My thoughts exactly.
I’m reserving all judgment on anyone until we get the big and full picture.
You mean the slippery slope the gun-grabbers are trying to push through so they can take away our Second Amendment rights?
If the armorer was terrified of loading blanks in a gun that may be someone so inexperienced as to not be able to tell the difference between wadcutters and blanks.
It could be that some armorers are OK with an actor who actually has the knowledge to inspect a gun for safety compliance doing so - but that might be a on case-by-case basis. Others might, for consistency’s sake, never allow it. I have read/viewed a lot in the last few days of professional set armorers saying they’ll happily demonstrate a gun is safe, even repeatedly, for actors and others on a set but most of them indicate they’d be the one manipulating the prop before handing it back to the actor.
I am willing to bet that should Alec Baldwin ever be on another set using prop weapons he’ll definitely be doing that, possibly to the point of being annoying/obnoxious, because I suspect he never, ever wants to go through this sort of thing again.
I suspect complacency plays a role.
Except that in movies, TV, and stage productions there ARE times they are pointed at people, hence all the rules intended to make that an acceptably safe activity.
There’s a difference between actually shooting firearms and making a fictional production.
A note about ‘recoil’: Blanks do not really cause recoil. Recoil is caused primarily by Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case the mass of the bullet being accelerated causes the gun to move in the opposite direction. No bullet, no mass. No mass, no recoil. I’m sure Baldwin knew something went wrong when the gun recoiled.
To be clear, there is a very small amount of recoil because the gases and wadding themselves have a bit of mass, but it’s nothing at all like a large caliber bullet being fired. If you’ve ever fired an airsoft or pellet gun, that’s about what you’ll get from a blank. Almost nothing.
That said, if the movie gun is an automatic with gas blowback action (‘Rust’ didn’t have those), you need to be able to fire blanks to cycle the action. In such guns, some of the hot gas from the detonation is diverted to cycle the action, eject the spent cartridge and feed another… This will cause the gun to jump a bit and can feel a bit like a recoil, but it’s just the mass of the action being slammed back and forth.
Some automatics designed for movie work can only fire blanks and may have barrel restrictors to simulate the pressure buildup behind an actual bullet so the action will cycle. These guns are still dangerous and should be treated like any other.
Doing recoil/action cycling/spent casing flying/muzzle flash in CGI would not always be easy. Muzzle flash is the easiest. The other stuff not so much, and in some scenes extremely difficult.
I think there’s a good reason why the John Wick movie close in fights were almost all done in darker indoor rooms. It’s much easier to do CGI that way.
As has been mentioned a couple times, the “loading blanks” she mentioned was in the sense of “creating blanks”. It sounds like armorers custom make blanks with appropriate levels of powder for a given scene.
Not defending her overall, but the claim she was scared to load a gun is a misunderstanding.
There are prop guns that are inoperative. Barrel plugged and other modifications. They’re just held as props and never shown firing.
I’m not sure if the armorer manages them. They’re probably just kept as props.
You’ll see them on TV shows. Schultz was often carrying a rifle in Hogan’s Heroes. It was never fired. Any shots were off camera and just effects.
All actors who handle prop guns must take firearms training, and refresh it every year. I believe Baldwin had recently undergone that training.
Here’s a company which does that:
Here are the actual guidelines from Actor’s Equity:
The Actors’ Equity Association’s guidelines state that, “Before each use, make sure the gun has been test-fired offstage, and then ask to test fire it yourself. Watch the prop master check the cylinders and barrel to be sure no foreign object or dummy bullet has become lodged inside.” Further, “All loading of firearms must be done by the property master, armourer or experienced persons working under their direct supervision.”
All of that was violated on this set.
On some shows (e.g. The Sopranos, admittedly 20 years old now) it’s very obvious that the bang and flash have been inserted digitally in post-production. No recoil, no slide movement, no ejection of empties.
