The gunbelts often seen in western movies and TV shows (despite being a rarity in real life during the late 1800s) had cartridge loops containing dummy rounds.
Posted on 10/25/2021 12:23:05 PM PDT by conservative98
A location manager for “Rust” says at least four people were responsible for checking the weapon that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — including gun-firing star Alec Baldwin.
“A massive mistake was made,” Stacey Mickey-Evans told Australia’s 92.5 Triple M Gold Coast.
“There are massive protocols to stop these things from happening. There are multiple checks for it,” she said Sunday.
She noted that the armorist, assistant director and the key grip are supposed to “check the gun … no matter what’s going on on set.
“And then very lastly, the actor checks the gun,” she said of Baldwin, who was also one of the movie’s executive producers.
“So there are four to five people in this stage,” she said, but “somehow there was a failure.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Why did Baldwin cock the pistol and then fire if it was a rehearsal?
i did a corporate video where a police officer was to draw down on me as i came out of a secure area... i had a toy gun painted flat black that looked real.
he showed me the gun was empty and the mag was empty before the scene and i reciprocated by showing him my clip was empty and bright orange when i pulled it out... we chuckled and then he drew down on me and tossed me onto the hood...
booked dano.
His career may well be over. But the crushing guilt on his conscience will live with him for the rest of his life.
Say what you want about his politics, but he is a human being and think he deserves our prayers.
That’s what we do here.
Me too. But if Baldwin and others were responsible for checking the gun then all should be held legally responsible.
Really?
Had that [fire into the ground] been done with the gun in question, any live round would have been revealed before a dangerous situation occurred.
Well, yes but then you have to load in more, hopefully blank, ammunition for the movie scene. What about the new ones?
For those old enough to remember unedited Bugs Bunny cartoons:
{Gun: Boom!}
Bugs: “Well, what do you know? There was one more bullet in the gun. Hey, Leatherstocking, there was one more bullet in the gun!”
Elmer: “One more bullet in the gun?”
Daffy: “Yeah. One more bullet in the gun.”
Well, I've never worked on a movie set and I don't see why live ammunition would ever be used on a movie set, but if it is, every actor/actress to handle the gun should have some training as to how to handle it.
You’re right, dummy rounds are for looks only and do nothing but act as paper weights outside the weapon
Did Alex rid the world of another Bolshei voter?
The gunbelts often seen in western movies and TV shows (despite being a rarity in real life during the late 1800s) had cartridge loops containing dummy rounds.
Also, with all the references to similarities to scripts from:
“Murder She Wrote,”
“Columbo,”
“Perry Mason,”
and others, . . .
. . . do I get to be the first one to mention that in the “Godfather” trilogy the bad old white-hatted Don in New York gets a loaded pistol replaced on the set of a melodramatic play, to get rid of an actor he dislikes (who is supposed to pretend to shoot himself in the head)?
And why, if it was only a rehearsal, would Baldwin have needed to pull the trigger at all? Let alone firing INTO A CAMERA with two people in the line of fire???
Extreme negligence on his part.
Typically I believe that movie and TV sets have non-functional low detail prop weapons for extras and characters that won't be seen up close, and they have very realistic ones for the close up characters. In SciFi stuff the so-called Hero props are the ones that are good looking, shown in close ups, and have the electronics that let them light up and stuff. I think it's similar for westerns except at least some of the guns need to be able to fire blanks so the firing mechanism is still there.
I suppose it's possible they need to fire real rounds sometimes. For example In "Unforgiven" Clint Eastwoods character of the reformed no-good-low-down-killer needs to go out after a lucrative bounty so he takes his gun out for the first time in years and tries to shoot some targets. The shots are taken from wide frame and as he shoots the bullets at the same time in the same camera shot you see him miss all the targets. Now maybe he shot real bullets, maybe he shot blanks and a sharpshooter shot real bullets, maybe there were small charges that went off as he shot blanks, I don't know. But it's possible that live ammo was used to make it realistic (keep it all in sync). But once that shot was over, if they did use live ammo and I were the safety guy I'd lock the stuff up and nobody uses it without going through me.
You can’t tell Mr. Anger Management Issues what to do.
The AD said Baldwin was practicing cross drawing the gun on the set.
“he heard a whip sound, a pop, and the gal running the camera say....her stomach hurt”.
Sounds like he accidentially fired the gun while practicing getting it out of the holster.
https://www.csatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/01FIREARMS.pdf
Sorry I did not post the link before.
It is not difficult reading (only 4 pages). The rules, procedures, and job assignments are straightforward. They are not quite the same "4 rules" you would expect at your local gun range. They are dealing with different problems.
See rules 9, 11, 12 and 16. As a Producer, Alec Baldwin specifically failed to see these rules announced and enforced.
As an Actor, Alec Baldwin should not have been rehearsing shots (which the scene required to be aimed at the camera) until the setup was complete and the crew were clear of the line of fire. The Prop master or Armorer should have called a halt to rehearsal activity.
The Director should have called a halt to rehearsal activity. Maybe because Alec Baldwin was also the Producer and the boss, there was some inhibitions there.
The Actor, Alec Baldwin, was not specifically required to check the weapon given to him. He was within procedure to request such a check from the Armorer or Weapons Handler and "witness the loading of the firearms". But he did not do that.
The Armorer or authorized Weapons Handler should have been there to unload and clear the pistol immediately before the rehearsal. You don't just tell somebody else to pick up a "cold gun" from a cart.
Firearms are supposed to be unloaded or checked immediately before rehearsals, loaded immediately before active filming, and then unloaded and cleared immediately after. The Actor is not supposed to do any of that. The people who were supposed to do that - didn't.
The failures go on to the point of tedium to list them all. A professional inquest likely will be several hundred pages and name a dozen people responsible in some way for the death. But it starts at the top with bad management and percolates down from there.
Alex Baldwin was in the bad management group.
How do you check if a gun is loaded when someone points it at you? If someone thinks it is a good joke to fire “blanks” at you, how do you stop him and check the weapon?
punch them in the adams apple...
“punch them in the adams apple...”
If you are the Director or Director of Cinematography for a movie and you punched the Producer, you would probably get fired.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.