How A Misstep Led to A Woman's Death & Alec Baldwin’s Downfall

On Oct. 21 at approximately 1:48 p.m., famous moviestar Alec Baldwin’s life was changed forever. 

While filming his recent movie “Rust,” Baldwin was performing a rustic scene which enabled him to be holding a .45 Long Colt revolver. The gun was said to be “cold” meaning it held no bullets and was disarmed. Although, as investigators proved, the gun was loaded. 

Baldwin shot the “cold” gun toward the camera as the scene provoked, yet to his dismay a loud noise went off and the gun actually shot. 

Baldwin hit film cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and killed her, as well as injured the film’s director Joel Souza. 

An incident like this hasn’t been seen in recent times. Films have been ever so careful with ammunition and weaponry and much consideration is put in when discussing using these within films. This specific incident has brought a lot of attention to props and ammunition being used in films and how dangerous they can be.

Thousands have signed a petition to ban and permanently remove firearms from film and TV sets and the conversation has been trending all throughout the Internet. 

Baldwin spoke to the press for the first time on Oct. 23, saying he was not allowed to discuss the situation with the press and was ordered that the investigation must be conducted in private. 

“She was my friend,” Baldwin tells photographers, on video that appeared on TMZ, as reported by the New York Times. “We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together, and then this horrible event happened.”

Baldwin, who said that he doubted that production would resume, called the shooting a “one in a trillion event” and said that he was interested in discussions about limiting firearms on sets. “We have to realize that when it does go wrong and it’s this horrible, catastrophic thing,” he says, “some new measures have to take place.”’

It is a very rare occurrence for anything of this nature to occur on a movie set. Although, even though they are very uncommon, they are not unheard of, and have occurred many times in history before. 

Elon University Associate Professor of Performing Arts Natalie Hart, who has professional expertise in scene design for theatre and theatrical properties comments on Elon and their protocol for weaponry in theatre.

“Elon University Performing Arts has a written protocol in place for shows that use ‘firing weapons,’” Hart says. “We created our policy based on industry best-practices and consulting with experts. First of all, we treat anything shaped like a gun as a firing weapon. Secondly, we never use live firing ammunition. We almost never use blank ammunition and when we do, we have a licensed fight director involved in the training and use. Almost all of the time, the weapons that you see in our performances are non-firing replicas—hunks of plastic or metal that don’t have the components to fire or eject a projectile.”  

As a recent NPR article states, “An Associated Press report from 2016 determined that from 1990 until the time of publication, at least 43 people died on sets in the U.S. and more than 150 had been left with life-altering injuries.” 

Kevin Williams, the prop department supervisor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Discusses the incidents within the NPR article. Williams has studied props for about 20 years and was seen as a professional in the incident which occurred with Baldwin.

"It is an extremely rare circumstance that anything like this happens. Especially nowadays when there are so many different procedures and policies in place," said Kevin Williams. "This is one of these freak accidents."

The major question now is… who should be blamed and found responsible? Is Alec Baldwin at fault? Are the crew members? And how did the “cold” gun become live with ammunition? The police are currently investigating this situation and finding out who to hold responsible for the weaponry. 

“We still treat these replicas as dangerous weapons,” Hart says. “When they are going to be used, we notify campus security. We keep these props locked up and accessible only to the faculty props head and the production weapons handler. The student handler must go through training and use the protocols with intentional redundancies that create layers of safety checks. We also educate other students, faculty, and guests involved in that production.” 

Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash.