Sunday, November 20, 2022

Shortcut




7 comments:

nick flandrey said...

Hey Aesop, unrelated to this post, but the Santa Fe sheriff released a massive pdf of interviews, etc from Rust.

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Binder_Rust-Case_Digital-of-Hardcopy-Sheets_optimized_Redacted.pdf

The relevant interviews start somewhere around page 136.

No need to post this, but I don't have an email for you...
nick

Wolfshead Brass Knuckles said...

Bullets are too expensive and end it too quickly.

Aesop said...

@nick,

Thanx. And yet, to date, it's still nobody's fault...

nick flandrey said...

Deeper into the file, the FBI did find that there were live rounds on set. There were live rounds at the dummy ammo provider's shop too, although the powder didn't match.

The "purple haired girl" or "the blond haired girl" as the armorer and prop master have been described by the cast and crew, have some issues with a box of ammo "showing up" and ammo that was in leather used on another production being loaded into prop guns...

Where did the live rounds come from? My guess, the leather. Either used by someone for real shooting between movie rentals, or used some time during the other film (which is supported by some other rumor and statements.) There are also text messages about ammo being lost from leather during shooting, and needing to be replaced, and picking up some additional ammo.

None of which would have mattered if they inspected the rounds properly prior to use, and if the 1stAD and armorer did their own jobs properly.

n

(hannah, the armorer comes across as a lightweight, and just from the way she and the props master are referred to says they didn't get much respect on set. The props master has a text saying that Hannah admitted to drug use but it was outside of work, and was a prima dona, not wanting to do other props work, that she'd been told was part of her job. The guy backing Hannah as armorer and providing the guns and ammo seems pretty sketchy in the emails and texts.)

I'm not sure where blame will be placed, but I know where the responsibility falls, and it isn't on Baldwin.

n

Aesop said...

Not surprising.
She was an absolute idiot (she'd never have been hired for big-budget shows, and on mid-budgets, she would have been fired by Day Two), and I didn't pull the fact that of about 75 black-letter safety regs for firearms and ammunition use on production sets, I could find on cursory examination where she'd violated 60+ out of thin air. She was a danger to everyone on that set, every day she was there.

People talking out their asses aside, there's no actor who could have been subbed into Baldwin's shoes who wouldn't have had the exact same outcome, because with such a monumentally incompetent and criminally negligent PropTwat in charge, you can't get above the level of shooting people.

The wonder isn't that someone got killed on that set, it's that it took them 12 days to get there.
QED

Termite said...

Interesting conversation.

Since my knowledge of movie site prop gun safety is roughly the same as the square root of a -1, I will accept your explanations, Aesop

Aesop said...

@Termite,

I did over 20 years' work in the industry on set, and posted links to the official industry-wide safety bulletins, which are the BIBLE for how to do things right and not injure or kill people on productions. There are, at this point 62 separate bulletins, most of them 1-5 pages in length, regarding any number of potentially hazardous activities when making movies, TV shows, commercials, etc.

https://www.csatf.org/production-affairs-safety/safety-bulletins/

The first two bulletins, by no coincidence, are the rules regarding firearms and blanks, and live ammunition. They're in plain English, and they were written in the blood of people who got it wrong, going back 50 years and more. Following them is why there hasn't been a firearms fatality in the movie or TV business for 26 years prior to that day on Rust.

And to the clueless consternation of self-appointed gun afficiandos, you can't follow the Four Rules on a set where the entire point of the exercise is to point things that look like weapons at people, and pretend to shoot them, which happens literally hundreds of times a month on productions, since ever. Hence, instead, the rules listed.

The bulletins are written at about a sixth or eighth grade level of education, and anyone, including PropTwat, could have looked them up at any time and figured out how to do her job properly and safely (she obviously never bothered). They've been around for literally decades, and everyone on set knows about them. FFS, they print them out and attach them to the daily call sheet for every single swinging dick on the set, every time they apply.

If you go to the link and read them, you can check off how many of them PropTwat broke, daily, deliberately, on just a 12-day shoot. It's damned near every single one there is.

And what pisses people off is that Baldwin broke exactly none of then. The responsibility for safety is on the propmaster or weapons handler, and their designated assistant(s). (Not any actor(s), ever, because a) they're idiots about anything but acting, and b) they're not the subject-matter experts on weapons and ammo. Not even Clint Eastwood or Keanu Reeves. Simply not the way it works.) That was PropTwat and an assistant director (which was another dumb idea - assistant directors aren't prop experts either, and shouldn't be handling weapons, as a general rule.) If I'd been unfortunate enough to be on that show, I'd have shot her myself out of self defense. It's no wonder the entire camera department except the Director of Photography (the woman killed) walked out that very morning. Gutierrez-Reed was a hazard to life and limb, should never have been hired, should have been fired multiple times before the lethal incident, and she should already be doing 5 years for criminally negligent manslaughter. Instead, she hasn't even been indicted yet, over a year later.

The D.A. in that county has a severe case of recto-cranial impaction.