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I am a consequentialist, so while I don't support the current state of "reform" in the USA I still think negligence is just as punishable an offence as malice.
I think Baldwin, responsible for cutting corners resulting in loss of life, should also face prison time.
Baldwin is old enough to remember what happened to Brandon Lee. Add several workers leaving for safety reasons and it makes Baldwin the Producer and decision taker, responsable for turning a blind eye on all the security violations.
He was the one gambling and taking a chance, as always, for a bigger profit.
Gutierrez-Reed was unprofessional and ignored many safety procedures and is very responsible also, and should have walked out also... but being young and on your first jobs can be demanding and difficult to say no. What a wake-up call for her.
This is dumb. Learn like airlines do; only prosecute for malicious intent. In all other cases, learn. Create procedures that make this situation impossible, and make certain that all major productions follow them.
Saying it's X or Y person's fault absolves any systemic issues. What training should an armorer have? Can we avoid a single point of failure that results in live ammo on set? Etc etc.
Edit: thank you Lemmy for positive votes. The Reddit threads are absolutely bloodthirsty in comparison. Good change in pace here.
Nahh. I watched the trial, this is a clear case of criminal negligence. The set was a mess, everything was rushed, someone died. There are dozens of gun heavy sets every months accross the US, yet people dont die. The producers and the armorer are responsible for gun safety on the set, they failes, they need to be held accountable.
Yo, all that shit exists and was presented in the trial. Lmao.
Umm.. No. I am sorry but you are about 30 years out of date in believing this is a problem of not having enough proceedure. In the wake of the death of Brandon Lee the industry created a very comprehensive system of weapon checks and requiring all basic prop people to go through licencing and safe handling programs as part of getting their union ticket never mind armourers who require more extensive courses in handling a wide range of weaponry and experience in handling them.
The Rust case IS one where legitimate negligence of stringent industry standard was SO endemic that there is no leg to stand on. This is criminal negligence. Unionized workers were already leaving that production for safety concerns before the incident occured.
Here is a list of things that specifically went wrong in process for this specific incident to happen.
Even if the gun were loaded with blanks not submiting to all of this process would leave the door open to someone getting killed on a set. Even blanks can kill. At this point the criminal negligence pie is so big that the slices that get handed out are going to hurt. Before you start calling this case "dumb" understand the industry.
the weapon was used with live ammo to shoot during the work day.
When I heard about this I had a strong feeling about what happened: people were firing the gun for fun while it wasn’t being used for the film. There would be an easy way to avoid the most remote possibility of this happening by accident: no live ammo on the set at all, period.
I mean... It's not the only problem? If you get killed by an actual bullet on a set something has gone spectacularly wrong. But you could just as easily get killed by something getting lodged in the barrel and getting propelled at bullet speed. Even a fairly small obstruction can be lethal. That's why whenever you as a props person / armorer hand a gun to an actor you perform a full check of the gun while the actor watches.
If you as an actor get handed a weapon without a check you call foul. If you as a crew member see a props person hand off without a check you call foul.
Even rubber prop weapons that have no capacity to fire and no internal components at all are treated the same as live weapons. Only props people or actors touch them, no one else. They are under lock and key when not actively under supervision or on someone's person and they have to be demonstrated, checked and explained at handoff with instructions for their safe return... Again... Rubber weapons on your average film set set is treated with more respect then the live weapons on Rust were.
It's really hard to explain to people how actually fucked up the situation on the Rust set is because they think we're wild westing all the time.
I'm familiar with that area of New Mexico and also read about how difficult it was for the set staff to deal with various conditions, such inadequate accommodations and being 1 hour+ from the closest vestige of civilization. That's definitely the middle of f'in nowhere. I don't even see how driving to Springer, Raton or Cimarron or what, Wagon Wheel would help much. It sounds like it was a poorly organized production in general.
Okay, good point, many other things went wrong with the protocol. I've had other discussions where I speculated that they could just use CGI to fill in the gun parts and it would seem about as realistic given the level of capability that has these days, but people have said the trend these days is for 'realism' in gun battles in movies.
It's basically still cheaper to hire one props person or armorer than a whole vfx team. To do good vfx there's a nessisary on site component and people react more realistically to actual weapon recoil and timing meaning less takes.
Realistically out of all the ways to die or even be injured in film guns are super rare. There have been three gun deaths in the past 40 years of filming and Rust is the first after all the gun safety changes that were made after the death of Brendan Lee on the Crow. The most common ways to die involves falling from a height over 3 ft, mishaps around vehicles and electrical shocks.
