To be fair, he’s looking at a situation where people were manifestly unqualified to do this work — the assistant director, who by all reports was a tyrannical prick and who ran the set like an obnoxious martinet and who had no business inserting himself into the chain of custody for delivering the firearms to the actors, and the armorer, whose only apparent experience for this position was having watched her father from the sidelines. And, yes, obviously this context led to someone’s death.
But where he oversteps is in drawing any kind of broader conclusion based on zero knowledge of the industry or its practices. Obviously, firearms protocols work when they are followed, because otherwise dozens of people would be gunned down on film sets every year. They aren’t. Working with guns on stage or in front of a movie camera can be dangerous, but when the rules are properly designed and followed, safety is maintained.
And Baldwin could have practiced that cross-body draw all day long with no danger to anyone.
Just like I pressed a revolver to another actor’s head in one performance, and in another performance fired a gun into the wings, and in another performance handed a weapon to someone who then fired it, and in another performance fired a shotgun, all with care and caution for safety procedures.
The gun is not the problem. The carelessness of the production is the problem. Just like the carelessness of the production was the problem when the stuntwoman lost her arm crashing her motorcycle into the camera rig on a Resident Evil set, as I linked above. But nobody’s calling for motorcycles to be regulated and banned from moviemaking, because everybody is apparently an expert on guns.
I don’t know how many different ways I can explain this.
Agreed, what happened on the set of Rust is what happens when professionals don’t act professionally.
Yes, to then state that following direction on a set is wrong if it involves doing something that would be unsafe in an uncontrolled environment is colossally ridiculous.
I’d like to point out that several posters have incorrectly conflated the film’s assistant director and director. The person who handed the incorrectly loaded (i.e., “hot”) weapon to Baldwin and incorrectly announced it to be “cold,” was Dave Halls, the assistant director, not Joel Souza, the director.
Souza was standing next to cinematographer Halyna Hutchins when the gun was fired, and was also injured by the shot. AFAIK, Souza never handled the gun.
A gun is always loaded until YOU ascertain otherwise. If Jesus handed me a gun and said it wasn’t loaded, I’d still check for myself.
The person I hold the most responsible is the person who is in charge of all the weapons used on set, and that person is often called the “weapons master” or the “armeror”. Besides policing the weapons themselves, he should also be preaching gun safety to the actors, and I don’t care how damn big an A-lister that actor is because no one is above gun safety.
That is as much a legal conclusion as it is a statement of industry customs. Your experience as an actor may leave you uniquely qualified to make the latter, but it does not qualify you to make the former.
Industry customs may inform legal conclusions, but they are not themselves the law.
“And I am getting really, really tired of repeating the same information over and over for people who don’t know how" the law works.
If NM law says that an actor is going to jail for 10 years over a gun incident, while the Safety Coordinator who straight up lied to that actor about checking that the gun was safe, gets 6 months probation… Actors shouldn’t work there anymore. Not on anything that uses realistic seeming guns, at least.
Allow me to clarify: I still question whether it is appropriate for the film industry to be using real firearms as “props” given the advances in things like CGI and 3-D printing, coupled with the already commonplace lack of realism when it comes to depictions of firearm use on film. That is speaking to industry customs and whether it may be fairly said, as Cervaise has, that “the gun is not the problem.” I think that’s far too strong of a statement to make without knowing a whole lot more about alternatives and their relative costs compared to the persistent use of real firearms capable of firing real bullets.
But as to Baldwin’s criminal liability, I’m leaning away from that, particularly as the DA is no longer proceeding under a theory that he was negligent as a producer (because it turns out he wasn’t that kind of a producer). Even if industry custom is… questionable at this point, I am satisfied, thanks in part to Cervaise’s comments and SAG-AFTRA’s safety bulletin, that Baldwin’s actions were consistent with industry custom, and so his actions probably don’t rise to the level of gross negligence that I would expect would be required here. But on that point, whether gross negligence is required or simple negligence alone will do, I will admit to being a bit shakey. I could swear that was a point of contention earlier (and maybe based in part under an earlier charge the DA brought, that it turns out was improper because it was ex post facto), but (1) this thread has been going on for a while now and (2) INANML.
When threads become thousands of posts, my universal answer is “no” because, as a working person with a social life, I simply don’t have that much time. Even so, I believe posting my opinion is valid even if it closely resembles an opinion given a thousand posts ago.
So did the previous 998 posters also get criticized via posts like this the way I am being criticized now? If the answer is “yes”, then I have no complaint. I sincerely doubt that is the case, however.
Besides, we’re supposed to attack the contents of the post, not the poster via a personal attack. Unless you have something to discuss about the contents of my post, this discussion needs to be over.
There are a lot of films made in England where I understand handguns are pretty much illegal everywhere. Anyone know what they do on film sets when they need guns?
The Hannah Gutierrez-Reed Gutierrez-Reed trial begins. I can easily see her losing a civil trial for negligence.
I’m not sure about criminal charges. I think that requires a much higher level? We’ll see how this develops
I’m interested in what the witnesses will say about safety on the set. How did they view Hannah’s work prior to the accident? Did they feel safe on set?
I do feel a bit bad for her though. Don’t get me wrong, she had a hand in this death, but it seems like she did everything short of walking off the set before it got to this point. It does sound like she complained about not having enough time to take care of all her responsibilities and I thought I recalled her saying, even before this happened, that she felt like she was in over her head.
Do we know if she ever discussed her concerns with her union? ISTM if she had done that, it might have prevented this death. OTOH, if she did and they ignored her, maybe walking off the set, even if it jeopardized her career in the industry, would have been the right idea.
The trial is starting. We’ll find out the admissible evidence soon. I expect this young woman is in deep shit trouble as everyone else will find her a convenient scapegoat, not to mention she is at least as responsible for this tragedy as anyone else on that set.
Yup. One of the articles I read yesterday said her defense made the claim that “Hannah’s age and relative anonymity make her an ideal scapegoat for the tragedy”.