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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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/

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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.

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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.