The New York Times reported that Halls said he did not check every round in every chamber before handing the gun to Alec Baldwin and declaring it cold. I think he’s admitting to gross negligence.
Kinda no two ways about it.
Lots of people heard him declare the gun was “cold.” Clearly that was not the case.
No getting around that one.
Good article by a professional cinematographer / director of photography with 35 years experience.
A comprehensive critique of what happened, especially Gutierrez and Halls.
He also talks about careless attitudes on movie sets in general - this is not a one-off case:
I have seen gung-ho special effects (SFX) and armourers in my lifetime as a DOP. It’s frightening, and I have been very fortunate to not have witnessed serious accidents;
The producers are ultimately responsible for this cavalier attitude towards safety. I’ve seen it on many shoots involving cars, stunts, trains, aircraft, microlights, helicopters, weapons, explosions, wild animals and the use of specialised equipment such as cranes, scuba equipment and smoke. It only takes one accident to take a life. A camera loader gored by an elephant. A talented cameraman killed by a giraffe. A cameraman seriously injured by a train. A news cameraman killed by a large predator in a cage. A stunt that went wrong. A crane that falls over. I’ve experienced my own near misses too.
… and something I haven’t seen elsewhere, some light criticism of Halyna Hutchins too:
Then, unfortunately, there is Halyna Hutchins herself. As the most senior technician on set, she is ultimately responsible for crew safety and care (besides the contractual obligations of the producers). She saw her camera crew leave that morning. She could have protested against shooting the scene, and warned everyone it was unsafe, but as a newish DOP and rising star, she probably didn’t want to make waves.
Completely understandable. Some of us experienced DOPs in the early 2000s were called HMC’s by some producers. I eventually found out what it meant: High Maintenance Cameraman. Truly! So, complaining, or trying to enforce safety protocols when it means time “wasted” in the eyes of the producers, is not usually welcomed, except by real professionals.
Excellent piece, yes.
The passage about fatal incidents does bring up something we have touched on earlier in the thread: On-set fatal, firearms incident may be rare enough to make news, and even absent the celebrity actor(*), would have probably still made national news for at least a day ot three, but not as a top headline or lead story. However, we also have accidents involving machinery or animals or stunts and those that barely register outside the trade press or the locality of the incident, and as long as nobody is killed or badly hurt, hazardous situations that you can tell are life-threatening are considered “just part of the job”.
California may ban the use of real guns on film sets.
My first thought was that this is a knee-jerk reaction that will probably not pass due to push-back from the industry. After all, as many here have said, if safety rules already in place had been followed, this would not have happened. However:
We shall see.
“[T]he urgency of the matter” is interesting wording, given that the last on-set firearm death in California occurred in 1984.
I was thinking the same thing but my thoughts aren’t fully formed on it. There are several reasons this is a big story. Not the least of which it was a big (politically active) star that pulled the trigger. There is also the gun debate. There are a lot of elements that make this into a big long lasting story. Everyone remembers the Brandon Lee tragedy. He was a rising star and it was awful what happened. But who remembers the man who pulled the trigger? He was a veteran character actor with a recognizable face but he wasn’t famous so that was never part of the story. (It was Michael Masse by the way. The incident haunted him for the rest of his life) Does anyone remember that a stunt person was killed on a motorcycle filming Deadpool 2 just a few years ago? I don’t remember all the details but I seem to recall she was way under experienced for the stunt. There were no calls for banning real motorcycles. No one was charged. Production was halted for an entire 2 days before they started filming again.
Here’s a long list of accidents in past 10 years, many of them resulting in deaths or serious injuries.
Even serious accidents on high-profile movies, like Harry Potter, where Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double was left a paraplegic, Blade Runner 2049, The Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp, Deadpool, Resident Evil, etc. hardly even registered in public awareness.
Didn’t someone once say “You can’t legislate against stupidity”? Seems appropriate in this case, where people are trying to draft laws to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
It’s not so much stupidity as the attitude that money matters more than safety and treating film crews decently.
Honestly, this whole thing puts me less in mind of gun safety and more in mind of industrial safety protocols. Things like lock-out/tag-out protocols for working on/around big hoists/cranes and the like. Some shops are scrupulous about following safety protocols, and others are more cavalier. If someone gets crushed by a hydraulic press because people didn’t follow the lock-out/tag-out rules, the OSHA investigation isn’t going to recommend a raft of new rules restricting the use of hydraulic presses. It’s just going to fine the crap out of the company for not enforcing the following of lock-out/tag-out rules.
