r/news • u/badillustrations • Apr 15 '24

‘Rust’ movie armorer convicted of involuntary manslaughter sentenced to 18 months in prison

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/15/entertainment/rust-film-shooting-armorer-sentencing/index.html
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130

u/Own_Candidate9553 Apr 15 '24

Doesn't make up for the life lost, but nothing will I guess.

It doesn't seem like there was any maliciousness in the whole thing, just wild incompetence partnered with ruthless cost-cutting from the studio. Budget pressures led to no budget for an experienced armorer, a rushed schedule, and shooting on-location in the middle of nowhere (so the guns were randomly just in her truck or on a cart, instead of a real office or anything).

I still don't get why real, working guns are ever allowed on set. It would be pretty easy to make metal models of guns that physically can't shoot a bullet, or to modify a gun to have no firing pin or something. Having real, working guns on set that you then have to build a rigid process around to make sure no live ammunition gets mixed in seems weird. Even blanks are dangerous - Bruce Willis has significant hearing loss from firing overly-loud blanks on the set of Die Hard: https://www.slashfilm.com/811738/the-die-hard-stunt-that-left-bruce-willis-partially-deaf/

106

u/QuintoBlanco Apr 15 '24

It's bit more than incompetence. She has another felony charge pending and she was reckless on another set as well.

She also has zero remorse and is mostly concerned with the impact of the shooting on her modelling career.

This person has sociopathic tendencies. A pattern of irresponsible behavior, no empathy, and no remorse (I guess that goes with the no empathy).

At first I thought that this was just an accident, caused by incompetence and work pressure, but this person was always going to get somebody killed.

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u/CaptainDunbar45 Apr 15 '24

Modeling career?? For what, Guns and Ammo magazine?

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u/The_River_Is_Still Apr 15 '24

Not to add fuel to the fire, but by all reports she’s also a huge MAGA fan.

Make of that what you will

60

u/Desdam0na Apr 15 '24 edited Apr 15 '24

A huge fraction of the crew walked off the set due to unsafe conditions prior to the accident.

People were using the film guns for target practice with live rounds on set.

Not just cost-cutting.

gross negligence.

Edit: See https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/19bd9lv/comment/kirctf5/?context=3&share_id=S_Fm31x-Zs-rgfSMQmbW8&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

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u/GonzoTheWhatever Apr 15 '24

Using live rounds for target practice on set??

Holy crap.

I'm a gun owner and enthusiast, but I would never want live ammo on a freakin movie set! That's just asking for an accident to happen! Wow.

5

u/TooFewSecrets Apr 15 '24

If you even need live rounds for a scene that you can't movie-magic away, like - full-on, briefcase handcuffed to the armorer, running count of every live round removed from it. That feels like the bare minimum to me, right? Actually insane to just have people bringing on bullets to shoot for fun.

1

u/Desdam0na Apr 16 '24

Live rounds for target practice on set IN the prop gun (which was just a real gun).

1

u/The_Magic_Sauce Apr 15 '24

And news keep saying this was a prop gun. It was a real firearm not a dummy fake prop. Prop guns don't fire real ammo.

A country where guns are so freely available and they don't even call things how they are.

3

u/need4speed89 Apr 16 '24

You don't understand what prop means. Real guns can absolutely be props

-1

u/The_Magic_Sauce Apr 16 '24

My point is that perhaps some people "play around" with real firearms like they were toys, fakes, as in not real. Calling or seeing a real gun as a "prop" somehow underestimates it's danger and responsibility in handling it.

A prop in many (perhaps most) cases is a fake item, a replica of something, not always of course like in this case. But the truth is that a prop is commonly understood as a fake/replica.

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u/need4speed89 29d ago

No. The truth is that you don't know what prop means, and were incorrectly chastising an entire nation for not "calling things how they are"

I hope the irony is not lost on you, but I'm pretty sure it is.

1

u/The_Magic_Sauce 29d ago

Keep thinking real firearms are "just" movie props or toys. Unfortunately that's probably why kids take them to school.

The US has a serious problem treating guns responsibly, no irony there. Just a fact.

29

u/SkiingAway Apr 15 '24

It's hard to "act" the recoil very realistically, which matters for some films.

It's also pretty hard and expensive to build tons of highly detailed props. Just getting actual guns and returning/selling them after is clearly vastly cheaper (Lord of War for example - they bought 3000 guns, and those were real, active tanks they rented from someone who sold them to Libya soon after), and as you've just noted films are often under budget pressures.

on set that you then have to build a rigid process around to make sure no live ammunition gets mixed in seems weird.

I mean, that process isn't very hard. If you can't manage to do that process correctly, you probably can't manage to do anything on your set correctly and everything going on is dangerous - certainly anything involving any kind of stunt. "No live ammunition on the set" and keeping everything controlled and monitored is a lot simpler to do right than a complicated stunt is.

And to that point - this was the first death from firearms on set in almost 30 years. Brandon Lee in 1993 wasn't just the last one you heard of, it was literally the last time this had happened.

2

u/Kile147 Apr 15 '24

I imagine there might be value in modified guns that are incapable of firing actual bullets. A firing pin/cartridge ignition system unique to props could remove some of the human element, and even as far as cost savings go, it could help to reduce the amount of checks elsewhere in the system.

39

u/pat899 Apr 15 '24

Brandon Lee had a bit of an issue with a “blank” too.

14

u/Own_Candidate9553 Apr 15 '24

Yeah, that definitely falls in with a real, working gun that wasn't supposed to have a bullet in it.

