Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever

[Roz]

Armorers are, however, expected to fully display the gun's unarmed status to the actor as part of handing it off, and the actor should always be visually confirming that themselves when receiving a weapon. The point isn't that the actor would be the responsible party if the gun was loaded when they were told it wasn't, but that everything should be checked and double-checked and triple-checked at every stage of the process.

Weapons literally are only supposed to leave the armorer's person when they're being handed directly to the actor using them. They don't go through third parties. The armorer is literally wearing the guns when they're keeping things on set to be used in scenes, until they're ready to be locked up again. That's why, yeah, pro armorers are so incredibly shocked at the sequence of events being described on the Rust set, because it's so wildly out of touch with very standard safety measures.

Alec Baldwin as an actor is not directly responsible for the gun being loaded. But Alec Baldwin as a producer holds some responsibility for the overall state of a set wherein accidents had already happened and union crew members had walked off the set due to safety concerns.

[GreenFlashlight]

Oh, I hadn't heard he's a producer. Then yeah, he owns more of the blame than I thought he did.

[Catsnake]

https://nypost.com/2021/10/27/rust-armorer-hannah-gutierrez-reed-tied-to-friends-death/

[Macha]

@catsnake Yeah, but this has nothing to do with what happened on the set.

this is stupid kids, getting drunk, and doing something dumb. Was she wrong to give her boyfriend the keys? Obviously. It was dumb to let either of them ride. But she may have been drunk too, who knows.

[Aria]

@faraday said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

@greenflashlight said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

@aria I forget if someone else already said this, but the argument against actors being responsible for gun safety is they're not trained professionals. Every movie set has, or at least is supposed to have, two trained, licensed professionals who check every firearm to be used in a scene prior to the cameras rolling, to check that it's loaded with blanks and to announce loudly to the whole set that the gun is either live or not. Adding that responsibility to the actor, who almost certainly is not accredited, just creates another way for the system to break by adding an amateur to a system designed for professionals. I tend to support this position, from my own anecdotal experience with systems that have lots of redundancy.

Exactly. It would be like a novice skydiver taking apart their parachute to try and make sure it's been packed properly. You don't want that; you want them to rely on the expert whose literal job it is to make sure the equipment is safe.

An actor isn't going to understand the subtle differences between dummy rounds (which can't shoot and just look like real bullets), blanks (which have dangerous gunpowder but no bullet) and real live bullets.

I have no experience with the film business myself, but many pro armorers have spoken out in interviews about their own on-set safety procedures since the incident. The gulf between what they describe and the stories coming out of the Rust set can only be summarized as: "OMG WTF was going on in that set??"

@GreenFlashlight @faraday Yeah, that's why I started my post with the caveat that I realize this doesn't quite apply to movie sets. The parameters are different. You are very much, by the nature of what you're using the prop gun to do -- simulate firing a live weapon, likely at someone -- ignoring one of the very basic rules of gun safety.

As @roz has pointed out a big part of the armorer's job is to fulfill that basic safety check with the actor. This is specifically because of the subtle differences between live rounds, dummy rounds, and blanks -- the latter of which are both used on movie sets, albeit for different reasons. The demonstrating the "unarmed" status, whichever definition is being used in the scenario, is supposed to be the equivalent of checking to make sure it's not loaded.

So my point was not "actors should be responsible for maintaining gun safety on set", so much as me sitting here going "Jesus Christ. If I, a complete amateur who actually has zero interest of my own in guns, knows better than what the supposed professionals were doing on this set, what the fuck is wrong with these people? How did they have this job? This is literally the great big thing it's their entire job to make sure doesn't happen."

[GreenFlashlight]

@aria I suppose I was arguing with my own conscience rather than you, because while I genuinely do see and mostly agree with the idea that relying on Alec Baldwin to possess knowledge outside of his profession is a recipe for tragedy, I was raised with an almost superstitious fear of guns that leads me to think an actor who's going to be playing with them like they're toys should make time to learn how these murder-engines work. I'm not saying everyone should go through a Keanu-level Quantico training regime, but, like, mandatory safety training or something with a written test at the end, you know?

