Toldja So

 

(CNN) An assistant director handed Alec Baldwin a prop firearm and yelled "cold gun" before the actor fired and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza, according to a court document.

The "cold gun" remark was meant to indicate that the weapon did not have live rounds, according to an affidavit for a search warrant for the movie set filed by the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office and obtained by CNN affiliate KOAT.

According to the affidavit, Baldwin was handed one of three prop guns by assistant director David Halls that were set up in a cart by an armorer.

Halls did not know there were live rounds in the gun, the affidavit said.

 But when the actor fired the gun, a live round hit Hutchins, 42, in the chest and wounded Souza, 48, who was nearby, according to the affidavit.

Hutchins was pronounced dead at the hospital after being airlifted, the affidavit says.

Before Thursday's shooting, some crew members quit the production over concerns related to safety -- including gun inspections, according to the Los Angeles Times and other media reports.

Three crew members who were on the set last weekend told the Times there were two accidental prop gun discharges before Thursday.

The rounds were accidentally fired October 16 by Baldwin's stunt double after he was told the gun was "cold," two of the crew members, who witnessed the discharges, told the newspaper.

 "Cold guns" aren't supposed to be loaded, particularly during rehearsals, a weapons expert told CNN on Friday.

"You have to make sure that the weapon is truly cold, which means there should have been no rounds in there, period. And especially if it's a rehearsal," Bryan Carpenter, an armorer and weapons master in the film industry, told CNN.

Carpenter added that while it's acceptable for some actors to want to get a feel of a weapon during rehearsals, it's crucial to ensure the prop guns are not filled with any rounds. He noted that weapons on sets should be confirmed "cold" by two people to avoid such tragic incidents.

Prop department weapons handler fucked up. She'd better be retaining counsel, because she'll likely be tried for involuntary manslaughter and looking at 18 months in prison, under NM criminal statutes.

And she's going to die on welfare after losing everything she owns, for life, in the civil suit.

Incident details:

(L.A. Slimes) Three crew members who were present at the Bonanza Creek Ranch set on Saturday said they were particularly concerned about two accidental prop gun discharges.

Baldwin’s stunt double accidentally fired two rounds Saturday after being told that the gun was “cold” — lingo for a weapon that doesn’t have any ammunition, including blanks — two crew members who witnessed the episode told the Los Angeles Times.

“There should have been an investigation into what happened,” a crew member said. “There were no safety meetings. There was no assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. All they wanted to do was rush, rush, rush.”

A colleague was so alarmed by the prop gun misfires that he sent a text message to the unit production manager. “We’ve now had 3 accidental discharges. This is super unsafe,” according to a copy of the message reviewed by The Times.

Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was huddled around a monitor lining up her next camera shot when she was accidentally killed by the prop gun fired by Baldwin.

The actor was preparing to film a scene in which he pulls a gun out of a holster, according to a source close to the production. Crew members had already shouted “cold gun” on the set. The filmmaking team was lining up its camera angles and had yet to retreat to the video village, an on-set area where the crew gathers to watch filming from a distance via a monitor.

Instead, the B-camera operator was on a dolly with a monitor, checking out the potential shots. Hutchins was also looking at the monitor from over the operator’s shoulder, as was the movie’s director, Joel Souza, who was crouching just behind her.

Baldwin removed the gun from its holster once without incident, but the second time he did so, ammunition flew toward the trio around the monitor. The projectile whizzed by the camera operator but penetrated Hutchins near her shoulder, then continued through to Souza. Hutchins immediately fell to the ground as crew members applied pressure to her wound in an attempt to stop the bleeding.

The person in charge of overseeing the gun props, known as the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, could not be reached for comment. The 24-year-old is the daughter of veteran armorer Thell Reed and had recently completed her first film as the head armorer for the movie “The Old Way,” with Clint Howard and Nicolas Cage.

One and a half movies, followed by one and a half years in prison for manslaughter.

So when she gets out of prison she'll only be about 27, and can still get a job at Starbucks. But she'll never work in Hollywood, and she'll never handle another weapon legally for the rest of her life. Getting somebody killed because you were careless is a tough way to learn weapon safety. Bummer for her, but life is tougher when you're stupid.

The woman responsible for handling weapons on the set of Alec Baldwin's "Rust" had only recently taken on a gig as a head armorer, and shared she had real doubts about doing the job.

(TMZ)Hannah Reed -- daughter of Hollywood armorer Thell Reed -- appeared on the "Voices of the West" podcast last month to talk about her new experiences in the biz. Reed told the hosts she had just wrapped a western movie with Nic Cage called "The Old Way" ... and it was her first time as head armorer on a movie.

In a now-eerie confession, Reed says of the Cage job, "You know, I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn't take the job because I wasn't sure if I was ready ... but, doing it, like, it went really smoothly."

Reed also talked about the guidance she's gotten from her dad -- who has previously worked on "Django: Unchained" "3:10 to Yuma" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" -- as an armorer.

 In talking about her training, Reed told the podcast hosts loading blanks in prop guns was "the scariest" thing to her, because she didn't know how to do it ... but it was something her dad had helped her work through.

Of course, there are still a lot of questions surrounding the accident on set ... including whether it was a live round in the gun Baldwin fired or a blank. Indiewire obtained an email sent by the propmasters union which claimed the gun Alec Baldwin fired had a "live single round" which struck 2 crew members.

A source who was working on the film tells us just last weekend there were several issues with blanks being shot when they weren't supposed to ... it's unclear who the head armorer was at that time.

There ya go: prop fuck-up during a rehearsal, on a low-budget shoot, with an inexperienced weapons handler.

(Thell Reed, BTW, is 78 years old, and worked in Hollywood since at least the 1950s, starting with Gunsmoke. When he was a teenager. Obviously, some skills aren't hereditary.)

Unless some fantastical new angle comes out, kids, what say let's just assume that if I blog something, I probably know exactly WTF I'm talking about until proven otherwise?

It's fun for me, but peeling your face off the brick wall has got to be painful for some folks out there eager to jump on the "Punk Baldwin" bandwagon.

He's a producer on the movie, so though not morally nor legally culpable personally, he's going to be ass-raped in civil court by the victims/families of. He's effectively done. At his age, you don't bounce back from this, and 50/50 this movie never gets finished.