TheBang

Rust armorer, Hannah Gutierrez Reed, found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. The involuntary manslaughter charge carries up to 18 months in prison and a $5,000 fine. The judge did not set a sentencing date. The jury acquitted her of a separate charge of evidence tampering.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/06/enter...eed/index.html

GoldenJCJ

I agree with that verdict.


Also, Gutierrez Reed looks so much better with brunette hair instead of that trashy bleached blonde shit she was sporting during the Rust shoot (pun intended).

TomOpus

If she winds up doing some prison time I'd help out with some conjugal visits.

Decker

So she's guilty of the same crime that they want to charge Baldwin with?

B5Erik

Yeah, with her guilty verdict it kind of makes it hard to blame Baldwin when someone else was already found criminally responsible for the death.

But these Bozos in NM are going to keep prosecuting them. I hope they lose their jobs over this. A first year prosecutor should be able to recognize that charges against Baldwin were not only unwarranted, but absurd in concept.

Troy Stiffler

I would hope she ends up with no prison time. Accidents like this are tragic. Incarceration over an accident is wrong. I’m sure she will never get a job around firearms again. Giving prison time does nothing except ruin her life.

Count Dooku

Since she was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, it means by legal definition that the killing was due to her recklessness or negligence, and an innocent woman is dead, so there needs to be some form of punishment (imo) beyond losing her profession. Plus, they have made such a big deal about pursuing this case in NM, it would make the prosecution look even worse if she got a slap on the wrist.

TheBang

Like Dooku says, it's not just an accident. It's negligence, at best. There was live ammo on a set that shouldn't have had live ammo. That gun should have been inspected and the live round found before being handed to the actor, and it was not.

Josh-da-man

That's the real issue. Everyone seems to hung up on whether or not Baldwin pulled the trigger or why he didn't check the gun himself, but the real issue here is how the fuck a live round found it ways into a gun used as a prop on a movie set. Like it's something everyone should have expected. Does the average American dipshit not understand that they don't fire real bullets in movies and tv shows?

orangerunner

Are there instances where live ammunition is used on movie sets? What about scenes where characters are shooting empty beer bottles as target practice? A machine-gun shooting at an empty house/car/wall etc?

Setting-up hundreds of squibs is time-consuming and much more expensive than simply filming live shots being fired in a safe and controlled environment.

Are live rounds legally allowed on film sets? Do lower budget films cut corners by using real ammo instead of using squibs, compressed air, small cap explosives or whatever they use to simulate gunshots?

B5Erik

No one uses live rounds on set. Ever. They couldn't get insurance if they did. I doubt it would be legal, for that matter.

Time Warrior

Use of live rounds is pretty rare except for directors who want realism at the cost of safety.

In the James Cagney gangster pic The Public Enemy (1931) his character is out in the street when machine gun fire hits the walls next to him, sending fragments of concrete everywhere. Cagney looks shocked on camera and rightfully as Director William Wellman had a firearms expert with a real machine gun blaze away at the wall in order to get a real reaction from Cagney. It did.

Josh-da-man

John Landis used live machine gun rounds on the set of The Twilight Zone, when Vic Morrow's character was being shot at in Vietnam.*

And we all know how that turned out...

* And I don't mean in the scene where Morrow and the two children were killed. This was a different scene, where he was in the jungle, and Landis had crew members with a rope yank Morrow a split second before the jungle behind him was shot up.

Yeah, that's probably true. They might be able to get away with it on second unit filming or pick-ups, though, under tightly controlled conditions.

They did shoot real guns occasionally on Mythbusters.

I remember watching a vampire movie that was a very amateur production, and during the climax the vampires exploded in daylight and they achieved this by shooting dummies filled with fake blood and guts with shotguns. In the behind the scenes, the director mentioned that that was either illegal or not allowed, but they did it anyway.

I also think Cronenberg did the exploding head effect in Scanners with a shotgun as well.

Scanners and Twilight Zone were made forty years ago, so the rules might have been different then. And safety on movie sets became a huge issue after the Twilight Zone accident.

TheBang

Going back to the Industry Wide Safety Bulletin #1 that we discussed a few months ago, even the version that was in force at the time of Rust says:
"LIVE AMMUNITION" IS NEVER TO BE USED NOR BROUGHT ONTO ANY STUDIO LOT OR STAGE
at the top of the bulletin.

So, it was a violation of the industry agreements that the producers and unions follow that live ammunition was on the set.

Investigators found 6 live rounds on the set in at least 4 different locations. In trial, Gutierrez Reed claimed that the ammunition supplier was responsible for mixing in live rounds with blanks. The prosecution argued that Gutierrez Reed brought the live ammo on set. Even disregarding how the ammo got there, there's still the failure to load and inspect the weapon properly to make sure no live rounds were in it before use. The jury rightly decided that these failures were Gutierrez Reed's responsibility.

Yeah, you're right. That wouldn't fly on today's movie sets.
​​​​​​​https://screenrant.com/david-cronenb...ect-explained/

orangerunner

True but there are a lot of things which make insurance companies nervous such as blowing-up buildings, rolling-over cars, jumping six stories into an airbag, attaching explosive squibs under the clothing of an actor, hanging onto the side of an airplane taking-off from a runway, setting a stuntman on fire with a flamethrower.

Risk-wise, shooting live ammunition at a wall in a controlled environment would seem rather harmless in comparison.

Crocker Jarmen

Yes, that was certainly a dangerous method. It gives me shivers just thinking about it.