[mietze]

If real firearms are allowed to be part of production (there's no reason for them to be) then bluntly i think it is every handlers responsibility to know basic gun safety and to at least do the final check themselves.

It is a hard way to learn that lesson, but if the choice is made to use firearms that should be the price of admission.

What happened was negligent. I dont think Baldwin is absolved of it, but I doubt he will be charged with anything more than minor slap on the wrist stuff (if he is at all).

I also wish that there were more universal and transparent rules around this but there's not. Sp this will happen again.

People negligently kill their children frequently with unattended/unsecured/improperly stored firearms and they're not usually charged with anything unless they meet certain qualifiers which none of the people involved in this incident meet.

I do think though that Baldwin and the company and that armorer are going to get the shit sued out of them in a civil court and I cannot say that I think that's bad.

[faraday]

@greenflashlight said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

I'm not saying everyone should go through a Keanu-level Quantico training regime, but, like, mandatory safety training or something with a written test at the end, you know?

But they do get safety training on how to handle firearms on set. It's just that the industry has decided that it's safer to train them to rely on the experts than to try to manage the guns themselves. The issue here isn't really an absence of established industry safety policies and training, but an apparent failure to adhere to them.

To go back to my skydiver analogy - all skydivers receive some safety training, but packing parachutes requires a specialized level of training that not everyone has. Those who don't rely on the experts. There are safety procedures involved in doing so, presumably involving double and triple-checking everything. Now if some parachute-packer fails to follow those well-established safety procedures and someone dies, that's obviously tragic. There should be an investigation to see what exactly went wrong and what can be done to keep it from happening again. But a knee-jerk reaction of "well just expect everybody to pack their own parachutes" is probably the wrong way to go, safety-wise. That's how I feel about expecting actors to be able to check for themselves what kind of ammo a gun is loaded with.

Of course, nothing stops the actor from raising a red flag if they see other people on set failing to adhere to said safety procedures. Claudia Black has a nice Twitter Thread talking about that.

[GreenFlashlight]

@faraday Right. I'm implying that I want every actor to have the same training and responsibility as the armorer, but I'm not suggesting that because I am aware that implication comes from an irrational dread drilled into me since childhood; if that makes any sense at all. My actual proposal would be more akin to learning what the different kinds of bullets look like so the actor has a greater chance of spotting them, especially in a revolver...

...but even as I say that, I imagine some poor actor putting a slug in their eye socket while checking the cylinder instead of leaving it in the hands of a true professional.

As you can tell, I am struggling with this one. Most likely, I'm trying to make myself feel safe by pretending I can contribute a helpful solution to an intractable problem.

[Roz]

@greenflashlight said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

@faraday Right. I'm implying that I want every actor to have the same training and responsibility as the armorer, but I'm not suggesting that because I am aware that implication comes from an irrational dread drilled into me since childhood; if that makes any sense at all. My actual proposal would be more akin to learning what the different kinds of bullets look like so the actor has a greater chance of spotting them, especially in a revolver...

From the responses I've seen from armorers and actors about the incident, under standard safety parameters, actors do learn these differences in their training under the armorer, and that's part of the process of the armorer showing them the contents of the gun every time they hand it over for a shot.

In the Rust incident, they failed pretty much all the standard safety measures.

[BetterNow]

This just in. Another reason to adore "The Rock".

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/04/entertainment/dwanye-the-rock-johnson-no-guns-movie-sets/index.html

[Arkandel]

@betternow I agree about the Rock, but he's also in a position to be both in charge of and impacted by the risk himself.

Most actors and most producers are one or the other. They are either the ones in front of guns and hope no one shoots them in the face with live ammo and little control over it, or they're trying to speed up production and cut costs with no direct stakes in the game.

[BetterNow]

@arkandel Yep, and he's all the better for this because it affects his money directly, paying more to do gunfire in post-production instead of using blanks on a set.

[Ganymede]

@betternow said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

Yep, and he's all the better for this because it affects his money directly, paying more to do gunfire in post-production instead of using blanks on a set.

It also works for him because most of his stuff is usually hand-to-hand anyway.

[faraday]

@greenflashlight said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

As you can tell, I am struggling with this one. Most likely, I'm trying to make myself feel safe by pretending I can contribute a helpful solution to an intractable problem.

