I had a chance to spend a couple days filming at Movie Armaments Group up in Toronto, and took a minute to speak with Charlie Taylor, their Managing Director. MAG is has been around for 25 years supplying guns to the film and TV industry, and Charlie has immense experience working with blank-fire guns. Sounds easy, right? Well, there's really a lot more that goes into reliable and safe blank-fire conversions than you might expect...
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This video is a couple years old so it has nothing at all to do with the Alec Baldwin fiasco.
It does beg the question, though - why were they using functioning firearms on that particular movie set when other options were available?
Baldwin was/is making a movie on the cheap. I suspect that "real" prop guns are more expensive to rent than functional firearms. The prop replicas are probably costly to render safe via internal blank adapters and other alterations. Correct me if I'm wrong.
ReplyDeleteAs an NRA-certified firearms instructor and Range Safety Officer, IMO the "Rust" movie set was a tragedy waiting to happen due to immense ignorance, slap dash procedures, and cost-cutting efforts.
They were using real weapons, unaltered for blanks because they're cheaper and it was a low budget Hollyweird movie...also, the crew were not familiar with jack shit about firearms, were firing live ammo outside when bored and remember, guns don't kill people, Alec Baldwin does...
ReplyDeleteErroneous! Untrue! She was a below-the-line type, and therefore doesn't qualify as "people". Sure, she was in my presence, so she was more of a person than you insects, but still really nothing more than a rodent.
Delete- Alec Baldwin.
And the "armorer" was incredibly incompetent.
ReplyDeleteThe armorer was Thell Reed's (grand?) daughter - just about the most respected "gun guy" in Hollywood since forever. Guess he was trying to get her into the family business, so to speak. Seeing her posing with pistols demonstrates his bad idea. Even so, I feel for him.
DeleteDaughter.
DeleteAll of 24. (Thell is 78.)
She did one previous movie, another low-budget non-union p.o.s., and managed not to kill anyone.
Other than that, she has no other prior movie or production experience, no prop experience, and no weapons experience.
She openly admitted in a podcast during the prior movie that she felt totally incompetent and unprepared for the responsibilities of her job, until Daddy helped her figure out which ends of the gun the bullets go in and come out, and she got this movie right on the heels of finishing the last one. A job that experienced propmasters had walked away from, after hearing what the production expected, and for sub-scale wages.
She's not in the property local, thus she hasn't taken any of the basic safety classes they demand, including an entire class on just firearms safety, that would be required for even the lowliest prop assistant before getting into the property guild, and she didn't work with any other propmasters anywhere, AFAAK, before leaping over all that to getting hired to be the foremost weapons expert on that set.
This is like picking a kid out of the passenger line at the airport, and handing them pilot's wings, and telling them to take the plane up.
With predictable results.
Weapon handler skillz obviously don't pass along in one's DNA, but no-budget movies hire anyone they want, and take their chances.
And this time, it cost them.
Yeah,...revolvers don't NEED alteration, so they aren't. Even with all the other gun houses in Hollywood, almost none of the revolvers are modified. Hollywood functioned this way just fine until the morons over-populated.
ReplyDeleteRevolvers are easy to check for "cold" (no ammunition of any kind). If you see "brass", it ain't "cold". Also, since Baldwin "missed" the camera shield and got a hit on the uppity union woman who had been grieving him about safety, you (or I) do have to wonder. Baldwin sure looked all broke up about it, but then, he is an "actor".
ReplyDeleteWell, of course I was broken up. Do you know how much money and 20 year old bangtail this is gonna cost me?
Delete- Alec Baldwin
If your belief is that weapons are so dangerous that no one should be allowed to own them, such as Alec Baldwin believes, why would you ever handle a weapon without the utmost caution and care?
