Unless someone has firm information, I’m really not clear on what the relationship was between the production companies and the various producers etc. There’s like 8 production companies affiliated with this film, and a number of producers. Do we really know who was running this production and who was “in charge” on set?
Obviously, any major star can make demands during filming and they’ll at least have to be dealt with in some way, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that someone would just show up, do their job, and trust that the technical staff is being managed appropriately. Different actors who have production companies and producer credits, I presume are investing differing levels of actual energy into really running the production. I have to assume most productions have a company and producer that “call the shots” just because a many-headed dragon seems like it’d be difficult to manage, but I don’t really know.
If Baldwin were to bear any blame for this, this is what he should have done. He should have insisted the armorer disassemble the gun in front of him, make sure any live rounds were absent, and load the dummy ammo in front of his eyes. As others have said, a gun is always loaded, even if you think it isn’t. And don’t depend on anybody’s word, especially if they aren’t a certified weapons specialist whose job it is to keep tabs on the weapons and ammo.
There is no studio. This is an independent movie. That’s what the independent means. The movie was being made by Rust Movie Productions which I’ll assume is a LLC made just for this movie. No doubt Baldwin is one of the main parties in the LLC.
That still doesn’t mean Baldwin was responsible. It’s easy to say that he’s an actor and should know all aspects of movie production but doubtful that’s true. How many movies has he handled a gun in? He’s usually not in that kind of movie. He had one in Hunt For Red October but that was 30 years ago. He may trust others to do their jobs while he does his. He may not fully realize what right looks like.
Baldwin’s company, El Dorado, is the one described as producing in the pre-tragedy press releases. I glanced at a few of the others, they just seemed to be funding and tax-abatement vehicles.
Do you believe this film production was unique? That every other low-budget movie is made following all safety regulations and with a fully qualified crew and decent working conditions?
The reality is far more likely that this production was not unusual. That there are dozens of movies being made in similar circumstances. And this one just happened to be the unlucky one where some people suffered the consequences.
If Alec Baldwin wasn’t somebody who was willing to work on movies like this, he wouldn’t be getting hired for movies like this.
I know this is a slight hijack, but I have experienced the same.
I have a gun range on my property, and have had many people shoot on it over the past twenty years. I have witnessed poor/dangerous gun handling more times than I can count. Even from people who claim to have “lots” of experience with firearms, including former military and LEOs. These people will pick up a gun without checking the chamber, and then sweep the muzzle in front of me and others without giving it a second thought. When I yell, “Hey, watch your muzzle!” they respond, “It’s O.K., it’s not loaded.”
The thing with having a father who’s a legendary longtime armorer is that 30 years ago things were done very differently than they are today. It may be that she learned some shortcuts from her father without absorbing the experience that allows him to know when these shortcuts are safe to employ, or maybe he’s just been lucky. It almost always requires a series of events to cause a workplace accident. Sometimes 30 years experience just means one year repeated 30 times. People may not incorporate newer safety practices in their daily activities.
When I was 14 or so a guy my dad worked with came over to hunt deer on our property. I sat next to the guy on our back porch step, explaining where he should go, while he loaded his deer rifle.
For whatever reason, the gun fired. Scared the shit out of me, and pure luck nobody was hit. My dad literally threw him off the property. Seeing my dad that angry was worse than the gun going off.
I had a high school friend fire at me. He first fired out the window 7 or 8 times, then pointed at me and shot. I told him never to do it again or I’d call the police, and never trusted him after that. From what I can tell he’s a successful adult, but he was a very deviant adolescent.
For the record, I was not angry or even mildly irritated about the references to her as “wife, mother, and rising star”. It just seemed weird to me that everyone seems to be using those same words in the same order every time they talk about her.
It was also sad, because no matter how far we come it seems that women are still being defined mostly in relationship to the men in their lives instead of in terms of their selves. If the description had been “a rising star and a wife and mother”, I might not have thought about it.
I think some of it is just the nature of media and the desire to stir stronger emotions in the reader. Most people can sympathize with the thought of losing a spouse or parent, losing a “rising cinematography star” is a little more esoteric to most people.
