248
Jury finds 'Rust' armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed guilty of involuntary manslaughter
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
248 points (97.7% liked)
Movies and TV Shows
2114 readers
31 users here now
A community for entertainment industry news and general discussion about movies and TV shows.
Rules:
- Be civil.
- Please do not link to pirated content.
- No spoilers in the title of submissions. And please use spoiler MarkDown in the body of discussions. This is a courtesy to other users.
- Comments solely criticizing headlines and/or journalism will be removed for being off-topic.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.