Had a viceral reaction to you calling film/television “theater” that I needed to parse for a second… I have worked the industry over a decade onset and off and I know the utter bullshit Producers pull when they think nobody is looking. Everything about this Production I have heard sounds like shit I worked in the past before I had the security to work Union gigs.
These gigs are generally hackneyed with grandiose dreams where Production chooses people who won’t rock the boat and safety falls completely by the wayside. They just want their shoot day and so they pick folk with cowboy mentality that make industry folk wince at knowing how often they are risking their skins.
In Union world armourers have not just guns but anything that even looks like a gun under lock and key. Doesn’t matter if it’s made of rubber you treat every replica and actual functioning weapon as though it is real. Only armourers and actors touch them. All actors who are given anything gun like must have them in their person or give them back to the armourer. Every actual weapon is handed off only to people who have been briefed on the rules. During the hand off the armourer checks the barrel and load to make sure there is no obstruction and the correct type of blank or dummies. This is done in front of the actor and only once complete and if there’s nothing in can a weapon be described as “cold”. Then before filming begins the size of the load is mentioned to the crew as a precaution to protect people’s hearing. The process isn’t actually all that hard it just requires dedication to do it properly every single time. Armourers tend to be gun enthusiasts anyway so the actual technical aspects of the craft are generally already well known by the first day on set it’s just learning the process.
So when you hear this weapon was left on a cart, picked up by a non-props department member who handed it over and called “cold gun” and handed over blind to a seasoned actor… Naw mate I don’t care how much everybody feels bad about this. People need a smack in the jaw to remember that this is a dangerous industry and you do not cut corners when it comes to safety.
I might be a bit tinfoily here, but since you mention union armorers, wasn’t Hutchins flacking for the union strike over - in large part- firearms safety protocol? I seem to recall several social media posts advocating for solidarity and such.
In any case, having the armorer check the gun like that seems “reasonable” and is likely very effective. My issue with it, is that armorers are people too, and they make mistakes- doesn’t matter how good they are; it’s part of being human. Redundancy is very important when the consequences of a mistake is death.
If there’s a single point of failure, a single mistake can have tragic consequences.
That’s the thing. This wasn’t one mistake on behalf of the armourer. This was a crew lousy with massive safety violations. For this to go wrong she had to fuck up three points in a row.
Using live rounds in a film weapon, not clearing and checking the chamber afterwards an instead of locking it up as she was supposed to have done leaving it unattended on a cart. For the other half of the equation you have Baldwin accepting it from a source who was not authorized to handle it, not waiting for a full check and accepting the call of cold weapon from an unauthorized person.
Six points of failure.
But then consider this :
A few days before Baldwin’s stunt double fired two live shots and a total of three accidental discharges. TWO live rounds were fired and yet this didn’t cause Production to bat an eye…
Camera crew walked the week before because gun safety was a fraught issue and the Production Manager did fucking NOTHING about it.
Production fucked with the crew hotel stays so their crew lost sleep which is how a lot of people in my local have gotten fucked up. When your standard day is 12-15 hours sleeping 5 hours a night doesn’t cut it. You make bad calls and are more prone to slip ups.
Yeah, armourers are people who make mistakes. The most common one is missing the last clearing check before handoff ( which actors are also on the hook for and are supposed to insist on if it gets forgotten in the hectic rush) but when you start seeing mistakes that are not just small reasonable mistakes but massive violations of protocol adding up… The word isn’t “mistakes” it’s negligence. When someone gets hurt and dies that’s criminal negligence.
It’s admirable wanting to forgive people on their worst day but I have seen too many working conditions where these “mistakes” are made and someone who was just trying to do their job gets life-changingly hurt and you know what? The person who caused that to happen doesn’t change.The industry doesn’t change. The abuses of power in our industry is aggregious at times and a lot of the way things are structured are to mitigate consequences for the people at the top and their relatives.
What drives me insane is that people just want to assume the best of the people they feel they know. Lady Gaga gets to be “brave” for throwing a hissy fit and endangering the lives of her music video crews for endangering their lives for a shot. Baldwin plays absolute cowboy on a crew that was bleeding from safety concerns and ends up killing someone. It could have been the stunt double the week before who killed someone but the difference between the stunt double and Baldwin is Baldwin could have DONE something about this fucking firestorm. Producers, even principle actors have the power to make things happen. But this show was lousy with people at the top who didn’t fucking care.
We reward the famous all the damn time for playing risky games. We reward producers for making quick dirty unsafe shows and then spinning it like playing with fire was a good thing. We reward nepotism, and cut corners and It has to stop. When your luck runs out all those devils bargains you made should come back to haunt you because it makes people with their head stuck so far up their ass who believe that it could never happen to them actually fucking think.
