did this. They were shooting a movie, and asked Burlington Northern or whoever for permission, which was denied.
Undeterred, they went ahead and started filming on the tracks. You’ll never guess what happened next!
But thanks for helping to prove my point so effectively…
She half-assed checking the gun. Nobody would have been shot if she had done it correctly. Also, nobody would have been shot if real bullets hadn’t been mixed in with the blanks. That was also the fault of the armorer. None of that has anything to do with the director acting as armorer. Whether it was proper procedure for the director to handle the gun, I don’t know, but in this case it didn’t affect the outcome.
[quote=“Riemann, post:2545, topic:952960”]
they have an uncontrollable urge to give patronizing explanations of how gun safety works [/quote]
It must really grate on you that the great unwashed amateurs have such a great track record. Baldwin was a pro, his dad was a marksmanship instructor or something like that?
I guarantee Baldwin had ALL that “patronizing” stuff drilled into him by an early age, seared into his memory I tells ya. Wonder what happened?
I can assure you, these are not “uncontrollable urges” for myriad amateurs to point out the obvious, many of whom incidentally were technically speaking professionals, as it were. There have been enough tragic deaths on movie sets over many years involving “prop guns” it just seems unnecessary at this point, most laymen thought real firearms were banned long ago for just this reason. Maybe they will be now, by way of policy at least.
I think it did. Had the armorer been the last person to handle the prop before showing it to, and giving it to the actor (as it’s supposed to be done, AIUI) the accident might have been prevented.
Do you have a cite for this? In any event, she wasn’t allowed to check the prop when and where she was supposed to (on the set before handing it to Baldwin) so the whole situation was dangerously compromised by her being banned from the set.
I’m pretty confident you don’t have acting experience.
They don’t. There are hundreds of accidental gun deaths in the US each year.
I agree.
and had the armorer handed the gun to Alec and said “here’s your gun, careful, it’s still got real bullets in it” it would be like getting denied a permit to film on active tracks and doing it anyway.
I’m pretty confident your analogy is silly, too. What point is it you are trying to convey?
She didn’t catch it the first time. Why do you think the second time would be any different? If she had handed the gun directly to Baldwin, it probably wouldn’t have changed anything. She was bad at her job and she’s trying to blame it on everyone else. She brought the bullets on to the set. She checked the gun. But somehow she thinks none of this is her fault.
What first time? You allege many things but offer no cites. It seems mere speculation and not fact-oriented. I cant comment on your speculations and assumptions.
She did not check the gun directly before it was in Baldwins hand. She probably checked it at some other time but thats water under the bridge. Its only the latest time that matters.
No. The gun was not defective. It worked as advertised and did what guns do. The only “defect” was the people involved. It should seem obvious to all, amateur and professional alike, that in retrospect genuine firearms capable of shooting a projectile, is a bad idea on a movie set, or theater production, anything like that. They can call it a “prop gun” but it ain’t a prop. Words mean things, although actions mean even more.
And thousands of accidental deaths due to cars in the US each year. Are you saying cars should be prohibited, since they’re involved in so many more deaths, most of them due to human error?
I said in my first post that this is from Wikipedia. I’m not going to give a link, because it’s not hard to find. She checked the gun, missed that it had a live round, and put it on a cart to be used on the set. It’s a little bit unclear if she was supposed to be there when the director picked it up off the cart and whether she actually handed it to him, but it was supposed to be ready to go at that point.
Again, the armorer put (or left) a live round in the gun. It’s very unlikely that she would have caught it if she had handed the gun to Baldwin. People often don’t catch their own mistakes. Her brain said that the gun was okay, so she very likely wouldn’t have re-checked it and found the live round before it was used.
I said the prop gun was defective. It did not work as advertised. It’s advertised pupose was to visually aid in telling a story about the old west that involves gunplay. Instead it killed someone (definitely, 100% not its purpose!) because it had a grave defect for a prop: it was loaded with real ammunition.
Please provide a summary of your experience on film sets and in stage productions.
That you don’t know what actors do or how filmmaking works.
You would not follow directions on a set for a scene. Because you’re not an actor.
It’s like judging firefighters for going into a burning building. It’s their job to do that stuff. Of course you wouldn’t do it, personally, because you would have no reason to do so. But judging a professional who does is ridiculous. You’re judging people who are actually qualified to do the work when you don’t have any idea how that job is supposed to be done.