Unfortunately I’ve been first on the scene for several fatal industrial accidents. It’s always the same thing. New safety procedures aren’t needed because the ones already in place are not followed.
And most often the old ones aren’t followed because they’re a tedious hassle, they slow down production, and management cares more about production than safety in spite of the fact that they make all their employees sit through safety videos and fill out safety paperwork before going out on the production floor and ignoring all the safety stuff because they’ve got some deadline to meet.
Note how this all sounds almost exactly like what happened here.
And now we learn THE ARMORER was doing some of the target shooting that morning? Jesus Christ.
Massee, styled with two Es.
That was pretty early in his career, and fortunately he kept getting work. The shooting wasn’t his fault.
Even when there are fatal accidents they might barely register even locally. There was a death during filming of a stunt for Transformers 3 in my area and it hardly hit the local press. Batman: The Dark Knight had a cameraman killed. Plenty of other big movies have had people injured or paralyzed. Taylor Hickson was left permanently scarred due to broken glass cutting her during a stunt, even though she’d been assure the glass panel that broke was safe.
I am certain there are sets where people really do work carefully and with safety in mind. I am also equally certain there are other sets that are an accident waiting to happen. We will never entirely eliminate accidents, but can reduce how many there are, and how severe they might be.
Joi Harris.
It should be noted that she was a professional motorcycle racer and not a beginner in riding them. Even people who know what they’re doing with some of these dangerous items can get hurt or killed.
Do we have a source for that? I’d like to confirm something like that.
Interesting article, yes, but it’s an opinion piece, not a factual report. He claims though that not only had the crew been recreationally shooting with the prop guns, but that Guiterrez-Reed herself was “plinking” the morning that the union crew walked off the set. I haven’t seen that reported anywhere; is that a new development that I missed?
From the coverage I’ve seen, it sounds like the emerging narrative is “inexperienced, young armorer was careless and let a hot gun on set” (with a subtext of “inexperienced young female armorer”). But it’s starting to sound to me that role played by assistant director Dave Halls, who was dismissive of safety procedures, and had been fired from a movie set before for safety violations, is being elided. In the article above, the author says of Hutchins:
An excellent point, but one that might also apply to Guiterrez-Reed, as well.
She does bear a significant part of the responsibility for this tragedy, of course. But so do Halls, and the producers whose penny-pinching drove the experienced union crew off the set.
Wow. “Expendables,” indeed — 1, 2, AND 3!
Being a racer and having experience doing motorcycle stunts are two completely different skill sets. You don’t generally race down stairs. Regardless of her skill level the production was found at fault for several safety violations and her family did get a settlement. And the movie was finished and released with little difficulty.
Yeah, guns + celebrity is what’s making this one a Big F-ing Deal. As we are ourselves giving witness by this thread.
And of course, yeah, the matter with the likes of AD Halls is, come to think of it, more of a labor issue and a matter of industry culture: do we take it as a given and “just the way it is” that people down the totem pole can be badgered and bullied and it’s just “suck on it, or quit and be known as difficult” and you can’t make a stand until you are boss yourself. As states by people in this very thread who have done this kind of work, for the line grunts that seems to be almost the expected norm.
As to the matter of further legislating to either make failures in safety become crimes or to seek a way to make it impossible to use “real” weapons in film/stage(*), we run into the matter seen in other discussions about the view that yeah, sure, tiger-wrangling, crashing through glass panes, jumping between buildings in bikes, dangling from overhead wires while exposives are set off, are life risking… but, “OMG GUNS!!11!1”.
(* I mentioned in another thread some time earlier: most safety/security measures are not designed to make it existentially impossible for the wrong thing to happen, just harder)
This is pretty crap journalism. The article states that “many insiders have said the bill is likely to pass” then quotes exactly one anonymous source who doesn’t say that it will pass only that it “won’t be forgotten.” The bill author’s been in office less than a year, which makes me think this is more of an attention grab than anything else.
I’m not saying California won’t pass something regarding set safety, but it’s not going to be based on one baby state Senator’s press release.