ReplyDeleteBaldwin wrote this p.o.s., but he didn't bankroll this flick, that was something like 11 other people. And the Unit Production Manager those producers picked hired an incompetent and totally inexperienced fuckwit to be the armorer, who proceeded to break virtually every single written production rule of safe weapons and ammunition handling it was possible to break, blatantly ignoring plain-English rules in place in The Biz since before she was even born, including what is literally a bold-black and underlined one that explicitly states that functional actual weapons are not to be used on primary sets, ever. No prop firearm capable of accepting live ammo is okay on a primary set, ever. Period. And for exactly the reason that it precludes exactly what ignoring that rule created: a massive fatal failure.
ReplyDeleteThe miracle isn't that she killed someone on set.
It's that it took her twelve full days to do it.
This was obvious within days of the basic facts coming out, and every person with any motion picture production experience on the entire internet has asked the exact same questions you're asking, Kenny: "Why would anyone break all the rules and do XX and XX??" Which is exactly what she did, over and over and over.
Because she's a criminally and grossly negligent moron, who got somebody killed, and needs to go to prison, is the inescapable answer.
And Mike, as you know, "cold" means no fireable ammo, not "empty". Dummies don't fire. PropTwat mixed live round with dummy rounds, so there was always visible brass in the cylinder. The whole point of the camera shot being rehearsed was to look right down the barrel, at the front of the cylinder, and see dummy round lead slugs, as the weapon was to be fired - with a blank. No one would buy empty holes in that shot. And (shocker, I know) the armorer failed to mark live rounds "conspicuously", nor segregate them completely off-set, nor securely lock them up far from set, and they shouldn't have even been anywhere within a mile of the set in the first place. Nor should the weapon(s) used. All of which was the sole and total reason for even hiring an armorer.
How many times and ways ways does somebody have to personally break multiple explicit rules before we're comfortable saying they're totally at fault here?
And don't forget, Baldwin was the one ultimately responsible for her death. The gun was in his hands and HE didn't check it. How fucking hard would that have been?
DeleteI don't know about you, but myself and every soul I know knows enough about safe gun handle to realize that.
1) What you and I know about and practice with real guns has no application to fake guns shooting blanks on a movie set, and wishing or imagining it were otherwise won't change that. The Four Rules don't apply on a set where actors point non-weapons firing blanks at each other all day long, and have for over a century, and laugh about it afterwards, any more than they apply to squirtguns and SuperSoakers. Unless you want every movie made with finger guns. Until this incident, no one had died from a weapon accident on set in 28 years, since Brandon Lee. Only three in US movie history, that I've heard any mention of. (There are exactly zero states in the US that can point to a similar safety record in any one year.) All three fatalities were a result of omeone breaking the safety rules, deliberately. But the nearly three decades of films following the rules included flicks like Saving Private Ryan, Heat, John Wick 1-3, etc., with zero screw-ups, doing far more than a simple draw-and-shoot scene. That's why they have 79 Rules instead. Until 20-something incompetent PropTwat broke about 50-60 of them, starting with bringing a real gun to the job.
DeleteThe Four Rules are a great idea for actual deadly weapons with live bullets, none of which are ever supposed to be on a set. But you can't use those guidelines in a workplace where it's people's job to stand at both ends of the same firing range, and blast away at each other, on purpose. Hence the 79 rules.
2) Checking a gun with a live round amidst dummy rounds would have mattered, if only PropTwat had "conspicuously marked" the live round(s), which she also didn't do.
Which was why both she and the AD also didn't know they had a live round in the weapon. (Her "I have NO idea how that one got in there" excuse is going to fly with a grand jury about as well as "That's not my dope!" ever has.)
Baldwin would have seen the same thing they had, and with even less basic knowledge: something that looked like it belonged there. (And it's not his job to load nor "check" any weapon, ever. Actors finger-banging weapons at all is how accidents happen. At most, actors may watch when blanks are loaded, but that wasn't supposed to have happened yet, at that point in time, for a rehearsal, prior to the actual filmed "takes". It wasn't supposed to be an "empty" cylinder, either. It was supposed to be full of dummy rounds that look exactly like real ones on camera.
That's why you hire an armorer for a show in the first place: to not skip 60 basic safety rules, ever, so that you can make a movie, with a non-weapon, that still looks like you're shooting a real one, without killing people.
