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He was negligent but not in his position as the actor holding the weapon. My understanding is he is partly responsible for deciding to choose a non-union safety team that lead to the death.
Actually... Both. In regular Firearm handoff protocols Actors have a responsibility to uphold on their end. If everything is done to spec it is impossible to fire a live round from a firearm. Some small obstruction in the barrel getting missed and propelled might be in the realm of reasonable but part of the process of handoff requires a mini briefing on handoff of the weapon where each round is checked over where the actor can see and only authorized people are allowed to handle weapons at all. Been standard since the Brandon Lee death on "The Crow".
Baldwin took the gun from a person on set whom everyone would have known wasn't supposed to be handling it and didn't insist on a check. In our industry actors are briefed every time they accept a role that it is their partial responsibility to make sure those checks are done because it is not just a safety thing, it's a liability issue if you harm someone. If a check is missed as an actor you are supposed to flag it and refuse the unsafe handoff to clear you of any potential liability or after the fact regrets...
Thing is this protocol has ever been throughly tested in a court setting. The last time anyone was killed by a bullet on a set was the cause of the massive change to the industry standard protocol in a mass concerted effort to do a "never again" style pledge which basically worked for 30 years straight. The other notable gun death was an actor who killed himself with a blank by pointing the gun at his own noggin and pulling the trigger which which was something he was expressly not supposed to do for a scene, he just did it on his own without anybody's sign off.
This industry sea change in part is designed to exonerate Productions from negligence charges like what happened on The Crow but it also made it one of the most well respected industry protocols as the Lee death basically became one of the industry's cautionary tale that lingers being retold to each new generation of crew. While non-union sets tend to be less regimented it is known fact that concerns of gun safety issues were already flagged and bought to production by the concerned Rust crew and no motion was made to change. Potentially Baldwin as part of a group may have directly ignored further appeals to firearm related safety prior to the shooting. This isn't the Brandon Lee situation over again - the industry now is a whole new ball game.
(Edit : Forgot to mention that the Rust crew had almost a full beat for beat dry run of the incident a few days before the incident where Baldwin's stunt double discharged two live rounds after being handed a gun that he was told was "cold"... How one ignores that kind of wake up call I'll never know.)
I read some more comments and I agree, I was too easy to convince that the actor doesn't bear responsibility.
I also liked another comment just discussing that it was a real gun, regardless of on set or off. Like anyone else handling a firearm in any other situation, the actor holding it is responsible for checking if it is loaded before pulling the trigger and for ensuring nobody is in the path of any bullet.
It be like that. As a person with my first decade of union/non union film now under my belt and trying for the shop steward program I find it really difficult to convey to people just how stunningly bad the praxis on the Rust set appears from an insider perspective. It's really difficult because people don't understand how regimented the safety protocols in film are and how ubiquitous certain ones really are. It's also hard for people to really grock power dynamics on a set. Like there have been people who have been banished instantly from set for being in an actor of Baldwin's power positions eyeline. Any regular crew would have risked their jobs to try and appeal directly to Baldwin to be safer and this was the year after film was halted for upwards of 8 months due to covid and was slow to come back. There were a lot of desperate people in film trying to make back the debts they incurred by the unexpected famine.
People have been sentanced to prison on manslaughter charges in film for a lot less than what happened on Rust.
Why do they even use real weapons for those kinds of shots? I fell like a high quality fake would be indistinguishable on screen but not even give the opportunity for something like this to happen except for the actor being given the absolute wrong prop.
More or less because the blanks give a more realistic recoil and the smoke whisps which saves on time and processing in post and you can see if the action works in real time on review.. and there are arguements that handling the real deal does actually add to the performance...
But like the standard done properly makes it incredibly difficult for injuries from weapons to occur. Consider that in 30 years the gun deaths in film plunged to almost zero *. There is way more production out there then there used to be and every scene where you see a gun being fired that is usually not one take and those takes were repeated over and over again. That's tens of thousands of safe handles over the years.
I don't have any issues with sets having or deciding to not have real guns but the real thing is that on a set that is doing the standard every weapon from barely looking like a gun at all rubber replica to projectiless gas powered airsoft gun are all treated as though they were real. When they are handed over you have to be shown exactly what they are and replica or not they can never be left unsupervised. They are always in authorized hands or locked up.
It's part of why this case is so important. Anyone with money can make a non-union film. The best practices transcend union borders because accidents made from cupidity and negligence should have consequences. You ignore the warnings then the consequences are yours. The discourse often frames this as a personal issue but it's a systemic one. Showing producers that being safe is a sometimes food is a dangerous precedent because the power they have over people is no joke.