I’m not a lawyer, but I watch a fuckton of legal dramas. What’s the deal with occasionally some poor dude gets accused of a crime and the judge points to the lawyer (star of the show) who is there for something else entirely and says “I’m ordering you to represent this guy” and they have to do it. I’m assuming that’s not total fiction. What is it actually like in real life?
I do not believe he should’ve been charged, let alone brought to trial.
With that said, devil’s advocate: if you shoot someone, “somebody else handed me that gun and told me the bullets weren’t real” is an explanation that deserves some scrutiny. You can absolutely make the argument that the person holding and firing the gun (although Baldwin denies pulling the trigger) has some duty to verify that they’re not firing live ammo. In Baldwin’s case, his position as a producer on the film (likely a vanity credit that is also related to skirting SAG wage rules by paying him as a producer rather than an actor) further muddies the waters.
Lots of things happen in film and TV that are blatantly illegal elsewhere - like in what other industry could somebody say “I am hiring for a job, but the person must be male and must be white?” But when casting roles that happens all the time.
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You must be joking. Baldwin was negligent and should have checked the gun, plus never should have pointed it at anyone. One place you don’t ever cut corners on a set is with weapons. I worked on a piece for some movie where an armorer showed how it’s supposed to be done (some kind of western movie).
You never ever ever point a weapon anywhere near someone, regardless of what it has or doesn’t have in it. There are easy camera tricks to make it look like the gun is pointing where it’s intended. That people are getting away with happened on that set is sickening. They never should have been put in position to do that and Baldwin was negligent in how he handled the weapon. He should have faced consequences, but that’s the way it goes I guess.
Unless you have a tone of money, it’s all one big racket. Most local private criminal defense attorneys are in bed with the prosecutors and just looking to plea deal and churn cases in my experience
This is all common sense, but not a crime. It’s also exactly what the armorer is PAID to do. I’m not sure if there’s a regulation in place that states anyone working on set with a gun should receive firearm training. If not, maybe there should be.
What Baldwin did was at worst, negligent and perhaps civilly liable. I don’t see how he can (or should) be held criminally liable
You should read up on what happened. It’s the height of negligence on a set and was considered an extremely dangerous set from the outset that people were complaining about. The armorer was sloppy with weapons.
LFS is wrong about Baldwin’s involvement as a producer. He was on some kind of 3 picture deal or something (vague detail memory) where he had a lot of power as a producer and my understanding is he was one of the people who cut the corners with how the armory was done. It wasn’t a vanity credit. He got away with gross criminal negligence in my opinion, because he was willing to compromise the safety of everyone on set to save money and did something incredibly stupid and tried to play dumb afterward.
Well, this is very different from what people like me knew about the incident . I thought he was just an actor. And even if that’s all he was, I agree he should’ve checked the weapon. It’s just that most laymen don’t know firearm safety and I wouldn’t blame an actor for not knowing either
But yeah, if he was someone in charge who was cutting corners with safety, then perhaps you’re right about him being criminally negligent
My point was, if I’m an actor on a set and some hired set professional tells me a prop is safe (it could be a switch to a trap door that a stunt man was supposed to fall thru), it’s reasonable for the actor to assume it’s safe
Man you don’t know anything about sets. There are many levels of responsibility when it comes to this stuff and acting like an actor has no responsibility here is insane. On a properly managed set, they are trained how to use weapons properly and one of the first things they’re likely taught is not to ever point it at anyone or anything live or no ammo.
A crazy story is about how this stuff was done previous to safety being cared about at all. The climax of the late 70s movie Salem’s Lot has insane gun stuff being done with James Mason. He could literally have been killed by how they did that scene because they thought blanks were safe.
Gun stuff on sets is supposed to be extremely safe these days, but the Baldwin set wasn’t.
I’m going to disagree here. I do think the set was sloppy and there was danger, but not to the level that it was reasonably foreseeable that there was a risk that of an actual shooting. Basically live ammo should never be on a set. Yes, Baldwin was in general careless with the gun, but it wasn’t his responsibility to check (at least according to the experts that I heard talk about it), and I think it was perfectly reasonably for Baldwin to rely that the gun was cold given it had been cleared by both the armourer and the assistant director in charge of safety.
The producer stuff is perhaps interesting, but the prosecution didn’t charge him as a producer (and in fact weren’t even allowed to mention that he was a producer). That said, there were five other producers, and Baldwin wasn’t the one that hired the armourer, so I don’t think you can blame him for her being incompetent.
I would say that he should be liable for in general there being a dangerous set, but don’t think his actions rose to the level of homicide.
I’m curious how this can be true. Don’t you have to point the weapon at people to make shooting scenes look realistic.
I’m really interested in hearing more about this experience.
No and with guns with blanks they are almost never pointed near an actor. All of it’s likely done with forced perspective.
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I’ve seen numerous scenes where someone is holding a gun, at close range and it is actually touching the other actor (e.g. putting a gun to someone’s head)? Are all those CGI?
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Trust me… I have experience (in my youth). And not from a lawyer’s perspective. It’s all about $$ my guy
It depends. A lot of sets don’t use blanks and use these electronic type guns that basically just have a muzzle flash when the trigger is pulled (I’d imagine John Wick is done this way but I don’t know for sure). The muzzle flash is then sweetened in viz fx. It’s debatable how ‘good’ that looks. There are some movies where it looks better to use blanks and those sets almost always have skilled armorers whose biggest job is making sure something like what happened on Baldwin’s set does not happen.
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I’m not sure I understand. You said this was the case with “private” ones. Aren’t they receiving $$?
The person that goes jogging with a gun not understanding basic gun safety should make everyone feel better
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It sounds like you know more about this than me, so if that’s true then he and the rest of the producers could have been charged with criminal negligence. I honestly don’t know how that would impact charging him as the actor who was handed the gun, I guess the case would be that he should have known the armorer wasn’t reliable?
It does just seem weird and stupid that movies still use real guns at all. In the Rust shooting, there weren’t even supposed to be blanks, but just fake bullets (which of course have to look identical to real ones, so it’s not clear that even if Baldwin checked he would have noticed the difference). You’d think in this day and age, it would be easy just use completely fake prop guns and add in whatever you need with CGI after.
Nun knows anything and everything about movies so good luck trying to prove him wrong.
Whatever you’ve heard in Alec Baldwin’s defense or whatever the courts say… that’s all wrong.
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