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Thursday, January 26, 2023
'Rust' A.D. Dave Halls Gives His Version of Shooting
Variety: Dave Halls, the first assistant director on “Rust,” became the first person held accountable in the death of Halyna Hutchins when he agreed to plead to a misdemeanor charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon.
4 comments:
Jasper
said...
I have been sort of following this case since this tragedy first happened but I haven’t entirely known what was going on at all. All I knew was that the cinematographer had been killed on set by a bullet from a gun Alec Baldwin was holding. The fact that something like this could happen is crazy and unthinkable to me. We think of our industry as one in which so many safety precautions are taken, procedures are followed, and anything dangerous is handled strictly and with redundancy. Even despite this though, this tragedy still happened. This article made me think even more about how crazy it is that this happened. They still don’t know exactly where things went wrong and everyone having contradicting memories and testimonies about how the events unfolded adds an even more complicated level of confusion. I hope that this case does get solved very soon and more importantly, we learn from what happened and make efforts to ensure it never happens again.
This topic is by far the most I've commented on in this blog. It's really exciting to watch this situation play out; it feels like every week, we get a new piece of information that changes the story. I think that this article is particularly interesting, though, because this is the first play by play of the incident that I've heard. As I was reading the article, particularly about the discrepancies between Dave Halls, the assistant director, and others who were present at the shooting, it hit me just how unsafe a movie set can be. Even after this shooting, I don't think I fully understood how dangerous it can be to be on a set, and accidents can be totally ambiguous, like the events of this one are turning out to be. It almost feels like sets ought to have a sort of black box like airplanes, to help with investigations. I guess the best we can hope for is some reform following this shooting.
I have been writing comments about this tragedy since it first occurred. Watching from afar as the story changed and people were blamed- or avoided blame. At the end of the day, my thoughts always came back to, needed to come back to the fact that this is a tragedy where a bright life was lost. I think that as this story grew people lost sight of what is truly important which is that Halyna Hutchins lost her life that day. The more that we learn about what happened the more jumbled the story gets. People try to cover themselves or don’t quite remember what actually happened and so the true story continues to get hazed. I don’t know if we will ever know exactly what happened, exactly what went wrong that day. It is my hope that we are able to learn enough that Halyna Hutchins’ family is able to rest a little easier.
I remember when the news of this fatal shooting was first released and how many different opinions there were as to why this tragedy occurred. While I am not surprised how wildly inconsistent the recounts of the event are, I am appalled at how both Hall and Gutierrez Reed failed to do their jobs. For an assistant director who has worked in the industry for decades to still not understand weapons procedures on set is telling of how incompetent Hall is. And of course for Gutierrez Reed for failing to practice the basic safety precautions. In an interview with a well known weapons specialist, the expert talked about how he is the only person who handles the weapons up to the point the weapon is handed to an actor.. He ensures each piece is stored and locked appropriately and always unloaded. If the weapons specialist on the set of Rust had done her job accordingly, there would not have been this devastating tragedy.
4 comments:
I have been sort of following this case since this tragedy first happened but I haven’t entirely known what was going on at all. All I knew was that the cinematographer had been killed on set by a bullet from a gun Alec Baldwin was holding. The fact that something like this could happen is crazy and unthinkable to me. We think of our industry as one in which so many safety precautions are taken, procedures are followed, and anything dangerous is handled strictly and with redundancy. Even despite this though, this tragedy still happened. This article made me think even more about how crazy it is that this happened. They still don’t know exactly where things went wrong and everyone having contradicting memories and testimonies about how the events unfolded adds an even more complicated level of confusion. I hope that this case does get solved very soon and more importantly, we learn from what happened and make efforts to ensure it never happens again.
This topic is by far the most I've commented on in this blog. It's really exciting to watch this situation play out; it feels like every week, we get a new piece of information that changes the story. I think that this article is particularly interesting, though, because this is the first play by play of the incident that I've heard. As I was reading the article, particularly about the discrepancies between Dave Halls, the assistant director, and others who were present at the shooting, it hit me just how unsafe a movie set can be. Even after this shooting, I don't think I fully understood how dangerous it can be to be on a set, and accidents can be totally ambiguous, like the events of this one are turning out to be. It almost feels like sets ought to have a sort of black box like airplanes, to help with investigations. I guess the best we can hope for is some reform following this shooting.
I have been writing comments about this tragedy since it first occurred. Watching from afar as the story changed and people were blamed- or avoided blame. At the end of the day, my thoughts always came back to, needed to come back to the fact that this is a tragedy where a bright life was lost. I think that as this story grew people lost sight of what is truly important which is that Halyna Hutchins lost her life that day. The more that we learn about what happened the more jumbled the story gets. People try to cover themselves or don’t quite remember what actually happened and so the true story continues to get hazed. I don’t know if we will ever know exactly what happened, exactly what went wrong that day. It is my hope that we are able to learn enough that Halyna Hutchins’ family is able to rest a little easier.
I remember when the news of this fatal shooting was first released and how many different opinions there were as to why this tragedy occurred. While I am not surprised how wildly inconsistent the recounts of the event are, I am appalled at how both Hall and Gutierrez Reed failed to do their jobs. For an assistant director who has worked in the industry for decades to still not understand weapons procedures on set is telling of how incompetent Hall is. And of course for Gutierrez Reed for failing to practice the basic safety precautions. In an interview with a well known weapons specialist, the expert talked about how he is the only person who handles the weapons up to the point the weapon is handed to an actor.. He ensures each piece is stored and locked appropriately and always unloaded. If the weapons specialist on the set of Rust had done her job accordingly, there would not have been this devastating tragedy.
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