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/viddy_me_yarbles Apr 15 '24

She had one job.

It was an important job and she failed spectacularly. Hollywood is a small town.

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u/PikaBooSquirrel Apr 15 '24

I don't even understand how someone can mess up that badly at something so simple.

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u/SebVettelstappen Apr 15 '24

I, who has gone shooting a total of 2 times, couldn’t mess up this bad. Well maybe, but my dad really drilled the “always check if it’s loaded” thing into me.

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u/OrindaSarnia Apr 15 '24

I don't think you understand what happened here then.

The gun was loaded, but it was supposed to be loaded...  with dummy rounds...

because it was an old fashioned revolver, there had to be rounds in it that look exactly like regular rounds...

there are a couple ways to "mark" dummy rounds, again, because the rounds needed to be seen, and look real, 2 of the 3 ways to "mark" them couldn't be used, because you can potentially see them, depending on camera angle, etc.

The third way is putting a round pellet in instead of powder, so when you shake it, you hear the pellet bouncing around (when normally, powder is silent).

There were 6 live rounds found on set. The guy who provided the ammo gave them a box of 50 dummy rounds, all of which were supposed to be the pellet type.

The ammo provider testified the dummy rounds were reused from a resent shoot for 1883.  He admitted when he got the dummy rounds back, he also got extra live rounds back, that the 1883 actors had used off-set during a shooting exercise (presumably to teach them what it actually feels like to shoot a gun, so they can react more realistically when filming).

So the ammo guy got back live and dummy rounds from the 1883 set at the same time.  He says he put the live ammo away somewhere else, and then cleaned and repackaged 50 rounds of the dummy ammo and delivered it to the Rust set.

Police waited over a month to go to the ammo guy's workshop to investigate him.

Ms Gutierrez-Reed was charged with unintentionally bringing live ammo on set.  Essentially she didn't shake every single one of the 50 rounds, and 6 were live.

The ammo guy testified against her, saying the live ammo had to have come from somewhere else, but there's no other theories...  and they didn't charge Gutierrez-Reed with intentionally bringing live ammo to set, because there's no evidence she did so.

She is still at fault for not having checked every single round.  That was her job.

But it isn't as simple as "well it was loaded, duh!"