Fewer than three weeks before actor Alec Baldwin is due to go on trial in Santa Fe, New Mexico, prosecutors have said that he “engaged in horseplay with the revolver”, including firing a blank round at a crew member on the set of Rust before the tragic accident occurred.
Baldwin is facing involuntary manslaughter charges in the 2021 shooting death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
In new court documents, prosecutors said they plan to bring new evidence to support their case that the 66-year-old actor and producer was reckless with firearms while filming on the set and displayed “erratic and aggressive behavior during the filming” that created potential safety concerns.
Prosecutors in the case, which is due to go to trial on 10 July, have previously alleged that to watch Baldwin’s conduct on the set of Rust “is to witness a man who has absolutely no control of his own emotions and absolutely no concern for how his conduct affects those around him”.
In the latest filing, special prosecutors Kari Morrissey and Erlinda Johnson allege that Baldwin pointed his gun and fired “a blank round at a crew member while using that crew member as a line of site as his perceived target”.
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.
It’s stupidly easy to check a firearm. You don’t have to be an expert to do it. For most fire arms it takes 5-10 seconds.
A large part of the “experts” job is to know what is and is not safe protocol, and to enforce it. Part of that includes teaching everyone who’s handling a weapon how to…. Handle a weapon safely.
no question, the armorer fucked up. She’s human. Humans make mistakes. Which is why you check the damn weapon, too. An expert doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes. An expert means they’ve made enough they should know better. (Or have learned from an older expert.)
Frist off, it is also the actors’ job to ensure the gun is safe. He should have been there when the gun was checked and verified it for himself especially when he purposely hired a fuck around and find out armourer.
Secondly, how were they supposed to know your level of knowledge about firearms and ammunition? With them explaining stuff in a simple and quick manner, we are all now operating on the same level of basic knowledge about this, so there should not be any miscommunications going on.
I agree. Both equally guilty.
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.
Hutchins took one of those stands filing a union complaint about the safety violations, how tinfoily you wanna get?
Wasn’t Baldwin at some level responsible for the armorer though too? Was he the producer or something?
He was a producer but that’s a meaningless title handed out to anyone who will front a little money or indeed sometimes just give some advice.
A producer has more input than that. An executive producer is what you’re talking about I’m pretty sure.
also, significantly gayer.