The chain of responsibility for this begins and ends with her, and the idiot AD who agreed to be her double-checker. Both of them were grossly negligent, and she worst of all.
(cont.)
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DeleteBaldwin took what was supposed to be a non-weapon with dummy rounds, after being assured by the double-checker it was that, as well as "cold", i.e. totally safe, and rehearsed the exact scene in the script: pulling the gun, and pulling the trigger while pointed at the camera, just as he would have done with one or more blank rounds for a film take. The safety for that is a simple plexiglass screen to stop wads and such. (People floating nonsense about "remote cameras" have no effing idea how film works.) And the DP wasn't "some union whiner" about safety, or she'd have walked with the rest of her department, and been alive to tell the tale. The union people on the camera were the ones who left, because they saw how effed up the armorer was, and how sloppy at basic weapon safety. They're now legendary geniuses. And alive.
A pilot who gets on a plane, and crashes into a skyscraper when the engines fall off the wings isn't responsible just because he was holding the wheel, either.
I would love - LOVE - to jump up and down on @$$hole Baldwin if he bore any actual or legal responsibility for this, and see him go to prison for it, after all his anti-gun douchebaggery over the years, but it simply isn't so, from anything that's come out.
The fact that he now owns the karma for being the guy who pulled the trigger on the the Russian Roulette Wheel he was handed is going to have to be satisfaction enough.
His career should pretty much be over with this, and he's going to be beaten over the head for this tragedy for every day of what remains of his pathetic existence.
People trying to stick him with this despite all the info that's come to light are like the gun-ban fools that dance in the blood every time some lunatic takes a gun into a mall or a movie theater and goes nuts on a crowd.
Just like with the armorer or any ten lunatics, you can't use the actions of one criminal idiot to try and blame things that oughtn't be blamed.
As much as it pisses people off, one of those things this time includes Baldwin.
People should rejoice that the universe has a sense of humor.
Baldwin is a liberal who just got mugged.
And like Ted Kennedy, his nose is going to be rubbed in his body count long after he's cold and dead.
Except for the tragic loss of an innocent life, I think that's a pretty good deal.
Bullshit, bullshit, BULLSHIT!
Delete"The Four Rules don't apply on a set where actors point non-weapons firing blanks at each other all day long"
That's like saying they don't apply to gun shop owners who hand customers guns all day long without an incident because they've never had a live round in them or towards those customers who receive the guns because the he's pretty damned sure it's unloaded. IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING DIFFERENCE.
Also, there's been numerous articles saying there had been live fire on the set earlier with those very same fucking guns.
So why didn't Baldwin take an extra 10 seconds to check the loads?
You can sit there and make excuse after excuse about how Baldwin wasn't at fault, but the fact is, HE was the one that was ultimately responsible for shooting that woman. Had he physically checked to make sure there were blanks only in the cylinder, that woman would still be alive.
Alex has been handling guns on movie sets for over 30 years and has probably heard the 79 rules a lot more, and knows more about guns then the 24 year old filling the spot as armorer. Out of the 79 rules for firearms safety Alex screwed up number 2.
DeleteNEVER place your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot . Keep your finger alongside the firearm and off the trigger .
Kenny, I'm sorry it frustrates you no end, but it's not bullshit. And this is not "like" anything related to known actual guns, and known live ammo.
Delete1) There weren't supposed to be even blanks in the chamber. Just dummy rounds.
2) The actor isn't the one who "checks" anything. (That's not a suggestion, it's the rule. Actors fingerbanging the weapons by physically checking anything starts the entire process all over from scratch. The second time that happens, they take even the prop guns away, and tell the director to get control of the actor, and hand out rubber guns. The third time it happens, they take all the guns, and drive home with them, and the crew is wrapped until they can find another weapons person. At a cost of about $300K/day on this no-budget craptacular, which kills the movie by the second day it happens.)
