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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This was always a political bag of bullshit. They even had to fund it as a special prosecution with legislation, going so far as to assign a special prosecutor that happened to also be a state Republican legislator.
The gymnastics people keep using to align blame for manslaughter onto Bladwin have slowly become accepted as if it is factual like propaganda is meant to do.
Yeah been following the rust cases closely.
Kari Morrissey was the one who secured the conviction for Hannah Gutierrez Reid.
Important things to note for Alec Baldwin's case: he's got more money and resources for his defense. There's a bunch of high class attorneys that entered appearance for Baldwin. But he has 2 major problems: those attorneys are not from new Mexico. A good lawyer knows the law and a great lawyer knows the judge. Additionally, he is known for being bad at safety and security. That was already becoming clear in HGR's trial. But legally things are bad as well: he held the weapon. Now in other states that doesn't make him more culpable than HGR, but in new Mexico basically everyone holding a weapon is held accountable for the consequences of whatever they do while holding the weapon. This, together with what I would predict are looking like pretty bad facts for him rn, is an indication that he has a steep climb to make, unless Morrissey fucks up in a major way.
Pretty solid summarization of the situation. I definitely think that Baldwin's on site safety problems and the seemingly rushed nature of production are going to bite him.
I think lying about pulling the trigger will become an issue as well.
but in new Mexico basically everyone holding a weapon is held accountable for the consequences of whatever they do while holding the weapon
Which is how it should be.
Remember that this occured during a strike, and Baldwin brought in scabs to fill the positions, and then pushed one of those scabs to be the fallguy, despite baldwin being both the one in the position of power, and the one who fired the gun without checking it was loaded.
It's not the actor's job to check if a prop is a functional weapon. They have other things to be focusing on.
But since he hired the people and set the policies, he's still responsible.
It is the job of anyone handling a firearm to handle it in a safe and responsible manner.
You don’t get to pull “not my job” when you were holding the firearm that killed someone.
Especially since the normal on set was so far below the industry standard - a fact I would expect somebody with is broad and extensive experience to know as a qualified actor.
He had a duty of care to check the weapon and to handle it safely and he didn’t.
He had a duty of care to not point a fucking lethal weapon at people, and he did.
(This is in addition to potential liability as a producer and a duty of care to ensure workplace safety.)
It is the job of anyone handling a dangerous object to handle it safely. If they can't, they shouldn't.
The point of an armorer on set is that they ensure that the guns aren't dangerous. The typical rules about "don't aim at something you don't want to destroy" doesn't apply in a movie because otherwise all the action sequences would look dumb with people firing wildly at the ground. How stupid would it look if John Wick shoots at the floor and blood spurts out of the guys face.
That said, anyone who hires a scab armorer gets what they pay for and deserve to be prosecuted.