More details have emerged about the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on a film set last week, with court records describing the circumstances leading to actor Alec Baldwin firing a fatal shot from a prop gun while filming the movie Rust.
The investigation to get to the bottom of how the tragic incident happened has begun, including a look at two instances where a stunt double on the same set accidentally fired two rounds after being told it was "cold".
Now a search warrant affidavit has been made public, including comments from camera operators and the director, Joel Souza, who was injured in the incident, while many people in the film industry are questioning how such a tragic accident could occur if the proper safety protocols were followed.
What do the court documents say?
Camera operator Reid Russell told a detective that Baldwin was rehearsing a scene in which he was to draw his gun and point it at the camera.
Russell told a detective the camera was not rolling when the gun went off, killing Hutchins and injuring Souza, according to the affidavit.
It also showed several members of the camera crew had walked off the production in a dispute over payment and lodging, Russell said.
Authorities said assistant director Dave Halls handed the weapon to Baldwin and announced "cold gun", indicating it was safe to use.
Russell said he was unsure if the weapon was checked before it was handed to Baldwin. Souza said he recalled hearing the phrase "cold gun" being used before the shooting.
The chief electrician on the low-budget western, Serge Svetnoy, blamed producers for Hutchins's death in a Facebook post, saying he noted "negligence and unprofessionalism" among those handling weapons on the set and said producers hired an inexperienced armourer.
How did a 'live round' even make it into the gun?
Bryan W Carpenter is a Hollywood weapons expert, armourer and head of Dark Thirty Film Services. He told RN Breakfast this morning that, in his experience, there was a "large series of safety violations that led to this".
Carpenter said he believed there was "a catastrophic breakdown of safety" that led to the incident.
He was adamant that a live round should "never" be in a gun used on set.
"At some point in time, that weapon may have been used for training, with live rounds at a different time and a different location," Carpenter said.
He said the only explanation could be that dummy rounds were somehow mixed in with live rounds.
"Dummy rounds look very much like real rounds, but they have BB's inside and you double-check them, even more.
"And it could have been that a lot of [live] rounds somehow got mixed into some dummy rounds and was overlooked by the armourer and the prop master," he said.
Carpenter said that, before things even got to this point, he believed it was clear there were safety failures.
He said that, despite what it might look like to viewers, a gun is almost never pointed directly at the camera or at an actor. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.
"Alec Baldwin, when he had that weapon, you never point a gun at the camera directly unless it's locked off and remotely operated," he said.
What about the people who checked the gun before handing it to Baldwin?
Carpenter said the process that was usually followed when shooting a scene like this is a long and laborious one. It looks like this:
- The weapon would have had to be locked in a safe to be taken out that morning and brought on to set. The safe is in the props truck. They would have been checked prior to going into the safe
- In the props truck, the armourer or prop master would have gone to the safe, taken the weapons out of the safe and checked them to make sure that they were safe and nothing was in them
- Then they would have been placed on a cart, generally a locked cart because other cast and crew can get curious, and checked again as they were put on the cart
- Then they would have been rolled out to location. The prop master or the armourer will know what scenes are going to be filmed and will have prepped the weapon if it was to have dummy rounds or if it was to have blank rounds. (Carpenter usually keeps rounds in separate bags)
- Then the prop master or armourer would have stood by to watch the weapons, which are unloaded, not even with blanks in them
- The weapons stay on the cart until the scene is actually filmed.
Carpenter said that rehearsals should be done with a rubber gun or a plastic gun, which says are "truly prop guns". The guns used in the scene are different.
"These guns aren't props. If they're real guns, they're real guns," he said.
What are others in the industry saying?
A crew member who worked with Halls on another project said she had raised safety concerns about him during the filming of the 2019 series Into The Dark.
Maggie Goll, a prop maker and licensed pyrotechnician, said in a statement that she filed an internal complaint with the executive producers of the show over concerns about Halls's disregard for safety protocols regarding weapons and pyrotechnics and tried to continue filming after the supervising pyrotechnician lost consciousness on set.
The fatal shooting and previous experiences point to larger safety issues that need to be addressed, Goll said, adding that crew member safety and wellbeing were top issues in recent contract negotiations between the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and a major producers' group.
"This situation is not about Dave Halls. … It's in no way one person's fault. It's a bigger conversation about safety on set and what we are trying to achieve with that culture," she said.
Several actors have also questioned how such a tragic accident could occur if the proper safety checks were in place.
Jeffrey Wright was acting with a weapon on the set of Westworld when news broke of the shooting.
"We were all pretty shocked. And it informed what we did from that moment on," he said in an interview at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
"I don't recall ever being handed a weapon that was not cleared in front of me — meaning chamber open, barrel shown to me, light flashed inside the barrel to make sure that it's cleared," Wright said.
Actor Ray Liotta of Goodfellas fame agreed that the checks on firearms are usually extensive.
"They always — that I know of — they check it so you can see," Liotta said.
"They give it to the person you're pointing the gun at, they do it to the producer, they show whoever is there that it doesn't work."
What about the reports of two incidents before the fatal shooting?
One worker on the set of Rust was reportedly so worried about weapon safety, he sent a text message to this manager warning of unsafe conditions.
Carpenter said that, on lower budget films such as this one — where Baldwin was a producer as well as a lead actor — there could be a "lack of oversight", and that many of his colleagues choose not to work on shows such as that, entirely because of a lack of oversight.
Carpenter said that, if proper rules were followed, an armourer would have been pulled in and a discussion would have been had as to why the two previous incidents happened and steps would have been taken to fix that.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 24 — the daughter of famous Hollywood armourer and stuntman Thell Reed — was the lead armourer on the film, but it was only her second production in the role, local media reported.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMia2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIxLTEwLTI1L2FsZWMtYmFsZHdpbi1oYWx5bmEtaHV0Y2hpbnMtc2hvb3RpbmctcnVzdC1jb3VydC1hZmZpZGF2aXQvMTAwNTY1MDY20gEoaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEwMDU2NTA2Ng?oc=5
2021-10-25 07:41:15Z
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