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Prosecutors say Alec Baldwin was ‘engaged in horseplay’ with gun before fatal shooting
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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There's no good reason to use a functional gun in film and theater, change my mind.
The only reason to do it is verisimilitude, and that's not compelling because a fake is easy enough to acquire/create.
In 2024 having a real firearm on set is unconscionable. Especially without a proper armorist. This was not only avoidable, but the situation shouldn’t have even presented itself.
It also only matters at all because of people banging on about "this movie was set in 1935, but the down-bent charging handle on gun X wasn't introduced until 1941". Which will still happen, anyway, and it's not a good enough reason to have real firearms on set.
Actors miming shooting looks ridiculous. Like laser tag guns. Actual recoil looks much more realistic.
❌When the recoil looks fake
✔️Action hero only ever gets shot in shoulder despite thousands of rounds shot at them, bullets used by bad guys never hollow point
The must be a way to create "false" gun in the sense that they only takes blanks and have nonfunctional barrels. Or I'm I too optimistic?
Unfortunately, guns are deceptively simple. Just about anything that can detonate a realistic looking blank is capable of firing an actual bullet. And even if it's just a blank, any obstruction in the barrel can end up becoming an ad-hoc projectile by the force. Every once in a while, you have that happen in Civil War re-enactments.
Thats also how Brandon Lee died. Iirc there was a squib malfunction that they didn't notice so when they shot a blank, the round was pushed out and killed him.
We could get around this by having specific calibers that only come in blanks.
Not really though because still, if anything is in the barrel, it becomes a projectile.
Ok but that's a separate issue and something that can happen with a regular gun loaded with a regular caliber blank, what they're saying is fake guns for movies should use a caliber for which no bullets exist, solving the main part of the issue, i.e. the fact that someone can load a normal bullet in a gun that is to be used as a prop.
This would help avoid this specific death, but not most others where the projectile wasn't an actual bullet from a live round, but something stuck in the barrel, like the other person says.
This situation was unusual in the sense that an incompetent armorer had live rounds on set, and the gun was loaded with one.
What I mean is that the main part of the issue is exactly not this.
If the armorer wasn't willfully negligent it wouldn't be a problem. Not a problem for the vast majority of film sets. Just pure lack of professionalism from the armorer whose sole core responsibility is to ensure safety.
if Baldwin wasn't waiving a gun around like a moron, a negligent armorer wouldn't have been a problem, either.
the armorer being negligent (and she was), doesn't mean that Baldwin wasn't also being negligent. and lets be perfectly clear: the reason Gutierrez-Reed was hired over other more professional armorers is precisely because she was "less professional"- or more bluntly, because she was willing to not insist on proper safety protocols that caused delays in shooting.
Woah woah woah. Baldwin should be allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants with a prop gun. If an armorer gives him a gun on a set, why would he reasonably believe it was able to hurt or kill someone?
If an actor is given a prop pipe bomb, and he throws it at a cast member in jest and it explodes...because the explosive expert gave him a live explosive why the fuck is that the actors fault?
Why is is Alec's fault he was horsing around with what effectively should have been a toy. It should have been a fancy cap gun at worst.
because it's a fucking weapon. he knew it was a weapon.
secondly, it was Hall (another producer) that gave him the weapon, not HGR.
thirdly, you don't fuck around with even the non-firing propguns precisely because of how easy it is to mistake them. He fucked around, and Alyna Hutchins found out. Ergo, it's negligent homicide
Hate to say it, but I agree here.
This is the price paid for not treating real guns with respect. Prop bullets or otherwise.
Wouldn't the live round have shot someone no matter what? The point of a blank round is so you can aim a gun at someone and not kill them.
Uhm.
That’s not how Blanks work
And even if there is some how no wadding They can still be lethal
You cannot render a functional weapon (blank firing or “real” or whatever you want to call it,) totally safe.
Which is why you should always treat them as something that will kill you given half the chance. (It was literally made to do just that.)
And you should always treat look alikes as if they were real because a) they’re easy to mistake for real ones and vice versa and b) the other people may not realize it’s a prop. (On a movie set, unlikely, but you never know who’s around and how they will respond. Or where an active shooter is going to appear.)
As for the cartridges, usually there’s tell tales of one sort or another. For dummy rounds it’s common to press the otherwise empty cartridge with a ball bearing or two so they rattle when shaken. Sometimes they also have a small hole on the wall of the casing
Blanks are, by their nature, lacking the bullet and the top is simply crimped to hold the wadding.
All it would have taken was a proper inspection to verify that it was unloaded/loaded with dummy rounds. Or, alternatively, Baldwin not pointing it at people.
Which leads me to the final thing you should always do: check the damn weapon. Don’t trust armorers. They’re people, too. They make mistakes, they fuck up.
