I find it strange how quickly our empathy tends to fly in his direction.
Rather than, you know, to the loved ones of the person who died, maybe?
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What I don’t get is how a live round got in the gun. Why would there be any real bullets anywhere on the set or near the gun?
I wonder if live rounds and blanks look anything alike. This is why I don’t own guns, I’m scared that I would kill someone accidentally.
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Looking at the IMDB page here, it looks like Alec Baldwin is acting in the movie as well as being a Producer. He’s also not listed as starring in the movie. Producer is such a nebulous title that he may be a producer in that he knows industry people and used his connections to help get this movie made…
My guess is that this is a lower budget film with a lot of new talent and a few semi established people. I’m not sure which studio this movie is from; it doesn’t say (which is a bit odd). It doesn’t look like a vanity project, but I’m not sure if it would have gotten a full theatrical release…
So it is entirely possible that corners were cut for budget or that the prop people and armorers were not as experienced as they could have been.
Sadly, the film is apparently about a person who gets convicted for accidently shooting someone. 
This is just a bad situation all around.
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Thanks for the background and detail here. I think it’s probably often underappreciated (certainly was by me before this incident) how much risk is still involved with this sort of filmmaking. Hopefully we can learn from this tragedy and make the process even safer going forward.
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Well what happened on the Crow set was fundamentally down to a lack of safety checks. That gun is supposed to be checked (including the barrel) before and after anything is loaded into it, and checked again before it’s handed to anyone. So before dummies went in, when the dummies came out, before the blanks went in, before it was handed to the actor. 4 times they “forgot” to check the barrel.
Had they checked the ammo, they probably would have caught the bad dummies as well.
It was already standard practice at the time, because dummy rounds in revolvers had caused accidents before. It’s basically a requirement today.
Apparently it took place during shooting, but it’s not clear to me that the gun was even meant to be fired. A couple of articles state that Baldwin “cocked” the gun and it went off.
The reporting seems all kinda jacked up because of the focus on Baldwin.
But it’s fairly common to point blank loaded firearms, and they’re often just actual fire arms, at people on set. For certain shots. There’s supposed to be a massive number of safety checks involved. Nothing even resembling a live fire arm should ever be even close to a set.
The fact that 2 people were hit means something went real wrong.
They have in a lot of contexts. Airsoft guns are common these days because there are very accurate replicas that can actually move and operate like real guns. There’s always been assorted non-guns, including those that “fire” using flash paper. These are typically used anytime people are close enough to each other, or a gun is close enough to a person. That blanks can be dangerous.
But blank firing actual fire arms is still used for visual accuracy, among other things. And doing muzzle flash and the sound in post isn’t neccisarily cheap or quick. Neither does it always look all that believable. But productions that don’t have a lot of guns, large shootouts, don’t need accuracy etc. Often just skip the actual guns.
It was reported as a revolver, but it’s not clear to me if people are just assuming that because “western”. There should be no live rounds on a film set. Ever. So something was loaded or setup improperly. There may not be a bullet involved at all.
The 2 people being hit bit makes me wonder if something straight up exploded. A lot of “prop” guns are just straight up guns. A lot of historic guns are actual old guns. You see a WWII movie, a lot of what you’re seeing may be actual guns from WWII.
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Since it was the DP and the Director, I’m wondering if they were both huddled behind the camera watching the shot, which was a shot down the barrel of Baldwin’s gun, where he cocked it and said something macho and witty when the horror happened? 
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I wondered that too. But even a catastrophic failure of a revolver with over powered reloads rarely ends in death. And it usually will injure the person holding it.
I guess we will know when the investigation is complete if it was a break down in safety protocols, or some sort of equipment failure.
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That’s kind of what I’m thinking. They may have been looking for a shot of the gun being cocked, which is a common enough trope. And something failed or Baldwin fumbled it. Maybe they were too close because the gun wasn’t meant to be loaded. Maybe it was loaded improperly and they were a blank safe distance away. But the gun wasn’t prepped safely.
Is a break down in safety protocols. Checks and safety practices with this stuff are pretty intense if done properly. Any gun even remotely capable of sending anything down the barrel would be dismantled and inspected regularly. If it’s even in question that it might not be reliable or safe for firing, it gets relegated to background duty.
Somebody fucked up here. It likely wasn’t Baldwin or the DP. If some one from the armory team did something improperly, then ultimately the fault lies with the director for not enforcing safety standards.
That’s the pretty regular line on onset injuries and deaths these days. A director who either doesn’t bother to keep an eye on or think about safety. Or actively pressures cast and crew to ignore best practices.
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The producers could be held accountable too.
They could be held accountable yes.
But the producers we usually think of are not actively on set. Regardless of what sort of producer, day to day interaction with prop and safety teams isn’t neccisarily part of the job. There are producing jobs that answer to the Director, who may delegate over seeing certain things to them. And there have been cases where a high level producer pressured the Director to ignore safety.
But like I said. The usual line on this, especially recently. Is a director who doesn’t bother or doesn’t care.
