There’s no indication currently live ammo was used that I can find. Details are sparse but the reason I brought up how blanks work is because you don’t need live ammo to accidentally kill someone, blanks will do just fine. (As I assume you know since you’ve trained with them.)
Indeed. As I remember it, Voyagers actor Jon Eric Hexum killed himself by playing Russian Roulette with a pistol loaded with blanks. Problem, obviously, was that he put the barrel of the gun right to his temple, and the propulsion of the gas from the blank round and the expulsion of the paper wadding in the shell killed him.
Budget has a lot to do with how good CG and the prop gun looks, and in the case of indie films the muzzle flashes added in post typically do look terrible because they just don’t have the funds or time to do anything more than pop a basic flash from a library onto the shot. In this case, it sounds like it was a close-up shot of the gun going off, so CG would have to be spot-on to pass muster.
I hadn’t seen this confirmed by anyone yet.
Yes. That’s why a production that can hire 230 extras, have 72 people on a location shoot and afford Alec Baldwin and Travis Fimmel can also hire experienced matchmove/vfx artists to do that.
Very true that details are extremely sparse, but the fact that not one but two people were struck makes me think it had to be either a live round that penetrated one of them (probably the DP) and struck the other or a blank shotgun shot that hit them with some wadding or some such.
Where did you get this detail?
I don’t think we can assume anything. I can picture plenty of gun fights in movies where successive shots are fired fast enough that in a tragic accident more than one shot could be fired before realizing something has gone wrong.
Yep. Until we get a lot more detail, we’re all of us just speculating on different scenarios that may not be remotely germane to actual events on set.
Alec Baldwin is a producer on the movie.
And Travis Fimmel? Are you saying he was expensive? I doubt it.
As for the location shoot with extras, indie films do that all the time. For a certain level of indie a location shoot is paradoxically cheaper than a studio shoot.
I remain pretty unconvinced. I don’t think this production was close to a big budget, but from what I gather from a variety of indie filmmakers and vfx artists speaking out about this today, decent gunplay effects added in post aren’t exactly budget breakers either.
(I have no firsthand experience on this matter either way, to be clear. But with that being the case on lots of stuff, I tend to give credence – perhaps too much, and perhaps there are opposing views on it from other experts – to those who do this stuff all the time.)
Wouldn’t the reason to have live rounds be to create all the other stuff that goes along with firing a weapon, like the reaction of the actors, including the one holding the weapon?
Oh to be sure, there are a bunch of valid reasons to go with CG and completely non-firing weapons and if they wanted to afford it, they could’ve. I’m sure the director and producers thought they needed to do it old-school despite what outsiders may say after the fact.
This guy, for example, gives some insight into how even a “good” production can get sketchy.
Two people being injured (and crew, at that) is the strange part to me as well. But I can’t imagine Baldwin would intentionally fire a gun loaded with live ammunition towards people (I mean, unless he was actually trying to kill them, which doesn’t seem to be the case) , and while live ammo is sometimes used in filming, I would hope it would be too tightly controlled to end up in a gun accidentally.
Blanks, on the other hand… they are dangerous but not necessarily understood to be.
Oooooof. This is real bad, if true.
IATSE Local 44, which covers prop masters, sent an email to its members early Friday morning that said the gun used in the scene contained “a live round” and the production’s propmaster was not a member of Local 44.
Yeah, holy shit that is BAD.
I know that IATSE members had been threatening strikes for the past month or so (which was finally settled I think this past week)…but I wonder if the thought of impending job action made this production go with a non-union prop master here.
That’s even weirder to me, but then I don’t know anything about film production, but how do you send an email in advance knowing there is one (1) live round in a gun… unless you put it there? Like, hey guys, I know that we have a box of blanks, and that the 15th bullet is real, and I saw them grab 10 of them, and so I know there’s a real one mixed in there. I’ll just passive aggressively send an email instead of calling the set and warning the cast because the production is trying to get around union employees… I mean, what?
Complete guess, but since it was the cinematographer that was killed and the director was wounded, the scenario that popped into my head is a front POV shot of whoever is being shot by Baldwin. So you have a bunch of people clustered behind the main camera and the actor pointing and shooting directly into the camera/bad guy’s perspective.
Yes, as discussed in this very thread! There were also alternatives already offered (airsoft replicas, for example), and then we agreed none of us are experts. A blanket statement like “real guns are always necessary to achieve realistic results” is probably just as wrong as “visual effects can always achieve realistic results”. Second guessing any particular production in that regard is probably over most of our heads without a lot more information.
The accident happened on Thursday afternoon at 2pm local time. The email went out overnight.
Yep, fully co-signed. We’ve already seen some information leaked that turned out to be either disputed or incorrect on this already, I’m afraid.
If the union email is correct, then that would seem to back up the reports of Alec Baldwin talking about unknowingly being handed a “hot gun” during the accident.
Immediately after the incident, an eyewitness told Hollywood gossip site Showbiz 411 that Baldwin started asking how he could have been given a “hot gun” — meaning a firearm loaded with real ammunition.
“In all my years, I’ve never been handed a hot gun,” the actor allegedly kept saying.