Poor Alec Baldwin. He’s been through an ordeal at work beyond the wildest imaginings of most of us, at least of us who haven’t been cops or served in a war, and now he can’t get any peace. He fled to Vermont with wife Hilaria and the kids, but finally was discovered and agreed to talk to reporters on the side of the road.
The interview discloses that Rust probably will not go back into production, which was the way that industry insiders were calling the shot. Baldwin also holds forth on reforms that he would like to see in Hollywood, including banning the use of real firearms. That’s a sterling idea if they can’t be handled safely. Daily Beast:
Baldwin said Saturday that he was instructed by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office not to comment on the active investigation, but he did not let that prevent him from speaking on Hutchins herself.
“A woman died. She was my friend,” he said. “The day I arrived in Santa Fe to start shooting, I took her to dinner… We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.”
When a paparazzi asked about Baldwin’s meeting with Hutchins’ husband but couldn’t remember Hutchins’ name, Hilaria said, “If you’re spending this much time waiting for us, you should know her name.”
Over the objections of his wife, Baldwin said he’d met with Hutchins’ son and husband, who he described as “overwhelmed with grief.”
Watch the video. Baldwin is handling the situation professionally and admirably. His wife is unnecessarily hostile to the press. This is a big story and Baldwin is a big star so of course the press is going to cover it. Demonizing them is ridiculous. But perhaps it’s understandable because the press revealed last year that Hilaria was not born in Mallorca, Spain as her profile with CAA talent agency indicates, but rather in Boston and that she was known as “Hillary” until 2009. Also, there are videos of her speaking with a Spanish accent in one and not in another, so questions were raised late last year. Then it became tabloid fodder when Donald Trump, Jr. chimed in.
Alec Baldwin should play Alec Baldwin when SNL parodies his wife pretending she’s Spanish for the last few decades as opposed to the basic white girl from Mass that she actually is.
It would be the first funny thing Saturday Night Live has produced in years.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 31, 2020
Baldwin said she made her Boston heritage clear to her husband when they met at a vegan restaurant in 2011. She was speaking in Spanish to an Argentine man and his girlfriend who were seated at a table next to one where her future husband was seated. “I walked by him,” she said of Alec Baldwin and he called out to her, “‘Who are you, I must know you, I must know you,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘Where are you from?’ And I said, ‘I’m from Boston.’ That was the first thing I said, that has always been my narrative.” (Still: “My wife is from Spain,” Alec Baldwin once said, on television, to David Letterman.)
Life in the fast lane. On the positive side of the ledger, if the tragedy on the set of Rust leads to reforms on gun handling and safety in the entertainment industry, so that this can never happen to anybody else, that will be a plus.
I agree that while Baldwin’s wife feels protective this was an instance in which she should have kept in the background. Quietly. As for Baldwin himself I figure he is in fact distraught. As someone with well over a half-century of firearms experience and knowing Baldwin has done movies where he used firearms I’ve had trouble getting past his not checking that revolver himself before putting it in his holster. If as it now seems they had been using “dummy” rounds sometimes (to those who don’t know a dummy round consists of a casing with a bullet inserted BUT has no powder in the cartridge and the primer that if real would contain the initial charge is actually a solid piece of brass. IOW it CAN’T fire because there’s no powder) perhaps his accepting the AD’s “cold gun” call is understandable. However, unless there was supposed to be a shot of him checking his gun to see if it was loaded I can’t for the life of me understand why even a dummy round would be in there. Anyway, by all accounts Baldwin trusted the system (so to speak) and someone died as a result. And he pulled the trigger. That’s going to be damned tough for him to live with.
A broader question, especially now that the film’s armorer is speaking out and blaming the production company for the lack of proper safety (she says she wasn’t allotted time for doing safety briefs, had two jobs which didn’t allow for her to focus on her role as armorer and some other stuff) is Baldwin’s role as one of the Producers.
Since you have some background in film perhaps this is something you’ve already teased out of coverage (that I missed) or have been looking for. Or at least you can clarify my own understanding of things.
