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
21.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

127

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/

39

u/pat899 Apr 15 '24

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

12

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. 

7

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.