I knew people in my ill-spent youth, from the less “civilized” parts of Virginia, who regularly did things like dry-fired unloaded guns into their mouths as a “joke.” While not someone I knew well, a son of one of my grandmother’s neighbors had a party trick where he’d dry fire an empty gun into his temple “haha, it’s empty.” Around age 24 he did that trick and the gun ended up being loaded–as you’d expect he was killed instantly.
From that description the penetrating power sounds like it was a functional gun with real ammunition. So something like a period-piece Colt 45 may have been used.
If what is said about the armorer is true then it sounds like she had no experience with firearms at all.
Reporters don’t want to make assertions that they can’t support but likewise, at the same time, most of them probably don’t have the time or the access to get first hand information and can probably only crib off what others have written. We see in this case, for example, that the deceased is consistently referred to as the “Director of Photography” even though that appears to not actually be a title that is used in the industry (according to others in this thread). An early article referred to her as such and everyone else is copying it because that’s what’s on the record to-date. (IMDB lists her as “Cinematographer”.)
While not an exact quote, Alec Baldwin tweeted about her, “Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother and deeply admired colleague of ours.” See point 1.
“She was a bit careless with the guns, waving it around every now and again,” said a source, who worked alongside armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed on the upcoming Nicolas Cage film, The Old Way. “There were a couple times she was loading the blanks and doing it in a fashion that we thought was unsafe.”
“There were several concerns I brought to production’s attention,” one said. “I have been around firearms my entire life and noticed some things that were not OK even with loaded blank firearms.”
Another source said, compared to other sets they had been on, there was considerably less attention to gun safety under Gutierrez-Reed’s watch.
The most troubling incident occurred when Gutierrez-Reed allegedly loaded a gun on the ground where the area was filled with pebbles, then without properly checking the weapon, handed it to child actress Ryan Kiera Armstrong, both sources told The Daily Beast.
Concerned crew members intervened, demanding filming be stopped until Gutierrez-Reed had properly checked the firearm, the two sources said.
“She was reloading the gun on the ground, where there were pebbles and stuff. We didn’t see her check it, we didn’t know if something got in the barrel or not,” one source said, explaining the crew waited until she double checked the gun for barrel obstruction.
I was going to ask this question. A Colt .45 would probably do it. It must have been that since it’s a period piece and it fully penetrated a person and injured another. .357mag or .44mag did not exist in the 1880’s so those guns would be way unrealistic for a ‘cowboy’ six shooter.
A crew member who also worked in the productions but requested to not be named for fear of retaliation corroborated Goll’s accounts, saying that when Halls did hold safety meetings, they were short and he was dismissive, saying the guns used would be the same as the production always uses, and questioning why they’d have to hold the meetings in the first place.
The crew member also said Halls complained about having a gun “cleared” (inspected by a licensed professional on set, such as an armorer) for a scene where an actress would aim the gun to her own head and pull the trigger.
Goll and the other crew member told CNN of another instance where Halls insisted on continuing filming on location while a storm hit, where electrical lights were touching mud, wires were exposed to the rain, and crew members feared for their safety.
The Mythbusters demonstrated repeatedly (and failed to absorb, repeatedly) that less powerful guns were more likely to be a through and through. More power and they explode on impact and don’t pass through.
Of course, I would assume that there’s some level of underpoweredness where that stops being true but I wouldn’t take that because it went through it must have been a more powerful slug.
(I would take from the type of gun being used that that’s the bullet, though.)
Whenever I see something like that it feels like a man is thought of being unimportant to his loved ones. A child losing their mother is seen as a horrible tragedy. The fact that a child has lost their father will be mentioned in the last line of an article. It’s all to illicit an emotional response.
It would be easy to add an extra layer of safety to the handling of firearms on movie sets. For example, paint the muzzle tips of all prop guns bright green. No green; don’t touch. It’s trivially easy to mask out colors in post-production using editing software, like After Effects.