Can I ask what the point of this screed was? I'm aware blanks are dangerous. That's irrelevant. There was a real bullet in the chamber. At some point, even if it was a blank, it would have been pointed at someone and the trigger pulled.
The point appears to be "check the damn weapon", which of course you could have said without 'educating' me, and wouldn't have been undercut with going on endlessly about wadding.
That point is a terrible one because the armourer is the expert, and is the one who should be signing the gun off as safe every time it is opened, not an actor who neither is required to have qualifications nor skills in clearing a gun as safe. If an actor interferes with the weapon, the armourer has to check it again.
HGR definitely didn't do right here but a lot more went wrong. This was a perfect storm of negligence. Multiple people could have taken minor stands to have prevented this tragic tale. So many people spoke out and zero action was taken to address their concerns.
A layered safety approach is a great idea. But it only works when at least one person in a position to do so does what's right.
Wasn't Baldwin at some level responsible for the armorer though too? Was he the producer or something?
In Blade Runner 2049, Weta Workshop had their laser pistols set up with a solenoid that moved back and forth with a trigger pull. Adam Savage looked at them in a Tested video. I don't know if it's cost prohibitive, but it sure seemed like the right way to do it.
However, you don't get smoke with that. You can definitely rig something up as they did it with a knock off nerf blaster in the 80's or even a cap gun, but at some point I assume the level of complexity makes modifying a real gun cheaper.
You could weld shut the barrel of a gun, which is what a lot of them do, but it seems like it's a cost cutting measure when they used real guns that would retain their value. Alec (as a producer) used a cheap setup with a cheap armorer that didn't know what they were doing. It's both of their faults.
Man, I am a cinema buff and I just really don't think I care if the smoke is there at all, much less just right. Obviously botched attempts at realism are another matter entirely but this just seems like an area ripe for creativity and artistic reinterpretation.
Point is, we cede ground to the theater of the mind all the time, I don't know why realistic gunfire can't be treated similarly, and I think the lack of verisimilitude itself could be approached many different ways and that's even kind of exciting.
Smoke is easy to add in post. Muzzle flash is a little bit harder but also of course very possible.
A blank killed Brandon Lee while filming The Crow.
Although I don't know the details admittedly.
It was a blank that was fired, but there was a bullet lodged in the barrel from a previous firing they had done using improperly handled prop rounds.
The force from the blank ejected the round into him. :(
Here's the background on the only other two deaths that occured on-set: Brandon Lee and Jon-Erik Hexum.
https://www.looper.com/640645/every-tragic-movie-set-death-caused-by-prop-guns/
Modify the dang things so they can’t take real ammo. Make it keyed somehow or odd shaped. Problem solved.
This particular gun was an actual period gun, so it could prevent the use of the gun if it needed to be modified. But honestly, just like there wasn't a real helicopter in films besides stock footage or military footage the production company didn't film, because accidentally killing three actors two of whom were children being illegally treated, was enough for studios to forbid it, the people who've been shot accidentally on film should really make everyone unwilling to use anything but a prop that is explicitly and legally not at all a gun in any way.
But we all know the old adage:
Guns don't kill people, helicopters do.
It’s funny I recently bumped into a guy who is a gunsmith and worked in Hollywood sets before so we talked about this. There are reasons to have a fully functional gun on set and the different rounds they use on set because there are a bunch of different types depending on the scene and lighting. They use different charges for different shots and a bunch of other things. Especially if it’s a practical effects movie.
The issue is making sure live ammo is not on set or around the guns on set. If you have access to these guns you can use them after filming is done with live rounds.
Alex trusted the people around him to do their jobs and they didn’t make it a safe set. This is like flipping the keys to Dodge Hellcat to your 15 1/2 year old son with a learners driving permit and his 18 year old friend riding shotgun. It’s not a good idea. They should be driving Kia Sportage.
With all the money spent on films, I'm amazed there isn't regulated "Hollywood" caliber firearms. Something incapable of chambering anything on the market, and only functions with the certified blanks.
Something akin to the way fake currency is controlled.
I mean, cool idea, but that would severely limit the available choices for types of firearms.
I dont know. I think there could be an inventory of replicas. You can get a 1911 in multiple calibers already, as you can many revolver frames. There's no reason they couldn't make custom ones.
Except my understanding is Baldwin would be the Hellcat owner in this case. He was the producer and the film hired a company to handle the guns that was known to have issues and be irresponsible. I'm not intimately familiar with the case but from what I remember he was being reckless with that choice and it sounds like he was being reckless with the gun as well.
Real, sure. But functional, no. Sometimes, for authenticity's sake or just for cost reasons, it may make sense to use a real firearm for a scene. However, it should always be modified so that it cannot be loaded or fired. There are plenty of ways to do this without affecting the appearance of the gun, and skipping that is just pure negligence.