Hmmm…
I wonder if Gutierrez’s inexperience led her to accept a job she - and anyone else - should have walked away from…
For liability reasons, wouldn’t you rather use blanks that come from a manufacturer that has consistent processes for making and testing them?
The FB post reads to me like a rushed, emotion-fueled tirade. He also seems to really not like Reed hiring her BFF as an assistant.
BLP perhaps? Blind Loaded & Plugged. Maybe? But then that might just be a type of training shell for naval guns.
Yes, Martin_Hyde said that TMZ was accurate. But he decided my reluctance to say target practice was confirmed as happening because TMZ, in my words, isn’t “a bastion of quality journalism” meant I was “a tad lazy.” That’s what I was responding to.
Does such exist? It’s hard to believe that there’s enough demand for blanks that you’d have sophisticated manufacturing of them.
I think I recall an article which was linked upthread that noted that there were few commercial suppliers of blanks, which leads a lot of armorers to make their own.
A fair point. But on the other hand, it seems logical that if you publish the sort of celebrity- and personality-oriented material that TMZ specializes in, you’d better make damn sure you’ve got your facts straight first, unless you want to be constantly fighting off libel suits.
Many years ago when I was just out of college, I worked as a proofreader for a business newspaper. An award-winning financial journalist, who later became the paper’s editor, talked about how impressed he was by the reporters and fact-checkers at People magazine. He said he didn’t have much respect for their subject, but he couldn’t fault their journalism.
The article I linked earlier said that some armorers like to load their own blanks because they can put in the smallest amount of powder adequate for the scene, to minimize risk.
Some gun people simply like loading their own ammo - especially target shooters, where precise control of the amount of powder (more precise than a factory) gives you more consistent results. Maybe that attitude carries over to blanks as well.
I do think the armorer being a 24-year old woman is relevant. One, her age means that she can’t possibly have a lot of experience. But more importantly, an armorer (or any safety personnel) needs to have gravitas on set. There are a lot of big egos in Hollywood, and male actors who have been around prop guns a long time may not take direction from a young woman well or seriously, and she may not have the physical presence or exude the expertise required to override that.
If you look at typical armorers, they seem to be almost always ex-military or ex-police. If some guy who looks like a retired drill instructor tells some middle aged actor to pay attention, he’ll probably get more compliance than if some young person with 3 years of experience does the same, male or female. But with some men, being dressed down or corrected by a young woman over a ‘macho’ thing like guns might not go well.
It sure looks like she was incompetent, but we haven’t heard the whole story. Maybe what we’ll discover is that she was simply pushed aside by people who thought they knew better and could cut corners safely, and there was just nothing she could do about it.
The Covid angle was interesting, If she wasn’t allowed on aet because of Covid restrictions, then remaining with the guns outside and trusting the AD to hand over the weapon properly might have been the best choice in a bad situation. If that’s what she did.
But the fact that she allowed the guns to be used for plinking was awful. Not checking them afterwards, when she knew they were going to be pointed at people and dry fired, is close to criminal negligence.
The more I hear about this, the less likely I am to blame Baldwin. He’s just the last person in a chain of negligence. But the AD is the final on-set authority for safety, and the armorer screwed up plenty. and those two are supposed to be specifically trained and accept the responsibility. As errors go, Baldwin’s was the most understandable - esprcially if the set was chaotic and weapons checks were spotty in the first place. But maybe there’s more we’ll find out.
There are millions of gun owners in the country. I would guess the number that load their own ammo is in the hundred thousands. Possibly more. It’s easy to do once you have the equipment, cheaper than buying ammo and it’s less prone to supply chain issues. It’s so common to do that it really isn’t a liability issue.
Well the military used blanks by the millions every year. That’s normally 5.56mm, 7.62mm or .50 cal ammo. I have only trained in the army with rifle or machine gun blanks. Never saw pistol blanks. Most pistol blank sales seem to be for theatrical purposes. Smaller market means higher prices which also leads to loading your own.
My dad loads his own ammo. It doesn’t seem worth it to me but he enjoys it.
As has been stated, it gives you more control. And depending on technique can provide a very visible differentiation of the cartridge. Example of making a blank using foam as packing material.
Except you won’t be constantly fighting off lawsuits. I was able to dig up a New York Times article I read back in the day. Since it’s probably paywalled, I’ll quote from it:
Every few months, a celebrity walks into Vincent Chieffo’s law office in Los Angeles, angrily waving a copy of one of the supermarket tabloids, those weekly newspapers that offer readers a feast of gossip, scandal, and believe-it-or-not phenomena.
Asserting that an article is not true, the celebrity asks about suing the newspaper. Mr. Chieffo, a veteran entertainment lawyer, usually responds with what he calls “the facts of life” in the never-ending battle between these publications and the famous people whose lives provide the fodder for each week’s blaring headlines.