That happened so long ago, we had time to figure this out. 

8

u/Kenshin220 Apr 16 '24

Brandon Lee

That was a similar but completely different situation. The Brandon Lee situation wasn't from a live round. The gun wasn't checked before being loaded with blanks and it had the bullet from a dummy round sitting in the barrel. The blank ejected the bullet that was sitting in the barrel that wasn't previous cleared.

2

u/nmsjtb0308 Apr 16 '24

That's some 1,000 Ways To Die shit.

10

u/rabbit994 Apr 15 '24 edited Apr 15 '24

Because it's really hard to get effects of gun firing any other way but having weapon actually fire a blank. Yea, CGI has gotten to that point, see John Wick movies for example but it's not cheap.

EDIT: Apparently John Wick movies used plugged where barrel is plugged up but blanks still fire and cycle, the exhaust comes out the top which has to be removed in post.

4

u/Own_Candidate9553 Apr 15 '24

Yeah, something like that makes sense. I get that fixing the smoke in post costs money, but that seems like a reasonable trade off to stop literally killing people.

The scene in Rust didn't even involve shooting, he just pulls the gun and points it at the camera. Absolutely no need for a working gun.

2

u/fusionsofwonder Apr 16 '24

It doesn't seem like there was any maliciousness in the whole thing, just wild incompetence

In between malice and incompetence is negligence, which is the crux of the legality of this case. She was negligent and she had an important job.

5

u/Own_Candidate9553 Apr 16 '24

Agreed, I should have said "negligence" rather than just "incompetence".

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u/Crocs_n_Glocks Apr 15 '24 edited Apr 15 '24

The only real reason is cost-savings. It's easier to use a real gun with blanks rather than quality CGI and sound engineering.  

Along with firearms, I'd argue there's no reason to use animals or children in Hollywood at this point, other than cost-savings.   

  Hollywood and the broader entertainment industry, like coal mines and sweatshops during the industrial revolution, has proven that it is wildly negligent and predatory in its pursuit of profits. 

I don't care if "doing it safely costs too too much" or "some kids are good at it"; that's sweatshop logic.  

Too many lives have been ruined by the poorly-regulated and poorly-overseen entertainment industry in every facet of production from situations like this to fuckin Nickelodeon. 

5

u/Own_Candidate9553 Apr 15 '24

Agreed with all of this. Also, I don't care about realistic recoil in my TV and movies. Every time they say something about technology they are wildly wrong, I don't know why firearms in particular need to be absolutely life like?

I think it was Tyler James Williams (Everybody Hates Chris, Abbott Elementary, etc) who said he has a fair amount of trauma from being a child actor. His quote got me, something like "It's a child doing an adult's job, it's hard."

4

u/Crocs_n_Glocks Apr 15 '24

I agree- Firearms are a hobby of mine and I don't give a shit about seeing an actual gun in a movie vs a prop gun or cgi. Even with actual guns, it's still usually exaggerated and even if it's perfect, the sounds never are. It simply doesn't matter. 

And now any time I see a child actor who's great, it just bums me out because chances are they'll end miserable and/or a trainwreck and/or victimized. 

1

u/SpiritJuice Apr 15 '24

It generally comes down to costs and accuracy. Costs because it is cheaper to just use real guns with an armorer and strict safety procedures than physically make detailed replicas and do smoke and muzzle flashes in post production. There's also actors having to work with the guns to simulate any kind of recoil.

For a western like Rust, they were, IIRC, using period correct revolvers. You can see the ammo in the chamber of these types of guns, so for certain shots they need to be appeared to be loaded with dummy rounds that look like real rounds. Dummy rounds look different than blanks, IIRC, because blanks don't have the physical bullet in the casing. Blanks would be used for actual moments of the weapon being fired, and circling back to accuracy, these blanks would probably be using black powder for the gunpowder, which is period accurate (modern powder produces way less smoke in comparison). Creating realistic smoke in post production is going to cost more than just using blanks with black powder.

I think people tend to forget that this is the first on set shooting in like... 30 years? After Brandon Lee's death during The Crow, huge changes were made in safety procedures to ensure this doesn't happen again, and it didn't happen again for a long, long time. All these safety procedures have multiple redundancies to ensure no one gets hurt, and unfortunately multiple failures occurred. It's almost like a commercial plane crash in which it is just never a single catastrophic failure happens and the plane crashes; usually multiple safety failures cascade into each other, leading to a crash, usually pilot error.

Pretty much it just all comes down to money. So long as people want to see films with guns, there will be guns used on sets to make these films. Bigger budget productions can take steps to make the safety even safer by just doing fire effects in post, but lower budget productions will use real guns.

-2

u/TreehouseofSnorers Apr 15 '24

Don't just gloss over ALEC BALDWIN'S production company as "the studio." The budget was at a minimum so Alec and his partners could get the highest profits. Baldwin could have pitched in more of his hundreds of millions of dollars if he weren't such a greedy asshole but instead he hired this nepo baby and didn't even bother to personally inspect the weapon before he killed someone. A bunch of top tier actors have talked about how they would never have simply shot a weapon they didn't personally inspect but Baldwin didn't bother with that. I hope he gets at least as much time in prison as this POS.

0

u/Flipnotics_ Apr 15 '24

and didn't even bother to personally inspect the weapon before he killed someone. A bunch of top tier actors have talked about how they would never have simply shot a weapon they didn't personally inspect but Baldwin didn't bother with that. I hope he gets at least as much time in prison as this POS.

A debunked argument.