Just Like We've Told You All Along Department:
Turns out PropTwat, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, future felon for manslaughter on Rust, comes by her ineptitude and total incompetence naturally, as the stories flow in from her prior gig, on The Old Way with Nicolas Cage.
(Getarope News)'You just blew my f**king eardrums out!' Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed 'discharged weapons without warning and infuriated star Nicolas Cage' on her previous film
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was the subject of numerous complaints while working as the armorer on her previous, and first ever, movie The Old Way
Nicolas Cage, the star of the film, reportedly yelled at her after she fired a gun without warning for the second time: 'You just blew my f**king eardrums out!'
A crew member from the The Old Way said she 'put the cast and crew in several unnecessary and dangerous situations' before he reported she should be fired
In a podcast interview after filming ended, she said she wasn't sure if she was ready to be a head armorer on a movie set
Two production sources claim Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed previously gave a child actor a gun without checking it on set of the The Old Way film
The rookie armorer was named as the person who loaded Alec Baldwin's prop gun that killed cinematographer Halyna Gutierrez-Reed on the set of Rust
Word To Your Lawyer, PropTwat:
End the farce. Cut a deal and plead out, while you still have a shot at some leniency for killing someone. You'll be out in 12-18 months, tops, and thankfully, never be legally allowed to touch a firearm the rest of your adult life, which will save as many lives as a cancer cure at this point, based solely on your demonstrated performance on one and a half movies.
So, total shocker, untrained and incompetent non-union PropTwat was a walking disaster with weaponry, and only by some miracle took until her second movie gig to kill someone, in a way no one has done in Hollywood in...lemme see, carry the zero...ever. (Neither Brandon Lee nor John Eric Hexum were killed by live rounds on set. Gutierrez-Reed is thus the only propmaster/armorer in recorded cinematic history, AFAIK, to screw that pooch right out of the gate, and managed it on her sophomore film, which was yet another low-budget piece of crap.)
RTWT
And for those spring-loaded to the stupid position, there were multiple producers on Rust, and she wasn't hired by Baldwin (who had no such hire/fire authority), but rather by line producer Gabrielle Pickle (who has a documented history of firing camera crews when they complained that safety corners were being cut), and/or by Unit Production Manager Katherine Walters.
The locus of stupid on this disastrous film aren't Hollywood people at all, but in fact a bunch of cut-rate indy film bumpkins from Georgia, trying to do everything on the cheap, and think of themselves as scrappy, but are in fact crappy, right up until they killed someone. These cheapskates are working overtime to live up to ever stereotype about producers that exists, and bringing them to life before your very eyes. Wannabes will get you killed every time, even in movie-making.
Gutierrez-Reed, total newb to guns, and yet serial fuck-up armorer
Dave Halls, 2d AD, the guy supposedly double-checking Guttierez-Reed, and previously caught violating weapon safety rules on another production (and as a member of the production department, not the prop department, he should never have anything to do with weapons on any set, yet here he was screwing that pooch again too)
Gabrielle Pickle, line producer, already found guilty of violating federal labor laws for firing a previous camera crew on another production when they complained about unsafe practices on-set
This movie was being made by a complete rogue's gallery of incompetent assholes, and for the motion picture budget equivalent of peanuts.
"When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys." - Aesop
QED
*{Hot tip, kids, when I use "non-union" derogatorily in the context of movie and TV productions, that's because it's true. I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into two unions over two decades in Hollyweird film production. The point isn't, as you imagine, because union membership confers infallibility. Anything but. As an elected officer and member of my union's executive board, we spent 90% of our time on the 5% of our union members who were nonetheless stone-cold f**k-ups. The point, in Hollywood, is that getting union membership for behind-the-scenes crafts and guilds is that it takes 30 days working on either a union show, or non-union show that organizes, to get it. And getting that, usually takes 1-3 years, on average, meaning no one on a union show with their shiny paid-up AFL-CIO card is a freaking incompetent rookie, because they'd never last. Hannah Gutierrez-Reed never got those 30 days, nor 1-3 years, nor took the week's worth of mandatory union classes the producers - that would be Universal, Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Sony, et al - require before you can be in your job. Which, in Gutierrez-Reed's case, would have included not just general set safety classes, but for propmasters and armorers, she would have had an entire class devoted solely and entirely to firearms and ammunition safety. She would have had to pass at least a basic test, before being allowed near any set, to do the sort of f**k-ups she did on both of the one and a half movies she worked on, right up until her multi-incompetence manifested itself in killing someone - by deliberately violating 50 or 60 of the most basic on-set rules for the job for which she was hired, after representing herself as an expert, rather than a farking novice and junior moron, which is what she was and is. A non-union member in Hollywood is one step above an absolute rookie level moron, whereas anyone with a union membership card has at least enough acquaintance with their job to not do anything as stupid as the plethora of screw-ups she pulled off, let alone killing people. Which exact lack is why she took on too much job, for too little money, with too few brains, and committed career-ending manslaughter. People on set sound like the kid in The Sandlot - "You're killing me, Smalls!" , and they say that to their co-workers all the time, usually jokingly, for making their job harder. When they say that to Gutierrez-Reed, they mean it literally.}