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I have noticed a lot of digital gunfire in tv shows/movies in recent years. Although a lot of that is outside the US, come to think of it. The US continues to have a gun problem in reality and fiction…
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Alec Baldwin, the star and producer of the Western, fired the prop gun, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office. Hutchins, 42, was transported by helicopter to University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque, where she died. Souza, 48, was taken by ambulance to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe, where he received emergency treatment for his injuries. He has subsequently left the hospital
If Variety named Baldwin as the star, then he’s probably the star of the movie.(the estranged grandfather character.) Whether his producer credit meant he had a say in hiring underqualified, nonunion propmasters is another story.
Anyway, here’s a variety story that focuses on Halyna Hutchins.
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In the case of The Crow, they made their own dummy rounds (bullets that appear on screen) by removing the powder, but not the primer. Those were loaded into a revolver (where you can see the bullet tips in the cylinder) for a scene. At some point, nobody knows when, the bullet loaded in the chamber discharged, which had just enough force behind it to lodge into the barrel. Apparently, nobody noticed this (I wouldn’t be surprised if they stored it loaded and it went off in a storage box). A couple of weeks later, they loaded blanks in (powder and primer, no bullet) for a scene where the gun would be shot, and nobody in charge bothered to look down the barrel like they were supposed to. This basically formed a complete bullet, which they handed off to the actor.
Thing is, I’ve read that what’s supposed to happen post-Crow is that prop guns are specifically designed to have different calibers, so they can’t load regular ammo (or badly jury-rigged prop ammo). It would be pretty shocking if they were using real guns on the set of Rust and essentially repeated this complicated series of failures. If that’s the case, Alec Baldwin wasn’t just a supplementary victim, he’s also the executive producer so he’s ultimately responsible. If this is someone else’s screw-up (like, proper prop guns, but a rock got lodged in there or something and the armorer didn’t clear the barrel), then that armorer should be held responsible. Either way, wrongful death lawsuits will be filed.
The takeaway here, of course, is that a gun is always loaded until proven otherwise.
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The point of good digital effects is that you don’t notice.
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I don’t believe that is true for most things. Though IIRC some of the blank firing zinc guns use an 8mm and 6mm blanks, too small for a 9mm to fit into.
The prop gun that killed “Rust” cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza on during an on-set accident on Thursday contained a “live single round,” according to an email sent by IATSE Local 44 to its membership.
Wow, so a severe break down by whomever was in charge of loading and managing props. I can only guess complacency, incompetence, and negligence in a perfect storm. 
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Of course. But being complex organisms it is possible to empathize with more than one person at once. You get fewer internet righteousness points that way, but it works.
I have lost family members to tragic accidents. It sucks, even when you understand the circumstances. Understanding what happened goes a long way to putting your world back together into something that makes sense. Witness all the crusades by various family members to get a specific thing changed after a tragedy (even something like a stop sign) - this can help with dealing with the loss.
At the same time as empathizing with that, I can also empathize with someone who was involved in the accident. I witnessed an accident where a person rushed out into traffic from behind a van, and was immediately hit by a taxi. The pedestrian was killed, the cab driver was badly traumatized though he had done nothing wrong - he was collapsed on the sidewalk in tears. I tried to do first aid and can remember every second of the event, 20 years later.
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Hopefully much better than it was when he was married to Kim Basinger. He’s still a problematic person with anger issues, so I hope this doesn’t blow back on family.
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I guess for me it’s clear that the biggest victims were the ones shot, but I’ve been annoyed at how every headline, including this one, is Alec Balwin Killed Someone instead of Tragic Accident on Set Killed Someone".
It’s only framed this way because Alec Baldwin is famous, but he is also a victim of this, though of course not at the same level as the actual victims. The headlines make it worse.
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It depends.
“Prop guns” are often not guns. Replicas, dummies, flash paper firing non-guns, gas or electric powered airsoft pellet guns, starter pistols, blank firing replicas that can’t physically load ammunition, solid lumps of plastic. But many of the firearms you see in films are just guns.
Well before the Crow, it was common to convert firearms to fire 8mm blanks. There are apparently few actual live cartridges that will load into something built for the 8mm blanks used. The barrel or chamber may be blocked to prevent the loading of live rounds.
Thing is. Not every fire arm will cycle on 8mm blanks. Blank converting a firearm can render it dangerous, if done improperly. Apparently blocking or restricting the barrel can be very dangerous if done improperly. Some of the guns used may also be rare or expensive, and especially with anything automatic there may actually legal restrictions on altering them.
Per the Crow, revolvers apparently are hinky to convert to the standard 8mm blank.
So reversible conversions are preferred, and they apparently avoid restricting barrels in any way. That tends to be something you see on things that were built that way.
What gets used when is all determined by safety concerns, the needs of the shot, and practicality.
I used to know a lot of prop people, including several that worked as armorers. And this stuff was actually covered at Film School, along with some other safety shit.
And nearly every article closes out with “no charges have been filed”.
They’re all salivating for an Alec Baldwin murder trial, as if that’s how this would go or what’s important.
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