Alec Baldwin kills crew member on set with "prop gun"

[JHC]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/27/enter...set/index.html

"Stu Brumbaugh, the key grip on "The Old Way," told CNN that Gutierrez handled guns on the set of that project in a reckless manner and that he urged the film's assistant director to fire her.
"There's a universal way to handle weapons on set and immediately red flags went up when I worked with Hannah," Brumbaugh said. "This is why I asked for her dismissal."
"This is why people get injured because of rookie mistakes," he said."

Brumbaugh cited an incident in which Gutierrez fired a gun near the film's star Nicolas Cage without warning. "Make an announcement! You just blew my f***ing eardrums out!" Cage screamed in response and then walked off set angrily, according to Brumbaugh.
"She was talking to the stunt coordinator, and she just fired off a round, it sounded [like she fired] at the ground, and that's when Nick really laid into her. That's when I said she needs to be let go, she's the most inexperienced armorer I had ever worked with. I have no idea why she wasn't let go."

[hufnagel]

be interesting if nick cage corroborated that.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I haven't commented on this so far because I really try to restrain myself to discussions where I think I have something specific to contribute because of my own experience or training or similar. I do know two different guys who work as hollywood armorers; one is a bit circumspect about the whole thing and the other laid into Alec Baldwin in a pretty public social media rant...but he's also, IMO, a bit partisan on the subject, and his rant was morning-of, so I don't necessarily put a ton of stock in it.

I guess here's the one vaguely comparable piece of experience I personally have: I've been on site at a few major workplace incidents. One where a guy was crushed to death, one person had a leg ripped off...some pretty bad stuff.

If there's one thing I know from witnessing or being a party to major workplace accidents, it's that it's never been one person or one policy or one piece of equipment failing. It's been a cascading chain of errors, failures, or misconduct. You get one person in the process interrupting the chain, and the outcome would have been different. For this reason, workplace safety administrations always want you to report the near misses, the minor incidents that don't result in an actual injury, and so on...what they find whenever they investigate is that for every workplace death, there's some significant number of major injuries, some large multiple of that number of minor injuries, exponentially more near misses, and so on. The death is almost always (and you can almost delete the word almost) the tip of a huge iceberg of safety failures that built towards it, and if you correct the safety culture that kept generating the near misses and minor injuries and so on, you never get to the major injuries and fatalities.

I don't know how much to trust any of the information coming out about this incident as far as who was specifically doing what things. But if there's one thing I know, it's that you don't get to this point without first building though a long chain of safety failures. I can't imagine that there is one single person that is to blame or one equipment failure. The processes to keep people from getting injured or killed are always overlapping and redundant and if you start abandoning components of that safety regime, that's part of the chain of failure.

I don't know what it's like on movie sets where they have guns. I've been on a few movie sets where they had big animals like wolves and grizzlies because at one time I used to work for an outfit that built mobile enclosures for that kind of stuff - minor aside, wolves and grizzlies are spectacular to behold up close. But guns on set, I have no experience there at all.

But they are exactly the reason that you have overlapping safety systems in any workplace. I don't know how rigid hollywood is about "cheating the shot" so the gun looks like it's pointing at something when it isn't; my armorer friends were both pretty vehement about "no exceptions, that could be another Brandon Lee moment" but they're also both hardcore gun guys. They both had stories about times they had to hand revolvers to people, in one case, an 11 year old girl. The guy who did that talked about the length of the safety brief, the number of times he checked the gun, the number of witnesses to the checking, the discussions with the parents (presumably not applicable to Alec Baldwin but you'd think he'd have handlers or whatever the equivalent to a special needs support person is, except for personality disorders) and the sleep he didn't get the night before going over everything a hundred times in his head and writing out the list of steps and checking the boxes over and over so that he was sure there was no way to hand a loaded gun to a child.

Sure, in that case, that one guy and his drive to ensure safety was probably enough to guarantee it. But his presence wasn't an accident: someone had to make the decision to hire him, and pay for the time it took on set while he was making everyone shut up and pay attention to him. Someone had to say "on this set, we agree to delegate this procedure to this person and we don't cut corners when we follow his instructions." A bunch of crew probably had to have their foremen say "yes, we will also stop what we are doing and listen to this safety brief." And someone had to decide to hire those foremen, and then make a whole cascading chain of decisions that ensured those foremen would think they should be stopping their crews.

That culture of safety has to be built, one brick at a time, on any major project.