He tells the celebrity that the tabloid will aggressively fight back, so the lawsuit will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and will probably drag on for years. He emphasizes that in preparing for their defense, the tabloid’s lawyers might be given legal permission to scrutinize the celebrity’s personal life.
And he points out that by law, the standard for libel for public figures is high, making the case difficult to win. The celebrity will have to prove “actual malice”–that the tabloid was not just negligent, but rather knew that the item was false and nonetheless displayed a reckless disregard for truth.
Warnings often deter lawsuits
Such lawyers’ warnings, which often deter lawsuits, reflect how successful these newspapers have been at avoiding legal judgments. Even though newspapers like The National Enquirer, The Star and The Globe regularly leave famous people fuming about what those people consider to be lies, half-truths, and innuendo, the tabloids face few lawsuits and almost never lose trials.
Moral of the story: don’t judge a tabloid’s veracity by lawsuits or the lack thereof.
Old saying from the print media days: never pick a fight with somebody who buys ink by the barrel.
Yes, there’s definitely some misogyny in the reporting. But I suspect @Sam_Stone is right, as well, that Guiterrez Reed’s gender did play a role in this tragedy.
The assistant direct David Halls, according to reports, was domineering, overbearing, and disdainful of safety protocols. This is, of course, pure speculation, but I would not be surprised to learn that he overrode her authority and ignored her responsibility. Not to say that she doesn’t bear responsiblity; just that I wouldn’t be surprised if Halls was dismissive of her and, at 24 and on her second job, she didn’t have the courage to stand up for herself.
You might be right. We know that misogyny is not rare in Hollywood. And the language I had problems with came from people in “the business”.
I just hope that this isn’t used to justify a gender barrier for this kind of work.
If you have a safety system on a site that relies on a lot of administrative controls, so procedures that require people to do checks, rules to follow etc then setting rules like ’ you cant have live ammo on site’ , ‘never point a gun at someone’ or any of the , all you need to do is this, solutions are only as effective as the desire to implement them.
Training of people only tells them what they should do and hopefully makes them competent in performing the actions they are supposed to take. If no one is enforcing the procedure to be implemented , or the culture is to skip over it for expedience , the training is irrelevant.
The culture is set by the management. Running a safe set or site is absolutely the responsibility of the site mangement but when you have a situation where there is a conflict between getting stuff done and cost control and rigorous administrative controlled safety , you really need an outside chain of command who is responsible for the site safety, and reports up to those off site (ultimate financial backers who will be left holding a very expensive bag when the shit hits the fan) . They should be able to shut things down and not care one whit for forward progress of the operation. They are not there to make things safe but ensure the people doing the stuff are doing what they say they should do.
More expensive upfront maybe, but , even in if you were avaricious enough to ignore the loss of life, way cheaper in the long run. You also tend to get better outcomes when people do what they were supposed to do rather than thinking doing all the unnecessary safety process crap is a waste of time.
One other thought on the steps taken to check a prop gun prior to using it, and I am only talking about guns used as props on set here, not regular fire arm safety One way to test the effectiveness of your system is to eliminate that final check and see just how comfortable you are. For sure there are significant psychological comfort in doing that check, but if you skipped that check and thought there was a significant risk remaining then you need to go back and look deeper at the chain of custody of the guns prior to that step , the pre checks and witnessing, tagging , lock outs control even before they got to set. You need steps in place so if that final check is skipped or not carried out properly , the risk should remain vanishingly small. Over reliance on the final check for people under time pressure, focused on other outcomes and particularly if the safety and process culture is weak basically means your kind of fucked before you even started so get the checks and process off the critical path.
If Halls indeed overrode her authority and was dismissive of her, that wasn’t her gender; that was his misogyny. I don’t know Gutierrez or all the facts, and I suspect she may bear partial responsibility for what happened. I can tell you, though, that even when we women stand up for ourselves, we’re sometimes dismissed and our authority not respected. That’s not about our gender: it’s about the misogyny of those doing the dismissing and disrespecting.
Well it is, in the “if you weren’t Black I wouldn’t be racist against you” sort of way.
In that yes, blame is 100% on the bigot dismissing the woman.
The New Mexico First District Attorney spoke to the media today with some telling details. While she doesn’t say what specific type, she says the gun was an “antique that was in working order.” So I’m going to guess this was actually a functional antique single action revolver:
Assuming she was being serious I would guess a Colt Single Action Army or similar, Colt made a wide range of similar revolvers from the late 1870s to late 1890s that all had very similar baseline features and design, and most would aesthetically look very appropriate in a Western. If they were using antique guns, with actors not trained in using period revolvers, I am not surprised at all they had accidental discharges.
I have to think an experienced prop master / etc would either demand more modern reproductions with safer characteristics, or would insist on higher amounts of training time for the actors before using a real period gun.