SHOOT THE WORKS

Alec Baldwin waits for the cue to end his career.

 All of you have busy lives, so you might not be keeping up with the Hannah
Gutierrez-Reed trial -- otherwise as the known as the one involving the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer of Rust. Gutierrez-Reed and Rust star Alec Baldwin are charged with manslaughter. Baldwin's trial is scheduled for a June start, which is a good excuse for his kids not to have grumpy ol' Dad around the house during summer break.

The details are as dense as the defendants, so I'll simplify them: Gutierrez-Reed, the person in charge of guns and ammo on set, says Hutchins's death wasn't her fault. Baldwin, who pulled the trigger, says it wasn't his fault. If you think something doesn't quite add up here, the problem is not with your calculator. I can tell you, though, who definitely isn't guilty: the people making Rust who had already quit because of safety issues on the set.

HGR on police bodycam minutes after the
shooting, pretending to be sober and awake.

HGR, as we'll call her just to save copy-and-paste time, was also charged with tampering with evidence -- the evidence being cocaine, which she tried to hide after being questioned by the police. There's also evidence of her smoking grass and knocking back a drink or six after work each evening, and coming to set hungover -- just the kind of person you want handling firearms.

You might wonder how an amateur armorer got hired for an eight-million-dollar movie. It's because it was an eight-million-dollar movie. That kind of dough sounds good to us, but for a feature, it's strictly straight-to-video. The producers, who include Alec Baldwin, were too cheap to hire a real armorer who focused only on guns and ammo, and not to double as prop master as HGR was required to do. Oh, and did I mention that Baldwin -- who, y'know, was required to fire a gun in the movie -- missed his first firearm training session, and spent most of his time on his phone during the second?

Let's recap: A movie star/ producer too cheap to pay a professional

Groucho probably had more
training than Baldwin.

armorer instead hired a hard-drinking, coke-sniffing, joint-puffing nobody because she came cheap, and was willing to be distracted from her main job due to handling props like saddles... and because her dad is a movie armorer. Nepo babies may be dangerous to your health.

Once in a while, I work on TV shows where some of the extras play cops. Before we go to set (usually an exterior location), a production assistant calls for attention and holds up two of the prop guns being used on the scene. The spiel, which I first heard years before the Rust shooting, goes something like this: 

These guns are not real. They're made of wood. It's impossible to load them with bullets. But they are NOT to be pointed at ANYBODY at ANY time. Keep them in your holsters when you're not using them in the scene. When you hear "Cut", put them back in the holsters. Again, do NOT point them at ANYBODY. If you do, you will be sent home. 

Put the budget toward souvenir chairs
rather than hiring competent people --
that's the ticket (to prison).

It's mysterious indeed how there are more safety regulations for wooden guns on Law & Order: SVU or The FBI than that of a movie using real guns where real ammo somehow made its way onto the set. That's what happens when the producer hires someone who spends more time dying her hair yellow and purple than paying attention to her job. Cool chair, though!

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This episode of the Australian version of 60 Minutes goes into more detail about the Rust shooting than any American news program:

(14) What really happened on the deadly film set of Alec Baldwin's Rust? | 60 Minutes Australia - YouTube