Jury finds 'Rust' armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter
Jury finds 'Rust' armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter
The New Mexico jury deliberated for about 2.5 hours, she faces up to three years in prison.
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This is dumb. Learn like airlines do; only prosecute for malicious intent. In all other cases, learn. Create procedures that make this situation impossible, and make certain that all major productions follow them.
Saying it's X or Y person's fault absolves any systemic issues. What training should an armorer have? Can we avoid a single point of failure that results in live ammo on set? Etc etc.
Edit: thank you Lemmy for positive votes. The Reddit threads are absolutely bloodthirsty in comparison. Good change in pace here.
Umm.. No. I am sorry but you are about 30 years out of date in believing this is a problem of not having enough proceedure. In the wake of the death of Brandon Lee the industry created a very comprehensive system of weapon checks and requiring all basic prop people to go through licencing and safe handling programs as part of getting their union ticket never mind armourers who require more extensive courses in handling a wide range of weaponry and experience in handling them.
The Rust case IS one where legitimate negligence of stringent industry standard was SO endemic that there is no leg to stand on. This is criminal negligence. Unionized workers were already leaving that production for safety concerns before the incident occured.
Here is a list of things that specifically went wrong in process for this specific incident to happen.
- The weapon was left unattended and not locked in a secure location
- the weapon was used with live ammo to shoot during the work day.
- Each round loaded into the weapon during the workday was not scrutinized to ensure it was the proper load and there were no visually acertainable defects.
- the weapon was picked up and handled by several unauthorized personnel.
- the weapon was delivered to the actor by an unauthorized person from a different department.
- The weapon was accepted by the actor from a recognizably unauthorized person
- a full check of the weapon including each loaded blank and the barrel to check for bad blanks, possible obstructions or debris that can be projected to cause injury was NOT performed at point of hand over in sight of the actor.
- An unauthorized person decreed it a cold weapon without performing even the most basic visual check of the chamber.
Even if the gun were loaded with blanks not submiting to all of this process would leave the door open to someone getting killed on a set. Even blanks can kill. At this point the criminal negligence pie is so big that the slices that get handed out are going to hurt. Before you start calling this case "dumb" understand the industry.
the weapon was used with live ammo to shoot during the work day.
When I heard about this I had a strong feeling about what happened: people were firing the gun for fun while it wasn’t being used for the film. There would be an easy way to avoid the most remote possibility of this happening by accident: no live ammo on the set at all, period.
I mean... It's not the only problem? If you get killed by an actual bullet on a set something has gone spectacularly wrong. But you could just as easily get killed by something getting lodged in the barrel and getting propelled at bullet speed. Even a fairly small obstruction can be lethal. That's why whenever you as a props person / armorer hand a gun to an actor you perform a full check of the gun while the actor watches.
If you as an actor get handed a weapon without a check you call foul. If you as a crew member see a props person hand off without a check you call foul.
Even rubber prop weapons that have no capacity to fire and no internal components at all are treated the same as live weapons. Only props people or actors touch them, no one else. They are under lock and key when not actively under supervision or on someone's person and they have to be demonstrated, checked and explained at handoff with instructions for their safe return... Again... Rubber weapons on your average film set set is treated with more respect then the live weapons on Rust were.
It's really hard to explain to people how actually fucked up the situation on the Rust set is because they think we're wild westing all the time.
I'm familiar with that area of New Mexico and also read about how difficult it was for the set staff to deal with various conditions, such inadequate accommodations and being 1 hour+ from the closest vestige of civilization. That's definitely the middle of f'in nowhere. I don't even see how driving to Springer, Raton or Cimarron or what, Wagon Wheel would help much. It sounds like it was a poorly organized production in general.
Okay, good point, many other things went wrong with the protocol. I've had other discussions where I speculated that they could just use CGI to fill in the gun parts and it would seem about as realistic given the level of capability that has these days, but people have said the trend these days is for 'realism' in gun battles in movies.
It's basically still cheaper to hire one props person or armorer than a whole vfx team. To do good vfx there's a nessisary on site component and people react more realistically to actual weapon recoil and timing meaning less takes.
Realistically out of all the ways to die or even be injured in film guns are super rare. There have been three gun deaths in the past 40 years of filming and Rust is the first after all the gun safety changes that were made after the death of Brendan Lee on the Crow. The most common ways to die involves falling from a height over 3 ft, mishaps around vehicles and electrical shocks.
The industry is also super interconnected. If someone dies anywhere in the US or Canada on a film set union or not the news is known in every corner of film in about 3 hours.
Yes, I know the list of things that kinda-sorta-shoulda happened. That's really my point, though. How can a production big enough to star Alec Baldwin and other union actors be able to run with non-union armory and such piss poor procedures?
