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”.
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.
We could get around this by having specific calibers that only come in blanks.
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.
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/
Some guns are modified in that way for movies. They are still potentially dangerous. Blanks can harm someone close enough or accidentally propel something lodged in the barrel.
I know some pistols have a co2 blow back system that you can install on your gun so you can practice drawing and dry firing without fear of damaging the gun or hurting people. The only one I know of is for glocks but I’m sure a company could make them for more models.
At that point one should should buy the gas blowback replica that the manufacturer licensed for airsoft. It’ll have identical wright and balance, the trigger can usually be tuned to match, and it’ll dry fire with about half recoil. It’ll plink on target at 40’ once the hop-up is calibrated. Should be a modest $150-250 for common Glock, Sig, etc.
Yeah, you would think you could just change the chambers and bullets so only a certain standard of blanks would fit in it, although I guess those guns would become more expensive than the real mass produced ones.
Either way, this is all the result of Baldwin as executive producer cheaping out on every aspect of this shoot, causing this to happen.
If you shot a blank in a gun with a plugged barrel the gun would explode. A blank is just a round minus the projectile, it has just as much “push” from the powder as a real round does.
I know there at least used to be gas powered airsoft guns that had minor ‘recoil.’ I don’t know if there’s anything particular about them that makes them bad for filming, maybe just the lack of real force on the shooters wrist/shoulder.
What recoil? They are shooting blanks. There is no mass leaving the gun. If you want to cycle the gun on trigger pull in a realistic yet safe way, compressed CO2 can be used. Some movie guns are even electrically/magnetically actuated.
I mean 5-10 grams of vaporized gunpowder leaves the barrel at fairly high speed. It’s not a lead round but it’s not nothing. Also the spent brass being ejected is not easy to CGI convincingly.
Good points. The gun would have to cycle with CO2 or magnets and feed from a magazine empty casings so that the ejector continues to do its job.
Yet so many movies just add the sound of casings hitting the ground so I wonder if the hassle is worth it except for some specific shots. I enjoy the realism but I’d rather people not put their lives needlessly at risk.
You do know how physics works, right? There is an explosion in the chamber that moves the slide/bolt backward to rack another round of course there will be recoil. Have you ever fired a black powder gun with no bullet in it? There is still a recoil.
I’ve fired a lot of blanks in my life. The recoil is nowhere near a live round.
You can only get that with real rounds though. Blanks are not causing that recoil effect.
We gotta sometimes kill a bunch of people on set, because americans need their religion represented correctly