What would the problem be if the prop firearms were physically unable to chamber a standard live round? That is, the receiver (the portion of the weapon that the round is located when it is fired) is, say, 0.020" smaller than the standard round. That is, for a 45 caliber, the receiver would have a diameter of 0.043", and perhaps 0.100" shorter than the standard round. The barrel could also be a tad smaller, not enough smaller that one could tell with a casual glance, but small enough so the gun would not work.
Another option, rubber bullets. You could paint them so they looked like lead (so or the ever-so-vital view of the end of the cylinder, you would still see what looked like lead), but even if all other safeguards failed, it would be a less-than-lethal rubber round (hopefully fired by a similarly less-than-lethal charge in the casing). My point is there are relatively easy engineering solutions to this problem, it only takes some organization to decide upon and implement them.
Or a (painted)3D printed round that has no powder, no bullet, no nothing.
I take it another part of having blanks, besides having non-CGI smoke, is the noise causing a bit of flinch among the players.
In the first case you could still have the risks involving what would now be the custom-caliber blanks, but yes, it would prevent the casual loading of a live round in common calibers.
In the second case, ISTM that’s a solution looking for a problem and it would not prevent the potential of a regular round being mixed with the rubber rounds. Lower-pressure blanks for shooting scenes (maybe combined with a built-in wad-catcher in the barrel?) and for close-ups, fully inert dummies as running_coach brings up, would be superior.
To render it impossible for such a mishap to happen, we’d need to make it so the “part” of the “gun” is always played by a device unable to do anything except make noise. But since it does have to be visually (and physically, it should weigh enough that the actor handles it like the real thing and not a 4-ounce plastic toy) convincing, you would still will need an armorer or Safety Officer to safe check it before any (fake-)gunslinging happens, 100% of the time.
And as for making certain safety procedures on-set into actual law, that would be one big lift.
Thanks. I missed that. It changes the statement considerably. can you link to the source.
It was discussed pretty extensively earlier in this thread.
It seems, from what I have read (and they may well be wrong) that the camera was going for a close-up of the revolver. I am guessing that to do this, Baldwin pointed the gun right at the camera intentionally. Whether he was also meant to fire the gun when doing that I have no idea. Since “cold gun” was supposedly said when the gun came on set I am guessing that the gun was not meant to be fired for that take.
For “cold gun” isn’t really easy to ascertain whether a revolver is loaded? You can see the bullets in the cylinder (can’t you)?
I’d still be interested to know if there is an industry accepted definition of hot gun and cold gun
I’m not sure that is correct. The article I read described her statement as her being scared when loading blanks into a weapon. But given the godawful reporting around this, who knows? But I think it’s safe to say at the least that we don’t know what exactly she was referring to.
In terms of negligence, this reminds me of Midnight Rider, a film that was being shot in 2014 on an active railroad trestle when a train came through and killed a camera operator and injured other crew. The director/screenwriter/producer Randall Miller pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and served a year in jail.
Rubber bullets can be fatal at close range/mishandled. They are less lethal, but not completely safe, either.
I listened to the actual audio of the interview which, apparently, is now being misquoted all over the place.
From my viewpoint it was pretty clear based on the audio of what she herself said in the interview that she was talking about loading a charge into a blank, which is referred to as “loading a blank”, and not loading cartridges into a gun.
Maybe if I can find a link to the actual interview I can send it to you, but I’m basing my statement on the original source, not second/third/fourth hand reporting.
I have an acquaintance who follows all the auctions that commonly occur after finishing a movie or series, when a collector dies, etc. This is not much of an interest of mine. However some company was auctioning off a bunch of small items, costumes, bigger things from The Sopranos.
Only thing I wanted, for no particular reason except it sounds cool, was the gun that was used to shoot Junior. I would have made a bid, but you needed a gun license to do so, and probably an American one at that. Figured the paperwork in Canada was likely substantial if it could even be done at all. So I didn’t, and it went for something like $100. This made me feel slightly steamed. I presume it was real if those were their requirements, but this would not have mattered to me.