Yeah I get it. Whenever a tragedy strikes it's our nature to try and problem solve.

For me, anyway, the existing industry safety procedures seem pretty darn robust when actually followed. It's really really hard to imagine how you're going to improve safety by making actors with minimal firearms training do anything more than hold the gun and pull the trigger under the careful supervision of an expert.

Sadly, even the best safety procedures can falter in the face of epic negligence and/or incompetence on the part of the people responsible for implementing them. That's when people get hurt.

Interesting, from variety:

Both Merrick and Corrie [prop experts] say that actors are not required to sign off on firearms being empty. Instead they must focus on their performance, rather than be distracted by gun safety rules that aren’t their expertise.

“I really need to reiterate that the actors have a focus on their dialogue and their emotion and where they got to stand on their lighting and how to react to the other actor,” Merrick said. “Their head is full. And in order for an actor to be fully vested in a performance, they need to have confidence in their surroundings. They need to be able to stand firmly and know that the wall is not going to fall down on their head, they need to know that the gun that they’re being handed is ready to go and it’s safe and it’s not going to hurt anybody.”

Also interesting is Legal Eagle's take on the whole mess.

[Arkandel]

@faraday said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

It's really really hard to imagine how you're going to improve safety by making actors with minimal firearms training do anything more than hold the gun and pull the trigger under the careful supervision of an expert.

And people (at least online) seem either entirely unsympathetic or entirely unreasonable with their expectations.

A thread I was reading lately insisted that it was the responsibility of an actor 'as long as the gun was in their hand' to individually check and go through all the gun safety steps regardless of what the armorer said.

That's all well and fine but they are actors. They are not necessarily trained. And on top of that they are playing a role at the time; their mindset can be set to playing a panicked person or an angry killer who happens to be armed. It's not easy to suspend all that for a minute, meticulously go through the firearm then slip back into character.

[Roz]

I think that the act of the armorer showing the actor (and other crew) exactly what's loaded in the gun is actually less about an actor's responsibility for being a final safety insurance and more about giving the other people working peace of mind so that they can do their jobs effectively. Safety in this regards falls to the armorer and the AD, but it's part of the armorer's job to demonstrate the exact status of the firearm in use so that those who could potentially be hurt can verify with their own eyes and feel safe. (And I do believe that any actor who is handling a firearm on a normal set is getting training enough to at least recognize the forms of ammunition being used, what they're looking at when the armorer demonstrates the gun's status, etc.)

[Catsnake]

@macha Not directly but it shows a history of irresponsibility and bad decision making.

[Macha]

@catsnake One mistake, that she let someone else borrow her bike when she shouldn't have? When she had possibly been drinking?

I'm pretty sure a lot of us have done dumb things under 25, while intoxicated.

[insomniac7809]

So, a few days late to this one, but coming in to drop my $0.02.

Which is, mostly, that a lot of the (well-intentioned) ideas people seem to be having are, kindly, counterproductive.

Relying on actors to do the final checks on firearm safety means taking the final responsibility for set safety from (what should be) a trained professional working in their field of expertise to someone in a completely different field who might be getting some on-set training. And I'm sorry, but that is a terrible idea. Firearms would not be made more safe by having unqualified third parties who have other significant time and attention pressures messing with the dedicated professionals' safety measures on the last step before their use. That's not just unhelpful, it's actively irresponsible, to the tune of "voids the production's insurance" if they would even try. (There's a reason the last people to touch the fireworks are the pyrotechnics experts, not Gene Simmons.)

Actors might need to point guns at other actors. They might need to be seen loading bullets into a gun on-camera. They might need to act the part of someone irresponsibly handling a firearm. They might need to stick the barrel of a gun in their own mouths and pull the trigger. They need to be able to know that when the actual professionals hand them a cold gun, that gun is actually cold, so they can do their jobs because the other people involved did theirs.

From the looks of things, the armorer on Rust never should have had the job. So that is the one place Baldwin might be responsible. Even that I'd put as something of an open question; "Producer" is a notoriously vague role, that can mean anything from "final decision on every point" to "cut a check before the start of production."