I'll also say that I've been in a bunch of low budget indie movies and used to love the wild, anything-could-happen vibe on set. You might get arrested, you might get whacked in the head with an out of control camera hard enough to get a concussion...it was a riot. Actually I played a rioter a bunch of times, so it was often literally a riot. That stuff is totally fun and I am completely open about my unadulterated love for chaos.

BUT. You don't get to play like that when you're handing out guns to fuckwit actors. You don't get to do that stuff on big projects of any sort, because you're using machines that maim and kill people and I don't care how much fun it sucks out of the process, that's the deal.



I'm going to wrap spoiler tags around this because I don't want it to be a distraction or shift the direction of the discussion but if you want the actual complete breakdown of a major workplace accident I was a party to and the ensuing investigation and how I became versed in building safety culture on big projects, I wrote it out below. But I would rather have it stay mostly out of the discussion, it's just the explanation of why I feel qualified to comment not directly on this incident, but in general about how safety responsibility works from my perspective.

In the one that took someone's leg off, I personally assessed the blame as mine: I was working on the shutdown of a site and a friend of mine who was also working the shutdown, but in a supervisory role, pulled up in a van and asked if I could help take down a sign that had been left on a different part of the site. I hopped in the van with a cutting torch and we drove down there and I was surprised when we got there that the sign had an enormous ladder frame made of 3x3x1/4" angle iron that the welders had clearly put together in a fit of structural overkill. "Well," I said, "I can cut it down but we'll have to get a truck to drag the pieces out of here. It's small enough that we can drop it this way and not hit anything but once it goes, it'll go, so stay back and I'll take it down." But that was all I said, because I'd been working with steel and cranes for a long time at that point. So had my friend, but not as closely - she worked on our crew but didn't personally handle cranes or steel. But I didn't think about the fact that she didn't have the same instincts as me, and when the other ironworkers and pile drivers said to you "if it starts to go, let it go" you know that's really f'ing serious. But it requires you to suppress this instinct that you have to prop something up that starts to tilt. I started cutting and the frame started to sag, and my friend, instead of just staying back, stepped in and tried to prop up about 800 pounds of angle iron at the same moment that we caught a gust of wind and the time between her stepping into the fall zone and the steel hitting the ground was only about a second and I didn't have time to shove her back and the steel scissored her leg off. I was able to lift the steel and get her out but then had to clamp a hand down on her leg and drive my thumb into her femoral to slow down the bleeding (honestly not certain whether this was working; the bleeding did slow but whether that was a result of the pressure or just her arteries retracting and her muscles locking up I don't know) and call an ambulance because there was nobody else on that section of the site and it was a huge site. The ambulance was pretty quick and they got her loaded onto the stretcher and took her away. The investigation by an outside workplace safety body concluded that it was my friend's decision to step into the path of the collapsing structure that was ultimately the cause of the incident, although I argued at length during the investigation that in fact it was my failure to do a sufficient pre-work safety debrief that precipitated the whole thing. I should have known she didn't have the same reflexes as someone who worked with cranes and high steel directly and the fact that she was technically my supervisor at that point was meaningless. I knew there was a risk of the steel coming down a bit unpredictably and I warned her to stay back but what I didn't specifically say was "this will probably start to go and you will have in impulse to prop it up partly because I'm going to be right there and even though consciously with lots of time to think about it you would know you can't stop half a ton of steel, if you don't have time to think and it starts to lean, you'll see me there and think you should help and you might try to prop it up...DON'T." That's what I should have said and if I had, she'd never have been hurt, and I told the provincial safety agency that and criticized the outcome of the investigation after I was assessed as not a factor. They described a chain of failure beginning with my friend's boss work duties. He was actually the head of the safety department, but during these last phases of the project, had been assigned a bunch of stuff that had nothing to do with safety, which was his area of expertise. He didn't really have a background in the work he was directing. Possibly as a result of his inexperience, he sent her to just go grab a guy and take down the sign. He didn't know what the sign was made from and didn't look into it, and just assumed she could grab a single guy with gear and get it done. The friend of mine they sent had ended up in the safety department herself but at this point in the project she was my boss, and as such the safety briefing was technically her responsibility not mine. The verdict said she made the decision to step in front after being warned, and despite my personal take on what a good safety briefing would include, that wouldn't be a typical briefing that anyone would get and if a different person had been selected to do the work instead of me, the exact same series of events would have occurred, because essentially I was carrying out instructions and the warnings I did give were typical of what you would get from a supervisor, and I wasn't the supervisor anyway. I understand their position but I also realize that I could have prevented it if I had thought carefully about my friend's likely vulnerability to that specific risk and how that works for people without that specific level of experience and as such, I continue to disagree with the outcome of that investigation. It did assess a bunch of blame within the company, but exonerated me over my objections. I got credited with saving my friend's life and leg and I also argued against that because neither would have been at risk if I had thought everything through carefully ahead of time and overridden the typical chain of command because of the disparity in our specific job task experience. But I didn't have any control over the outcome of the investigation and I didn't want to pursue it aggressively because my friend saw the whole thing the same way the investigators did and for obvious reasons I didn't want to get into a big conflict with her over it. But I continue to think that is also a misinterpretation of events. It's true that I was a cog in the machine, but I did have the power to interrupt that chain of failures and the actions I did take weren't sufficient to do so. That's just one of the ones I've been present for but it was the only one I probably could have stopped if I'd done things differently, but that's how I come by the knowledge that every fatality is the result of a long chain of failures.