3) Brian: Read Rule 1 before you point to Rule 2. They expect to point guns at people, and pull the trigger. That was the exact scene being rehearsed. That's why if even blanks are involved, it's only for actual film takes. Which is why dummy rounds, and why the AD called "cold gun".
https://www.csatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/01FIREARMS.pdf
4) Comparing live guns to prop guns is already an apples-to-oranges fallacy. Trying to wrench the discussion over to that as if it applies is why this keeps getting everyone's panties in a twist. The only reason it was a live gun with a live bullet in the first place is because the armorer fucked up eleventy ways to hell to make it so. That's already culpable criminal negligence.
She didn't know that. The idiot AD who was their double-checker didn't know that. But all the armchair quarterbacks figure Baldwin was supposed to know more than both the people hired and expressly designated by the production to oversee that, with the absolute legal responsibility to not let happen exactly what happened, because reasons.
Last I looked, he hasn't handled a firearm on a movie since The Edge, in 1997, 24 years before this p.o.s. (I'm open to dispute on that, but he hasn't had much of a career as a gunslinger, ever.)
If it was as cut-and-dried as everyone would like to think, purely from Baldwin hatred, the deputies at the scene would've had him in cuffs within 15 minutes of the shooting.
Instead, the armorer is the one lawyering up heavily, because she owns this turdburger, front to back, she knows it, and so does all of Hollywood. She brought the live gun and the live bullet to set, and had to load them herself.
If they find her prints on the live casing, she she'll be on suicide watch.
And so far, the tales of "plinking" off-set, by the crew or anyone else, are fairytales, with no substantiation anywhere on the record, despite multiple affidavits released to the public. That may change, but unless it does, there's not a shred of actual evidence it ever happened, except the newspapers. Who never fuck anything up, right?
I'm not trying to excuse Baldwin of anything. I'm looking at what happened, and what was supposed to happen.
To prove negligence, you have to have a clear duty, and fail to perform it.
Baldwin didn't fail: He hired an armorer. He has a reasonable expectation that the person hired to do a job will, in fact, perform it.
She failed universally, from A to Z. And she's got no one to backstop her but her fellow idiot, the AD who was supposed to double-check the weapon he handed to Baldwin.
The Santa Fe D.A. would have a monumentally tough time proving any negligence attaches to Baldwin.
But she can nail Gutierrez-Reed to the wall, blindfolded, with one hand tied behind her back.
Nope, still bullshit. Baldwin had the gun in his hand and he pulled the trigger while pointing it at two people. I don't give a fuck if he took anybody else's word that the gun was unloaded or not.
DeleteIf that incident had happened someplace else than a movie set, Baldwin would have been arrested and charged in no time.
You can quit wasting your time by trying to change my mind any time you want.
I wouldn't dream of it.
DeleteI agree with you 100%: If that incident had happened any other place than a movie set, Baldwin would have been arrested and charged in no time. And rightfully so.
But it didn't, and that, hired ptofessionals, and 10 pages of ignored safety regs on their part make all the difference, which is why Baldwin wasn't arrested and charged.
The only place we differ is you think that's a wild miscarriage of justice, and I see it as common sense obvious.
At some point, all the evidence sent to the Fibbie lab is going to come back, and then the chips will fall where they will fall, and the Santa Fe D.A. will make her decision.
In any event, Baldwin's still going to be tagged with this long after he's dead, even if he never gets anything but a witness subpoena out of it.
Couldn't happen to a more deserving @$$hole.
Okay, we've finally reached an agreement in your last two sentences. How 'bout we give it a rest?
DeleteDoooowayne the rock Johnson says that they will never use a real gun on set again. They will only use rubber guns. I assume he'll only use Nerf cars, too.
ReplyDeleteYeah, well, he's dame bramaged, so his opinion matters to me about as much as De Niro's does.
DeleteDoofuswayne is ignorant of the fact that they've never used real guns on his set, since ever.
DeleteAnd it's not his decision, unless he's paying for the whole film (which will never happen).
So he's just virtue-signaling right out of his underpants, and everyone in Hollywood knows it.
I say live ammo in all guns on the set. One way to get rid of the liberal assholes.
ReplyDeleteThis topic isn't going away too soon is it! Ugh! Ohio Guy
ReplyDelete