I
watched a picture called Crown Vic,
from 2019, because it had Thomas Jane. I
know he’s done a lot of stuff, but I didn’t take much notice until The Expanse – my bad. Crown Vic is pretty good, a series of incidents, really, not a rising narrative
arc, about a pair of L.A. patrol cops on a single night shift, the old salt and
the rookie kid, Jane of course the lifer, showing the newbie the ropes. It’s a well-made movie, handsomely shot, with
a handful of good cameos, both funny and disturbing, and I liked it enough to look
up the writer/director’s credits, Joel Souza.
Souza
wrote four pictures before Crown Vic,
and directed three of them, but what made me sit up and take notice is that the
picture he started work on next was a Western with Alec Baldwin, titled Rust.
This
may or may not ring a bell with the rest of you, but Rust was on location right down the road from here, at Bonanza
Creek ranch, a few miles south of Santa
Fe. Souza and
his cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, were rehearsing a set-up with Baldwin. At some
point, Baldwin drew a prop weapon, and cocked
it. The gun went off. From later investigation, it turns out there
was live round in the gun. The bullet
hit Hutchins, went through her, and hit Souza.
She died; he recovered.
Production shut down, and it’s unlikely to resume. There’s probably no way to get to the bottom
of what actually happened.
The
word “complacency” was used by the Santa
Fe county sheriff.
One question is how an assistant director could call out “cold gun,” and
then hand Baldwin a loaded one. Another is how dummy rounds, live ammo, and
blanks were all present on the set. This
called attention to the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, and her level of
experience. Hannah is Thell Reed’s daughter. Thell Reed is one of the more celebrated
gun-handlers in Hollywood,
right up there with Arvo Ojala, and it’s hard to imagine Hannah being stupid about
guns. In fact, soon after the shooting,
word got out that she’d argued for stricter safety protocols and basic firearms
instruction for the cast and crew, and she’d been turned down because it wasn’t
in the budget. The more unsettling thing
to me is that neither the AD nor the actor thought to check the weapon for
themselves.
Be
this as it may, let’s turn our attention to the gun itself. Alec Baldwin has recently said that he didn’t
pull the trigger. This may in fact be
true. The gun he was holding was a
replica of a Colt single-action Army. A
lot of these are made in Italy
by Uberti, and imported by American distributors like Cimarron. [See below]
This is by no means a primitive gun.
It was state-of-the-art in 1871.
Granted, there have been a few improvements over the last 150 years, but
it’s a proven and reliable design. It
does, on other hand, have safety issues.
The cylinder holds six rounds, but you only load five, and leave the
hammer down on an empty chamber. You
cock the gun, and the cylinder rotates.
It’s not a good idea to pull the hammer back with just the ball of your
thumb, straight back; you want the joint of your thumb across the hammer, or your thumb could
slip off. And the trigger is very light:
it’s seated directly against the hammer, and slides out from under it with a
breath of air. If you’re not familiar
with the hardware, it’s an accident waiting to happen.
Did it
happen this way? I have no idea. And while I don’t know guns upside-down and
inside-out like Steve Hunter, I think I know this particular gun fairly well. I’ve
been shooting it for sixty years. It’s
not at all inconceivable that the gun went off, in effect, all by itself.
This,
of course, addresses only the mechanical question, and absolves nobody of
responsibility. There was a culture of carelessness
on the picture. It was make-believe.
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