Had a viceral reaction to you calling film/television “theater” that I needed to parse for a second… I have worked the industry over a decade onset and off and I know the utter bullshit Producers pull when they think nobody is looking. Everything about this Production I have heard sounds like shit I worked in the past before I had the security to work Union gigs.
These gigs are generally hackneyed with grandiose dreams where Production chooses people who won’t rock the boat and safety falls completely by the wayside. They just want their shoot day and so they pick folk with cowboy mentality that make industry folk wince at knowing how often they are risking their skins.
In Union world armourers have not just guns but anything that even looks like a gun under lock and key. Doesn’t matter if it’s made of rubber you treat every replica and actual functioning weapon as though it is real. Only armourers and actors touch them. All actors who are given anything gun like must have them in their person or give them back to the armourer. Every actual weapon is handed off only to people who have been briefed on the rules. During the hand off the armourer checks the barrel and load to make sure there is no obstruction and the correct type of blank or dummies. This is done in front of the actor and only once complete and if there’s nothing in can a weapon be described as “cold”. Then before filming begins the size of the load is mentioned to the crew as a precaution to protect people’s hearing. The process isn’t actually all that hard it just requires dedication to do it properly every single time. Armourers tend to be gun enthusiasts anyway so the actual technical aspects of the craft are generally already well known by the first day on set it’s just learning the process.
So when you hear this weapon was left on a cart, picked up by a non-props department member who handed it over and called “cold gun” and handed over blind to a seasoned actor… Naw mate I don’t care how much everybody feels bad about this. People need a smack in the jaw to remember that this is a dangerous industry and you do not cut corners when it comes to safety.
I might be a bit tinfoily here, but since you mention union armorers, wasn’t Hutchins flacking for the union strike over - in large part- firearms safety protocol? I seem to recall several social media posts advocating for solidarity and such.
In any case, having the armorer check the gun like that seems “reasonable” and is likely very effective. My issue with it, is that armorers are people too, and they make mistakes- doesn’t matter how good they are; it’s part of being human. Redundancy is very important when the consequences of a mistake is death.
If there’s a single point of failure, a single mistake can have tragic consequences.
That’s the thing. This wasn’t one mistake on behalf of the armourer. This was a crew lousy with massive safety violations. For this to go wrong she had to fuck up three points in a row. Using live rounds in a film weapon, not clearing and checking the chamber afterwards an instead of locking it up as she was supposed to have done leaving it unattended on a cart. For the other half of the equation you have Baldwin accepting it from a source who was not authorized to handle it, not waiting for a full check and accepting the call of cold weapon from an unauthorized person.
Six points of failure.
But then consider this :
A few days before Baldwin’s stunt double fired two live shots and a total of three accidental discharges. TWO live rounds were fired and yet this didn’t cause Production to bat an eye…
Camera crew walked the week before because gun safety was a fraught issue and the Production Manager did fucking NOTHING about it.
Production fucked with the crew hotel stays so their crew lost sleep which is how a lot of people in my local have gotten fucked up. When your standard day is 12-15 hours sleeping 5 hours a night doesn’t cut it. You make bad calls and are more prone to slip ups.
Yeah, armourers are people who make mistakes. The most common one is missing the last clearing check before handoff ( which actors are also on the hook for and are supposed to insist on if it gets forgotten in the hectic rush) but when you start seeing mistakes that are not just small reasonable mistakes but massive violations of protocol adding up… The word isn’t “mistakes” it’s negligence. When someone gets hurt and dies that’s criminal negligence.
It’s admirable wanting to forgive people on their worst day but I have seen too many working conditions where these “mistakes” are made and someone who was just trying to do their job gets life-changingly hurt and you know what? The person who caused that to happen doesn’t change.The industry doesn’t change. The abuses of power in our industry is aggregious at times and a lot of the way things are structured are to mitigate consequences for the people at the top and their relatives.
What drives me insane is that people just want to assume the best of the people they feel they know. Lady Gaga gets to be “brave” for throwing a hissy fit and endangering the lives of her music video crews for endangering their lives for a shot. Baldwin plays absolute cowboy on a crew that was bleeding from safety concerns and ends up killing someone. It could have been the stunt double the week before who killed someone but the difference between the stunt double and Baldwin is Baldwin could have DONE something about this fucking firestorm. Producers, even principle actors have the power to make things happen. But this show was lousy with people at the top who didn’t fucking care.
We reward the famous all the damn time for playing risky games. We reward producers for making quick dirty unsafe shows and then spinning it like playing with fire was a good thing. We reward nepotism, and cut corners and It has to stop. When your luck runs out all those devils bargains you made should come back to haunt you because it makes people with their head stuck so far up their ass who believe that it could never happen to them actually fucking think.