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It was ultimately his responsibility because it was his production. It was not his fault for pulling the trigger, it was the unsafe working conditions on set.
If any of us died at work due to unsafe working conditions then our families would definitely want the employer held responsible to the full extent of the law. Baldwin may be a famous actor but in this situation he was an employer too, not just an actor.
That seems to contradict the article:
The prosecutor is explicitly arguing that he has responsibility because he was holding the gun.
I will be interested to see the angle the prosecution takes. I think there's a real sense of embarrassment from the authorities on this one, and they're trying to make sure they don't look like they're sweeping it under the rug to mollify the Hollywood people, but it's a case with pretty big holes. Since it's "only" involuntary manslaughter, I wonder if the angle they'll take is that there's a legitimate question of fact that even an actor could see that the armorer was a disaffected nepobaby who was bad at her job, and the production wasa chaotic mess, and that all this raised the bar for how Baldwin should have proceeded.
he did. You hold any weapon in your hand, and use it in an irresponsible manner, you're responsible.
yes, even if an 'expert' tells you it's safe. he had enough wherewithal to know it's a weapon inherently designed to kill. and to be perfectly blunt, it wasn't even necessary that he carry a real firearm with dummies. they weren't filming. they were setting up shots, checking angles and such...
and he should have had enough professional experience to know, you don't pass guns around like that on a set. it's controlled by a single person whose responsible for it, and it's either locked up, being held by that one person, or being actively used by the actor.
The way it works on a movie set is that the weapons master is supposed to check to make sure the weapon is 100% safe if the trigger is pulled and then hands it to the actor. The actor has to be in the head space to do their role properly, which would not include worrying about whether or not the gun is loaded since, in their mind, it's loaded. That's exactly why the job of weapons master exists. In this case, it's the weapons master who fucked up. Baldwin fucked up by creating unsafe workplace practices, not because he pulled the trigger.
Gutierrez-Reed was likely specifically hired because she was inexperienced. Movie sets are chaotic, the work is fast paced and rushed, and safety protocols slow things down. As they say: Time is money. She may not have specifically been hired by Baldwin, but she wasn't really in a position to push back against it. (she should have, and she's every bit as negligent.)
However, Baldwin has had a long, long acting career, much of it handling firearms. He- as a professional actor- should have known what the protocols should have been, and should have said something like "hey, you're not the armorer", when Dave Halls handed him the pistol.
What a lot of people seem to be misunderstanding is that more than one person can be responsible. Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, Baldwin were all negligent in a variety of ways.
The simplest of ways to have prevented this was to not be using a functional fire arm. There are movie props that are near-perfect replicas (and, on film, would look perfect.) without being capable of firing. This is particularly true considering they weren't doing live shoots. they were doing blocking, which is a process by where they set up the cameras and check for issues. One of the issues they should have been looking for is, "is this a safe direction to point the gun".
if you need any more reason to realize you can't ever assume a firearm, or any other weapon, is "100% safe", I suggest you give Anna Hutchin's family a call.
as for his "headspace" do you really think it's normal for actors to be totally, completely and wholly unaware of what they're doing? that in fight scenes they're actually fighting, rather than following a script in perfect choreography? that they're allowed to not pay attention to safety? No. Every one is always most concerned with safety. Or they should be. yes. that includes the actors.
I think fighting in fight scenes can and often does cause serious injury resulting in hospitalizations, so I'm not sure why you think that's an especially good argument. It doesn't have to even be a fight scene. I just read yesterday that Nancy Travis cut her the tip of her finger off with a knife during So I Married an Axe Murderer because she was laughing at what Mike Myers was doing- intentionally making her character laugh in the scene. They could have used a dull knife, but they didn't.
A better example would be Stallone ending up in the ICU for a week because he wanted the fight at the end of Rocky IV to be realistic, so he told Dolph Lundgren to forget the choreography and Lundgren punched too hard. May I remind you it was Stallone who was directing that movie and still wanted to actually be punched in a boxing ring so he could be in the acting headspace.
There are also character actors like Daniel Day-Lewis who live their characters 24/7 starting long before filming begins and not stopping until it ends. All of his blades in Gangs of New York were razor sharp unless it was known for certain that they would be connecting with someone- but you can't be certain of that.
That's just how movies and actors are.
Could they have used a realistic prop gun? That I don't know about. I would say it would depend on just how realistic we are talking when shot close-up with a high-definition digital camera and blown up to fit an IMAX screen. I'm guessing there gets to be a point where just buying the gun makes more sense than trying to buy a lookalike that looks good enough.
Method acting has its draw backs and one of them is safety.
“That’s just how actors are” is a shitty, pathetic excuse for putting other people at risk.
Particularly when that risk is from a weapon fundamentally designed to kill people, and it certainly doesn’t absolve anyone of criminal liability.
Yes it is, which is why there is a weapon master to (usually) ensure people aren't put at risk.
Brandon Lee was killed by a gun with dummy bullets. Before that, no one had even thought that sort of thing would happen. Before Rust, no one thought this would happen because no one had been killed by an arms master being this negligent before.
I think things will be different in the future, but expecting an actor to understand the nuances of firearms, let alone be able to do that when they're trying to prepare for something, should not have been something people should have expected.
And really, your bringing up choreography shows why. Actors are trusting the people who give them the swords that the swords won't actually cause serious damage. No one is expecting the actors to test that out on watermelons before shooting.
Also, note I have said nothing about criminal liability.
A little curious as to how you make 2-3 pounds of sword-shaped steel “safe”.
It doesn’t matter if it’s not sharp. It’s still going to brain a person if they get hit the wrong way, and any one older than a 10 yo would recognize that the moment they picked it up.
So if your hypothetical weapons master were to say “no no really, it’s safe, just hit them upside the head,” as a rational adult you kinda have to stop and think about it.
And again? My suspicious nature says they hired her specifically because she was inexperienced, and wouldn’t know to push for those more strident safety protocols. Which cost time and energy and get in the way of “artistic” shit.
Knowing that, and knowing that there were prior incidents of accidental discharges… you’d have to be an idiot for taking these people’s word that it was safe.
(Wasn’t Hutchins organizing the Union to strike because of those safety problems? I also dont think it was an accident, but I don’t have more than my gut feeling on that.)
Maybe so, but remember, Baldwin was the one who hired her and fired the gun. So he clearly trusted her to know what she was doing. Was that stupid and negligent on his part because of who he hired? Definitely since it was her second job and there were already complaints about her previous job. Was it stupid and negligent on his part because he trusted the idea that the weapons master made the weapon safe? If so, virtually every Hollywood actor given a gun capable of firing real bullets is just as stupid and negligent.
I really don't think we should start charging actors for crimes when all they were done was handed the gun and told what to do with it, not expecting to cause anyone any harm.
Charge Baldwin with negligence for being a producer, sure. That's an entirely different issue.
Worker go in without a mask and gets cancer: should have known 🤷♂️
Completely different scenarios. In yours the person hurts themselves. In this case Baldwin hurt someone else, allegedly due to his own negligence.
Closer to: Worker drives forklift around blindfolded. Hits someone killing them. It's both the managers fault and blindfold guy.
Fault is percentage based on the US. The employer and employer can be civilly liable for damages. But this is a criminal trial.
If this was a trucker who refused to check his blind spot routineoy before merging and killed someone the trucker would be held to account.
Yeah it was. He says he didn't pull it, but there was nothing wrong with the gun that would cause it to go off any other way. He was pointing it at people. He pointed a real gun at people and he pulled the trigger. Him being told the gun wasn't loaded is irrelevant. There are several levels of negligence at play and there's no excuse for any of it.