The prosecutors in New Mexico who made the decision to charge actor Alec Baldwin with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the “Rust” movie set said Thursday that he bore responsibility for ensuring that the gun he was handed did not contain live rounds.
“He doesn’t actually have to touch each projectile, each piece of ammunition,” Mary Carmack-Altwies, the district attorney in Santa Fe County, said in an interview after the decision to charge him in the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, was announced. “He has an absolute duty to know that what is in the gun that is being placed in his hand is safe.”
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was in charge of weapons on set as the movie’s armourer and who will also be charged with involuntary manslaughter, also had that responsibility, the prosecutors said, as did Dave Halls, the first assistant director, who reached a plea agreement. (Halls called out “cold gun,” indicating that it did not have live ammunition, when he handed the revolver to Baldwin, according to court papers filed earlier.)
But some armourers, actors, union leaders and others who work in the film industry questioned the assertion by prosecutors that actors bore the responsibility to check the guns they were handed on set.
“People in the industry are acting with surprise that Baldwin is hit hard on this as much as he is, and that others in the food chain are not,” said Dutch Merrick, a studio armourer and instructor who has worked on movies including “First Man” and the show “SEAL Team.”
“I honestly think that the district attorney profoundly misunderstands the process of handling guns on sets,” Merrick said. “There is no hard-and-fast rule that says an actor must check a gun.”
He said Baldwin could be vulnerable for pointing the gun at a person; Baldwin has previously said he was following direction when he positioned the gun.
SAG-AFTRA, the union representing film, television and radio workers, said in a statement that the “prosecutor’s contention that an actor has a duty to ensure the functional and mechanical operation of a firearm on a production set is wrong and uninformed,” adding that “an actor’s job is not to be a firearms or weapons expert.”
Larry Zanoff, the lead armourer at Independent Studio Services, who has worked on films including “Django Unchained,” emphasised that “the last person with boots on the ground who has responsibility for this is the armourer.”
But Bryan W. Carpenter, an armourer who is advising the Santa Fe district attorney’s office, said that there had been a trend to sacrifice safety on movie sets in favour of speed, and that all people handling weapons or ammunition on a set — including actors — had a duty to check them.
“Everyone is responsible for that,” he said.
The entrance to the film set of "Rust" is seen through a barbed wire fence after Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer and wounded a director when he discharged a prop gun on the movie set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the United States, on Oct 22, 2021. (Photo: Reuters)
The prosecutors said they had interviewed several actors who told them they did check their own firearms to make sure they were safe to handle.
Lawyers for both Baldwin and Gutierrez-Reed asserted they would be exonerated. Baldwin has repeatedly asserted that checking weapons on set was not his responsibility.
In a statement on Thursday, Luke Nikas, one of Baldwin’s lawyers, said the actor “relied on the professionals with whom he worked, who assured him the gun did not have live rounds.” In a lawsuit the actor filed last year against people involved in the “Rust” production, Nikas wrote that Baldwin had not been taught to check the gun himself.
“Baldwin believed, based on prior gun safety training he received on movie sets, that actors should not unilaterally check guns for live ammunition,” Nikas wrote in the lawsuit. “If actors want to check a gun for their own peace of mind, they should check the gun only with the armourer closely supervising the process.”
(Gutierrez-Reed was not in the building at the time of the shooting — which also wounded the film’s director, Joel Souza — because of coronavirus protocols that limited how many people could be present, she has said.)
In an interview on ABC News after the fatal shooting, Baldwin said that in his career, crew members tasked with managing weapons would sometimes insist on showing people on set the chamber of the gun, but that it did not always happen. S.L. Huang, a film industry armourer, said that armourers were responsible for checking guns and often showed actors, who might not understand guns, that they were safe.
Daniel Leonard, an associate dean of Chapman University’s film school who specialises in set procedures, said the responsibility usually rested with the armourer.
"An actor is the last line of defence and should always confirm themselves that a gun is not loaded," he said. "They are the ones actually holding the thing. But you would never want to rely on an actor for this. Actors are thinking about how to make a scene look as real as possible, they’re worried about staying in character, and they usually aren’t firearms experts. The responsibility falls on the armourer. That’s why that job exists. Actors usually trust them to do their job."
Some of Baldwin’s arguments about why he was not culpable for the shooting were rebutted by prosecutors on Thursday.
He has asserted that he did not pull the trigger before the revolver discharged, explaining that he pulled the hammer back and let it go, but Carmack-Altwies said FBI analysis concluded that the trigger had been pulled. The actor has also said Hutchins was directing him where to point the weapon, as the camera crew was trying to get a tight shot of him drawing it out before a gunfight. Carmack-Altwies said the directions were to point the gun at the camera, which Hutchins was standing next to.
“He did not need to be pointing it directly at her,” she said, “and he certainly did not need to pull the trigger.”
Leonard said that “general practice is to try to never point a gun at anyone, even if it is completely empty,” and that there was “usually a way to cheat the angles so that it makes it look like they are pointing at the person when they are not.” He said plexiglass screens should be used when there was no other option, as in the case of a “draw” scene in a western.
Joshua Kastenberg, a criminal law professor at the University of New Mexico and a former prosecutor, said the case might be difficult to prosecute because of the considerable expenses and the complex set of facts that would be brought in front of a jury, including Baldwin’s account of what he was told about the gun when it was handed to him.
“Nobody involved in this intended for it to happen; what makes it criminal negligence is when an adult fails to act in a manner to safeguard the safety of others,” Kastenberg said. “It’s why you don’t text and drive.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