“Producer” means to most of us a manager of some type that has authority over a production. We tend to think of it as fairly comprehensive but it’s my understanding the term is flexibly applied in the business and isn’t always what it seems. It can be nothing more than an ego stroking add-on to an actor or other person in the credits that looks good on their resume/career credits, all the way up to overall approval of everything about the actual production once the budget is approved and handed to them by the studio with the “here’s the script and how much you can spend – now get it done” mandate.
In practice, when a producer/co-producer is something more than a person given the title as an honorary, ego-stroker thing duties and/or areas of focus can vary. Actors, especially big name actor’s producer credit is often limited to their input on the script, or the hiring of other actors or some combination of the two. But they have nothing (or virtually nothing) to do with the budget and their only input on the filming schedule is (because they are in demand and often involved in multiple projects) is their availabilty to be on set on certain days. That can often force changes to what the Director had planned.
If that was what Baldwin’s role as a producer was then his liability for budget decisions that led to such a short schedule for filming, hiring crew and decisions about union/non-union is quite limited. However, some big-name actors have some dream of taking a pet project that they or a friend has spent years or even decades trying to get made and helping to find the funding and studio resources to get the thing made. In those cases they will likely have input on financial and/or staffing decisions. THAT is a question that’s huge in my mind. Was Baldwin, who certainly doesn’t need a “vanity” credit as a producer at this point in his career involved in the budget/production stuff or was he more of a “script and talent” recommendations type of producer?
As I said, I’ve been looking for the answer to that but no one seems to be saying. No doubt lawyers for the production company are at the direction of the Executive Producer (the top dog in charge of the whole shebang) making damned sure no one says shit without clearing it through them. Also, you have the LE folks who also don’t want ANYONE on that set that day or who was involved earlier in the production talking publicly until their own investigation is completed. It’s one of those relatively rare times when LE and lawyers who are preparing a possible defense (well, some of the lawyers at least) are actually trying to help each other.
I know if I’d been stationed in CA when I separated from the Corps and stayed there, and wound up one way or another (I kinda sorta knew Dale Dye once upon a time back in the 80s when he spent a little time at Henderson Hall) I wouldn’t hand any gun to any actor without making damned sure it was safe AND keeping an eye on it (and other guns I’d handed to actors) until it was safely back in my hands. And if pressed into service as one of those nameless extras in the background I sure as hell wouldn’t trust anyone other than myself to ensure a gun I’d been handed was safe. If some armorer or AD didn’t like me taking a few seconds to do so I’d have told them go to hell.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why any actor who would be handling a firearm for a role wouldn’t familiarize themselves with it/them and learn how to check for themselves to ensure it’s safe for a scene. And do so every fucking time! The “I don’t like guns and avoid touching them if at all possible” thing doesn’t fly with me. If the money (or if amateur – say in a stage play) chance to perform some role as an actor is enough to overcome your dislke of guns then by god you have a responsibility to learn enough about them and the one(s) you will be handling to learn to check it for safety. And a RESPONSIBILITY to not walk, but RUN from any production that won’t let you do so.
Which means that while I might wind up feeling sort of bad for Baldwin, there are limits to the amount of sympathy I’m willing to extend to him even if he was “only” the literal trigger man in this accidental shooting.
Are you saying that somebody didn’t know the difference between a “dummy” round and a real bullet? That’s incredible if true.
Outside of movie making dummy rounds are used for training – teaching people how to load firearms and/or magazines that are used in firearms. To an untrained person, a brass dummy round with a bullet, even a hollowed out one inserted at the business end will probably feel the same in their hand weight wise. That’s why there are specific visual means for instructors and students to know a round is a dummy round. Dummy rounds, often referred to as “snap caps” are also used for dry-firing guns for practice. To practice both technique in aiming and smooth trigger pull but also rapid dry firing to build up muscle stamina and memory. You’d be surprised how quickly your hand can wear out rapid firing a revolver. Why use a dummy round for dry firing? A lot of dry firing where the firing pin doesn’t strike anything can, over time affect it’s own performance and you don’t want a firing pin (or spring) breaking when you really, really need that gun to work.