[JRB]

Man. I dunno. If (if) the report is true—and I hear your caveat, brother—that is either so brutally incompetent as to damn near defy imagination, or deliberate. Either scenario boggles the mind. That said, if the media is rushing en masse to throw Hannah G-R under the bus, that alone makes me want to consider the second option. I mean, Baldwin’s record as a tier-1 dick is pretty established. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that some dark-ass mofo buried somewhere on the crew was disgruntled enough to lay in a sabotage.

Or, Hannah really is that dumb.

Or, the rumor isn’t true.

My gut is leaning towards doors 1 or 2. In no small part to your circumspection and track record of not talking out your ass, mind.

Despite the overwhelming tragedy of the situation, I have to admit to eating some dark popcorn while watching this one unfold.

Wadcutters are almost exclusively a revolver thing, and there's an awful lot of otherwise squared-away 'gun people' I've met with minimal/zero experience with revolvers that had no idea such ammo exists.

Speaking from a military perspective, we haven't issued revolvers in a hell of a long time. Without specific training and experience with revolvers -and thereby seeing and learning about those sorts of wadcutters- a hell of a lot of genuinely safe and skilled gun handlers are in uniform that have no idea there's live ammo loaded for revolvers that looks so much like a blank, or an empty casing.

I've had that exact conversation with a lot of folks here since this incident happened, including our current armorer, and a former Marine Recon armorer. A few have noticeably changed their tune a little when they realized they could very well have made the same mistake in ID'ing that as a blank round instead of a live round.


Given the other indicators of Ms. G-R's ignorance and inexperience displayed by everything else we currently know, it's not outlandish to suggest she may have been similarly ignorant about flush-loaded wadcutters.

[Totem Polar]

Given the other indicators of Ms. G-R's ignorance and inexperience displayed by everything else we currently know, it's not outlandish to suggest she may have been similarly ignorant about flush-loaded wadcutters.

Point taken.

If true, that’s even sadder in one way: it would mean that she likely spent her childhood smoking weed with friends and posting to the ‘gram, instead of doing dad shit with her dad. I am very sure that her dad would be expert on anything that can be put into any wheelie, past or present.

At any rate, we will see what we will see.

- - -

Sidebar to the topic: I received a push email from change.org yesterday, asking for signatures on a petition to remove real guns from Hollywood productions based on this event.

[Maple Syrup Actual]

I received a push email from change.org yesterday, asking for signatures on a petition to remove real guns from Hollywood productions based on this event.

Ironically the people this would punish the most would be gun enthusiasts, forever sentenced to watch movies in which they identify every single replica as an obvious fake.

[Jim Watson]

It would punish them a lot worse, eventually.
Eliminating real guns from movie sets is, to the banners, a "good first step."

[OlongJohnson]

It would punish them a lot worse, eventually.
Eliminating real guns from movie sets is, to the banners, a "good first step."

Anything and everything they can get away with, no matter how small or large, is, to the banners, a "good first step."

[Wingate's Hairbrush]

Reports beginning to surface that investigators have found live rounds mixed with blanks; lends potential support to @JRB post.

From the article:

As for the shooting that resulted in the death of Hutchins and left director Joel Souza wounded, Mendoza said during a press conference Wednesday that a live round was recovered from the director’s shoulder. In addition to that bullet, investigators found 500 rounds of ammunition, including a mix of blanks, dummy rounds and what appeared to be live rounds.

In an affidavit, Gutierrez Reed previously told investigators that there should be no live ammo on the set at all. However, given the evidence found at this time, including live ammunition, Mendoza said this week that he believes that to be "not an accurate statement."


https://www.foxnews.com/entertainmen...afe-conditions

[peterb]

Good photos and descriptions of different blanks:

https://www.westernstageprops.com/Bl...ion-s/1822.htm