We know that the whole safety procedures from top to bottom were rotten. So putting criminal blame on one person doesn't ring honest. How can we know the whole story if everyone is trying to cover their tracks to not land in prison? The people with meaningful authority on set failed, and I'm not convinced that this armorer truly had the authority to shut down production on safety grounds.
Procedural changes might be mandating that productions need armorers who are then protected from dismissal if things get dangerous, so they can stop productions etc. But nothing will change this time, since we have found someone to blame.
Here is what it is. The name of the star isn't important. Union people are not barred from being on non-union productions. I have had my union card over a decade and I have worked non union on occasion. What the difference is is how much of the liability is sunk by the Producers.
On a union show at any point there is a hotline I can call where a team from the Directors Guild, IATSE and the Teamsters can show up and stop production flat. That's on a union show. If it's a big studio there's a studio hotline that I can call who will check Producers because they protect their investments by enforcing standards.
If you have neither and you front the money and make the decisions at the top and have no regulatory body to which your employees can take their concerns to mitigate the responsibility to then you THE PRODUCER assume the liability for failure to provide a safe work environment. Alec Baldwin among other things is a Producer. He may have forgot that his job is an an employer and not an employee but the law fucking hasn't.
Yeah, if people are taking falls, Baldwin needs to take one. I am shocked that Halls got 6 mo suspended, too, as he was previously fired after another unexpected discharge among other complaints.
Non-union shows can be a bit of a nightmare for safety because Producers don't have the checks on power they should. Calling foul using government outsider jobsite regulators comes with potential costs of losing your job and blacklisting you with the other powerful people affiliated with production because Producers don't want to be bothered. Going out into the middle of nowhere where it's hard to get someone from OSHA to show up while something fuckity is actively happening is another layer of complexity.
Just like any other kind of work you don't get burned by liability and manslaughter charges until the bad thing actually happens. Union Film is one of the most regimented workplaces you're ever likely to encounter. Non-union projects though run the gamut. Anyone can fund them, they can be any size and they can be staffed with anything from people untrained in industry standard to folks with decades of experience. The wise thing for a Producer to do is to cover their ass by staffing with people who will enforce good safety standards but end of day if an aspirant first time Producer on a non-union show wants to hire all newbies there no immediate recourse. It's no different than if an employer at a regular job hires someone unqualified to do a dangerous job. It is the threat of it coming back to bite you in the ass that keeps you honest.
It's not like the airline industry. Shows pop up, they incorporate, they shoot then they completely dissolve and disappear within the space of as little as a couple of months and everyone goes back to shopping around for the next gig. Every non-union show is a tiny little bubble. If individuals don't face consequences things will never get better because there's no real cohesive industry after a certain point of the non-union world. Like if you work one of those things it's because you knew somebody who personally asked you to be on show as a personal favor or you're trying to upgrade your category or get started and show up on a word of mouth recommendation with promises of gaining experience and access to a group of people with money, wild aspirations and enough connections with techs or excitable talented amateurs to make something happen that may pay off further down the line.
The whole damn thing is rubber bands and handshakes.
Nahh. I watched the trial, this is a clear case of criminal negligence. The set was a mess, everything was rushed, someone died. There are dozens of gun heavy sets every months accross the US, yet people dont die. The producers and the armorer are responsible for gun safety on the set, they failes, they need to be held accountable.
I'm pretty sure there are already procedures and those include never having real guns on a set. If you do have real guns on a set (why would you ever have real guns on a set) they should be physically separated, and visually distinct.
Of course the real solution would just be to never have real guns on a set which of course is rule one that she broke. They didn't need real guns, they had them there for no reason that's why she's guilty because she was doing a stupid thing for no good reason.
There's a bunch of things that should never happen. No real guns on set. No live ammo ever near those guns. No removing guns from set. No pointing guns at people. All the procedures getting skipped when a new person holds a prop.
By blaming a person and one element of it, we leave everything else as it was and more accidents will eventually happen. Sooner or later a studio will want a non-union armorer that they can boss around again, who won't have the authority to push back on things, and if we don't learn now then it can all repeat.
Yo, all that shit exists and was presented in the trial. Lmao.
I feel like a slap on the wrist would just incentivize this sort of behavior.
I think what they mean is it would bring about change across the entire industry to prevent this type of thing from happening regardless of who's in charge.
There are already industry standards to point to the left or right of the target when firing on set, there are already strict procedures and guides for actors and armorers both. This event happened due to multiple levels of gross negligence. To say "only prosecute for malicious intent" is just legalizing murder.
Yeah, I didn't say I agree too much with the concept, especially with the way airline safety has been pretty sketchy nowadays.
Agreed, that would be a more just system. I suspect the procedure in this case came down to tedium like the class and terms of the insurance policies held by studios, towing the chain of liability. But also IIRC aviation law is surprisingly broad in scope, so it’s likely apples and oranges.