But again, some dummy rounds are obviously not real. Some are even made of plastic that can have non normal colors or shapes to make the point they are real but only training devices. It’s the ones that are in brass cases with actual bullets in the end that make things tricky and potentially dangerous. Again, why use them at all? Simple. Speedloading/reloading with adrenaline pumping makes for enough of a challenge without having practiced repeatedly. So bullets/rounds as close to the feel of real ones as possible matters. In those types of dummy rounds the “primer” is not an actual primer but a solid piece of metal. Brass for nickel rounds and nickel for brass ones. Or the fake primer itself is painted black or some other easily discernable color so that people know the round is a dummy.
Now, one a movie set you see all kinds of rounds being carried and loaded. Think about any western you’ve seen with the gunbelts full of rounds, and watching actors load/reload guns. They are doing so with dummy rounds of course, or at least damn well should be. I think where the problem and therefore danger comes in is if you think about it you sometimes see reloading from the shooter’s point of view – looking down into the round(s) being loaded. A dummy round that would normally have a primer that would identify it as such obviously wouldn’t work, so you’d need to use one with a realistic looking primer.
That opens up all kinds of possibilities and it’s hard to think of good ones. Needless to say the simplest solution would be to say screw the cost and do whatever takes and editing needed (including adjusting the script/actor’s “marks”) so that you never, even go directly from said dummy rounds being loaded to that gun then being pointed at, much less fired at someone. Also, if some fucking actor who insists on “keeping it real” (or director for that matter) insists on having truly realistic looking dummy rounds on set during a scene then the armorer SHOULD be the one in control and able to call cut/halt, basically stop things cold no matter what. And anyone not obeying that command should be kicked off the picture and if SAG has a problem with that then fuck em.
It also means only allowing someone to serve as armorer on a film after they’ve served a LONG apprenticeship, and have some very demanding firearms safety instructor certifications. And every actor handling a firearm should have to go through a course taught by the armorer, with the final exam being administered by another movie armorer NOT affiliated with that movie. Armorers on movie sets should be allotted the resources the need to hire the staff necessary to supervise all munitions and weapons that will be used on a given day’s shooting and a safety brief should be mandatory before filming begins.
Yes, experienced people will bitch about it. To that I’d say what I used to say to staff I’d train to care for developmentally disabled adults. I’d ask if they knew who people like Michael Jordan, or Jack Nicklaus or Tiger Woods were and all replied yes. And most agreed they were if not the greatest at their sport then one of the top two or three in history. I’d then point out how many hours a DAY these guys would spend practicing, and on basic fundamental stuff. And challenge them – if THEY don’t think practice damned near every day, and devoting a big chunk of that to basic fundamental stuff then what makes YOU so freaking special?
I could go on and on about this.
The bottom line is that there are some things, that if you do them properly each and every time will prevent something bad from happening. And getting away with skipping it now and then should bring a sense of shame, instead of what too often it actually does which is cause people to skip over some very necessary stuff with the result being a tragedy.
This cutting corners on firearms safety proves my point.
former guy must have a great deal of time on his hands….oh yeah. lol
I find it extremely hypocritical that Baldwin catches soo much hell,(not saying he didn’t screw up), over the accidental death of ONE person, while Trump is DIRECTLY AND KNOWINGLY responsible for HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of deaths & COUNTING. Where is all the outrage??????????????????????? OUR CULTURE IS EVIL.
IANAL, but on the basis of what I have heard and read, if I were a prosecutor, I would not dream of charging Alec Baldwin the actor for this death. Everyone on set appears to have heard the person handing him the weapon say “Cold gun.” It is said to have been very loud.
But Alec Baldwin the producer is a different proposotion. Also according to what has been published, there was carelessness on the set with general safety precautions, the original armourer ([sic] had left and the one in charge was quite inexperienced. I would have lots of questions about who hired the crew, whose duty it was to enforce safety protocols, how can I get in touch with people who have left the crew (there are said to have been several), and so on.. And in the end, the buck stops with the producer, unless someone can convince me it doesn’t.
A friend who lives outside the US has suggested the whole situation may have been set up by crazy people who support Trump** still.
it seems far fetched to me – but on the other hand, many things the GQP has done hin order to discredit honorable people have been far fetched. I don’t know. But the answers to questions like who hired whome would come in handy if one wanted to oursue the thought.