The industry is also super interconnected. If someone dies anywhere in the US or Canada on a film set union or not the news is known in every corner of film in about 3 hours.
I'm pretty sure there are already procedures and those include never having real guns on a set. If you do have real guns on a set (why would you ever have real guns on a set) they should be physically separated, and visually distinct.
Of course the real solution would just be to never have real guns on a set which of course is rule one that she broke. They didn't need real guns, they had them there for no reason that's why she's guilty because she was doing a stupid thing for no good reason.
There's a bunch of things that should never happen. No real guns on set. No live ammo ever near those guns. No removing guns from set. No pointing guns at people. All the procedures getting skipped when a new person holds a prop.
By blaming a person and one element of it, we leave everything else as it was and more accidents will eventually happen. Sooner or later a studio will want a non-union armorer that they can boss around again, who won't have the authority to push back on things, and if we don't learn now then it can all repeat.
I feel like a slap on the wrist would just incentivize this sort of behavior.
I think what they mean is it would bring about change across the entire industry to prevent this type of thing from happening regardless of who's in charge.
There are already industry standards to point to the left or right of the target when firing on set, there are already strict procedures and guides for actors and armorers both. This event happened due to multiple levels of gross negligence. To say "only prosecute for malicious intent" is just legalizing murder.
Yeah, I didn't say I agree too much with the concept, especially with the way airline safety has been pretty sketchy nowadays.
she's got a great hairstyle here.
I was thinking that she definitely doesn't look like what I assumed an armorer would look like
The way she looks in real life before this trial is nothing like she looks during the trial now. They're trying to make her look as professional as possible
Why do they even use real guns? And even when they do why aren't they guns with locked/incapacitated barrels, blocked ? I am sure that they could have disabled the hammer, detached the trigger so that it did not actually fire or maybe even dont allow real guns and bullets in filming locations?
The actor didn't actually pull the trigger. He pulled back the hammer on the revolver manually. I guess they needed a working hammer for the scene.
I remember someone saying "there is no way this firearm could have fired, it was a modern reproduction gun with modern safety features like half cock". So I went off and found the manual for that firearm and it explicitly mentioned things NOT to do, which included banging the gun, releasing the hammer etc. So regardless of modern safety features or not, even the manufacturer gave warnings that correspond to some of the statements Baldwin made about it just going off.
That doesn't excuse sloppy firearm safety, or the use of live rounds, or the incompetence of the armorer. But like most things, an accident is not just one thing but a chain of events.
A good armorer uses a mix of these techniques, and it usually isn't a problem there have only been 3 ~~gun injuries~~ live ammo shootings:
-The Captive (1915). -The Crow (1994). -Rust (TBA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_film_and_television_accidents#
This one too:
Cover Up (1984). While waiting for an episode filming to resume, actor Jon-Erik Hexum played Russian roulette with a .44 Magnum loaded with a blank. The gunshot fractured his skull and caused massive cerebral hemorrhaging when bone fragments were forced through his brain. He was rushed to Beverly Hills Medical Center, where he was pronounced brain dead.>
huh, I missed that one, I was looking for live rounds, there are a few other instances involving blanks or prop guns:
The Girl of the Golden West (1915). Actor House Peters Sr. suffered serious burns to his face and hands when a prop pistol exploded upon being fired.
The General (1926). During filming of the epic comedy in Oregon, there were a number of incidents. Several National Guardsmen, employed as extras for the Civil War battle scenes, were injured by mishaps caused by misfired muskets or explosions. Director and star Buster Keaton was knocked unconscious when he stood too close to a cannon firing. Assistant director Harry Barnes was accidentally hit in the face by a blank charge. Train brakeman Fred Lowry sued the production for US$2,900 after his foot was crushed when it was run over by a locomotive wheel during filming of one of the railway scenes
Die Hard (1988). Bruce Willis lost two-thirds of his hearing in his left ear after firing a gun loaded with extra-loud blanks from underneath a table.
there was also:
My Life for Ireland (1941). An anti-British propaganda film made by Nazi Germany. During the epic final-battle scene set during the Irish Civil War, several extras were killed when one of them stepped on a live land mine. The footage is said to have been included in the release prints, although no proof of this has been established
but that's more of a where did you get a live land mine issue.
Wow.