Alec Baldwin shooting

[anton pulisov]

Wow, I knew I was exaggerating when I said "every second person" but it seems I was not exaggerating by that much.

[anton pulisov]

Wasn't Baldwin one of the producers of the film? So even assuming a total accident, he could be in a world of shit.

Rumors that the union workers walked out the day before the incident due to shitty working conditions. Would that have included the gun safety expert, I wonder.

[ursus arctos]

Probably not, but there may not have been an expert, given the budget and chaos.

I recommend reading the LA Times article linked in a tweet on the last page.

[WOM]

This was a feature film with a 21 day shoot. Most features are 70 days. That, and cutting lots of corners, is how you make a seriously low budget film.

[ursus arctos]

I wonder if they skimped on insurance

[Sam]

So when working to a budget for a film that's going to involve letting off (even dummy) firearms, the person who ensures the firearms are safe to be let off is considered one of the expendable jobs? I'd have thought that even when the budget's really tight the one person you always want to make sure you've got the money for is the one who ensures no one ends up getting shot to death.

Still, regardless of the rumours and the (rightful) criticisms and his reputation for being difficult to work with at times, I've been wondering during the day what's been going through Alec Baldwin's mind. Even if through the magic of cinema he's actually not legally on the hook for any of it (which seems unlikely), he's still got to live with having done it for the rest of his life. It pales in comparison with being one of the victim's family or close friends, of course, but still.

[Toby Gymshorts]

I wonder if they skimped on insurance

Almost certainly.

[Hot Pepsi]

I suspect it was one of those things where everything was rushed to save time, because time is money, and these things are incredibly unlikely so it just got overlooked.

[Jon]

Reports coming out that Baldwin was handed a gun and told that it was safe.

A tragic story. I am reminded of the story of Spain's Juan Carlos I shooting his younger brother by accident when they were both teenagers. Hopefully something good will come out of this and regulations will be tightened.

[ursus arctos]

A very thorough thread from a film armorer

https://twitter.com/sl_huang/status/1451797888158375937?s=21

[Satchmo Distel]

How much of a dilemma do the police or coroner have? Would corporate manslaughter be considered or is it going to be filed as an accident?

[ursus arctos]

Potential charges aren't for either the police or coroner.

They are for the local prosecutors.

The more serious financial threat is the inevitable string of civil lawsuits for wrongful death, et al.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I just can't understand why any prop gun on a film set would have any need to have live rounds in. At all. As opposed to blanks. Why indeed even have live ammo anywhere near the set, so as to avoid even the faintest possibility of a tragic error? But I know nothing about films, or guns, so hey.

[WOM]

My assumption would be that any movie with gunplay - and this is a western, remember - would have scenes with real bullets hitting real things. Think windows, or wood buildings or tin cans lined up along a fence rail. So the bullets would be somewhere on set, under the care of a trained armorer. Once they are present, the opportunity for an error is now there too.

[scratchmonkey]

Per that thread posted by Ursus, they don't use real bullets on sets for those things you're talking about. Too much of a safety risk. They'd use blanks and then small charges on where the bullets would be hitting.

On-set armorers may well refer to blanks as "live" or "hot" ammunition, because that's the only thing you're supposed to be using on-set, which may be part of the confusion surrounding what happened here.

[Satchmo Distel]

This reminds me of an old minor irritation of mine: Any scene with bullets hitting tin cans always looks like a charge has exploded under the can. The can jumps up instead of flying off in the direction you'd expect. But in hindsight that small loss of realism may have saved lives.

[Patrick Thistle]

A thought about this. Some shows are now banning "live guns" on sets. But why have guns at all? It just seems so normal for guns to be involved in American TV shows and films. Even if they don't need to be.

[Antepli Ejderha]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/202...droidApp_Other


"Rust assistant director who gave Alec Baldwin gun ‘was subject of 2019 safety complaint’
Prop maker Maggie Goll says she raised complaints about Dave Halls in TV series Into the Dark but that issue is ‘in no way one person’s fault’"

[WOM]

Apparently the crew were burning off some downtime the morning of the incident by 'plinking' - shooting beer cars off a fence rail - using live rounds and 'prop' guns.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/10/26/entert...day/index.html

[Amor de Cosmos]

Really good CBC interview this morning with a senior props manager. He implied that this tragedy was almost inevitable at some point given the way film production works these days. Part of this is down to the speed of production, driven largely by streaming services. There's just no time to prepare properly, almost everything is done on the fly. As senior armorer he would check guns a minimum of four times, once (at least) on his own, once with the director, once with the actor who has to fire it, again with the senior production manager. That rarely happens now, except on movies with a massive budget.

Secondly mentoring among film crews has disappeared. He worked for years with just a couple of production managers. Watched everything they did, then imitated it under their supervision. Tacit learning, can't be beat. Now, he says, someone can be a production assistant one week and senior armorer the next.

[ursus arctos]

I have heard similar, though the driving factor for the obscene haste here seems to have been cost rather than the demands of streaming services

What I don't understand is why, if you are "forced" to do something in a third of the usual time, you don't just use genuine prop guns so no one has to go through all of the protocols

[WOM]

Exactly. How has nobody invented a credible bang/smoke movie prop gun by now that doesn't use full-fat blanks to achieve that?

[ursus arctos]

It can be done at least equally well in CGI and to a very high degree of verisimilitude with props.

It is another aspect of the US' sick obsession with guns that that isn't "good enough" for a certain kind of person.

[WOM]

Stephen Spielberg was ridiculed when he reissued ET with the FBI carrying CGI'd walkie-talkies in place of their original guns.

[Sunderporinostesta]

As mentioned in a previous thread concerning the use of adults acting as teenagers a degree of belief suspension may be required in future on US made movies and TV.