As most of my friends know, I used to be a working actor. These days I mostly do voice work (when I can get it) but before my poor health gutted my acting career, I did a fair amount of stage and a little bit of film work, and I wanted to say something about the tragedy that the family of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins is experiencing. My heart goes out to them and to Alec Baldwin as well; I can’t even begin to imagine what hell he must be feeling.
The level of negligence and incompetence that led to this tragedy is unbelievable. My first question was, what the hell was the Assistant Director doing with the gun in the first place? It is not the AD’s place to deliver firearms to the actors. Where was the propmaster? Where was the armorer? Where was, at the very least, a pyrotechnician? Why were live rounds anywhere near the production at all?
Basic gun safety was clearly not being observed by anyone. The first thing that anyone, anyone, should do upon being handed a weapon is to check it. Make sure the load is correct, the safety is on, there is no round in the chamber, etc. You do not blindly trust what anyone who hands you a weapon tells you, you check it for yourself, always. Which means being taught by an expert on how to do exactly that with that weapon.
Weapons are never to be pointed directly at another person, ever. Make it look good, but safety first. And they are never, ever, ever to be used for pranks or as toys.
When I was first starting out, I played the role of Lennie in “Of Mice And Men” and [spoiler alert] at the end of the play, Lennie is shot and killed by George. The production was done in the round, in a theater with the audience very close to the actors. The muzzle was close enough to my head that I could see the flame from the blast go past my head. The safety level on that production was extremely high; it was around the time that actor Jon-Erik Hexum had accidentally killed himself by firing a blank at his own head in jest. We had an armorer who made sure that only unwadded blanks were used. We had a member of local law enforcement (a sheriff’s deputy and marine vet, if memory serves) who checked that Luger every time an actor touched it, and who stood guard over it every night. He made sure that the right kind of ammo was loaded and trained all of us in how to properly check and use the gun; he was the one who taught me that you never take a weapon from another’s hand on trust; that it can never be checked often enough. (A quick word on blanks: there is more than one kind. Unwadded blanks are just cartridges with powder; maybe a tiny of bit of paper to hold the powder in place. They just explode a blast of hot air and plasma out of the barrel. They are still lethal. Firing an unwadded blank at close range into, say, one’s temple would still transmit a tremendous, potentially lethal amount of explosive force. This is how Hexum and actor Brandon Lee were killed. A wadded blank is just what it sounds like: a small amount of cotton is packed into the cartridge to hold in the powder. That wadding is fired out of the barrel of the gun at the same speed and with the same force as a bullet, and at close range is just as deadly.)
The point is that there should have been a number of safety precautions in place, any one of which would have prevented this terrible tragedy, and it seems as though none of them were. This morning I learned that one contributing factor may have been that a union crew on the film had recently been replaced by a non-union crew after the IATSE settlement, which puts the blame even more squarely on the shoulders of the producers, if true.
Know that, sad as it may be, nobody but nobody can be trusted with your safety except you.
