A movie weapons supervisor is facing up to 18 months in prison for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer by Alec Baldwin on the set of the Western film “Rust,” with her sentencing scheduled for Monday in a New Mexico state court.
Movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed was convicted in March by a jury on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and has been held for more than a month at a county jail on the outskirts of Santa Fe.
Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer for “Rust,” was pointing a gun at Hutchins when the revolver went off, killing Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.
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Prosecutors blamed Gutierrez-Reed for unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set of “Rust” where it was expressly prohibited and for failing to follow basic gun safety protocols. After a two-week trial, the jury deliberated for about three hours in reaching its verdict.
She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.
More powerful heads need to roll.
I think this is a case of nepotism. Her father was a well known armorer. It turns out that does not count as experience.
You are correct that the person in charge of hiring (the producer) should be charged as well.
Oh, which one? Because there were six.
Funnily enough, the DA decided that Baldwin wasn’t actually doing anything as one of them, which I don’t think should be a surprise to people familiar with the idea of celebrity producers.
If you are given a loaded gun on a movie set and told it’s safe by the person in charge of gun safety, you can’t be blamed when it goes off.
Maybe he is as fault for cutting costs but that’s not at all what he was being charged with.
Should we hire the old dude who is expensive but has a ton of experience?
Nah, pretty woman with not much experience is cheaper.
This is more than a little misogynistic. There are female armorers in their 20’s out there who are kicking ass after a couple of gigs and old dogs who refuse to change with the times who are timebombs waiting to go off. Gender, how pretty you are, even experience have nothing to do with aptitude. On a set it’s more mindset, willingness to learn, commitment to doing the craft well and wits than experience.
You want to blame something, blame industry nepotism. That’s why she was there. She’s the kid of another armorer who pulled strings for her to get her jobs. Not a gendered thing either. The majority of people I see fucking shit up in my industry aren’t there because someone has aspirations to sleep with them, it’s because they are somebody’s kid, relative or best friend and they can’t be fired.
Film has enough gendered bullshit issues without people pulling this shit about one of the few departments that actually has gender parity.
How on earth do you achieve this feat:
“unwittingly bringing live ammunition onto the set”
Weren’t they firing rounds off for fun during breaks? Or was that claim never substantiated
Not that it makes it better but it would explain how it happened
That was never alledged during the trial itself. There was live round practice, but it was done properly at a fireing range.
The prosecution’s theory was that they came from a different set which did use live rounds. Reed brought dummies herself (instead of going through the prop house for everything) due to shortages.
The defenses theory was that their prop house messed up and provided live rounds with their dummies.
The Variety article on the closing arguments is fairly succinct.
The prosecution has argued that the evidence shows Gutierrez Reed inadvertently brought them to set, mingled among dummy rounds. In a police interview, Gutierrez Reed said she brought some dummies that were loose in a bag in her car and were left over from her previous job as armorer on “The Old Way,” a Nicolas Cage film.
“I’m not telling you that Hannah Gutierrez intended to bring live rounds on set,” Morrissey said. “I’m telling you that she was negligent. She was thoughtless. She was careless… For all we know those dummy rounds were floating around the set of ‘The Old Way,’ and Nicolas Cage is lucky to have walked away with his life.”
Throw in the fact that she apparently didn’t even give the rounds a little shake to confirm that they were empty except for the little BB rattling around in there, and “without due caution and circumspection” is a slam dunk. Baldwin’s case is a little more iffy, but certainly a reasonable one to bring to a jury.
Bullshit. You test and inspect everything that goes into a actor’s hands doesn’t matter what it is particularly when it comes to fx and stunts. Throwing shade on a prop house is a skeezeball move. Our industry has best practice checks that you do at multiple points - upon purchase before the day, when you load up and immediately before you hand over the weapon. Even if they somehow bought their live rounds from a prop house you would have to ignore at least three levels of check you should be doing to get that far, nevermind the weapon was left on a cart and handed over by someone unauthorized.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a breakaway ceramic piece or a round - you buy extra then what you need for camera and you check…
Tbh that’s worse.
Willfully violating protocol and allowing live ammo to be near, let alone loaded into, the prop gun. That makes them even more culpable.
Real guns don’t need to be on movie/tv sets anymore.
Craig Zobel, the director of the Emmy-winning HBO miniseries “Mare of Easttown,” drew one of the first lines in the sand after “Rust” actor and producer Alec Baldwin fired the gun that killed Hutchins.
“There’s no reason to have guns loaded with blanks or anything on set anymore. Should just be fully outlawed,” Zobel tweeted early Friday while the country absorbed the news.
“There’s computers now. The gunshots on ‘Mare of Easttown’ are all digital,” he added. “You can probably tell, but who cares? It’s an unnecessary risk.”
He was soon joined by other producers and directors. Alexi Hawley, the showrunner of the ABC police procedural “The Rookie,” said in a memo to cast and crew members that there would be “no more ‘live’ weapons on the show.”
In the future, all gunfire on “The Rookie” will come from airsoft guns — replica toys that use pellets instead of bullets — with CGI muzzle flashes added in post-production, Hawley wrote in the memo, first reported by The Hollywood Reporter and confirmed by NBC News.
“Any risk is too much risk,” he wrote.
Eric Kripke, the showrunner for Amazon’s dark comedy “The Boys,” made a similar pledge: Source
You can keep your fake-ass CGI gunshots to yourself, I will keep only watching movies where all deaths are real
Animals were definitely harmed during the making of this movie. And it wasn’t just one or two, it was a pretty apalling number of them. We’re not good people.
Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey urged the judge to impose the maximum prison sentence and designate Gutierrez-Reed as a “serious violent offender” to limit her eligibility for a sentence reduction later, describing the defendant’s behavior on the set of “Rust” as exceptionally reckless.
Morrissey told the judge Monday that she reviewed nearly 200 phone calls that Gutierrez-Reed had made from jail over the last month. She said she was hoping there would be a moment when the defendant would take responsibility for what happened or express genuine remorse.
“That moment has never come,” Morrissey said. “Ms. Gutierrez continues to refuse to accept responsibility for her role in the death of Halyna Hutchins.”
producers should be in jail for 5-10 years or they won’t learn to cut costs
