In recent months, advocates for the film industry have encouraged the resumption of business as usual by saying companies had put Covid-19 safety first.
Good for them. But as we saw recently, one film set was less careful about something just as deadly as a virus: live ammunition.
On Oct. 21, actor Alec Baldwin fired a long Colt revolver while filming a Western in New Mexico. Court records about the case say the assistant director who handed Baldwin the weapon announced it was “cold,” meaning safe to use.
Unfortunately, the revolver was loaded with live rounds instead of blanks, and one of them hit and killed the film’s cinematographer. The director, who was standing behind the cinematographer, was wounded.
The county sheriff, investigating the case, said search of the area around the set revealed 500 rounds of ammunition that included blanks, dummy rounds and live rounds.
As any fan of the movies knows, the film industry is exceptionally skilled at creating visual effects that make fake things look real. Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but Luke Skywalker really didn’t blow up Darth Vader’s death star.
So the obvious question is why there would be a need for live ammunition anywhere near where people are working on a movie, with the exception of armed security guards.
The attorney for the woman in charge of weapons for the movie said she doesn’t know where the live rounds came from. She blames the film’s producers for allowing unsafe working conditions. The Associated Press reported the only difference between live rounds and dummies is a small hole in the side of a dummy’s casing that signals it’s inoperable.
While it’s obvious that the film crew didn’t follow basic safeguards by double-checking the revolver, no evidence has surfaced to indicate that the shooting was anything other than a horrible accident.
Another interesting fact is that state and federal workplace safety agencies offer little to no guidance about guns on movie sets.
New Mexico has no specific gun laws for the film industry.
Two other popular filming states, Louisiana and Georgia, regulate the pyrotechnics that are used for movie explosions — but not guns.
Maybe this needless death in New Mexico will change that. It certainly should.
Movies need more guidance than their current studio and labor union warnings to treat all guns as if they were loaded.
One thing that probably won’t change, though, is the frequency of guns in movies. To a degree that’s understandable: You can’t make a Western without some gunfire, James Bond is licensed to kill and Martin Scorsese’s famous gangster movies always have lots of fatalities.
It may be hypocritical to wish that Hollywood was less dependent on gunfire and deaths to entertain us, but decades of popular movies and TV shows make it clear that viewers enjoy the action — until incidents like last month’s, when the fake becomes tragically all too real.
