Re: The amount of stupidity that led up to the Rust shooting is depressing and mind-boggling

[juan]

On 12 Mar 2022, Rudy Canoza <notg...@gmail.com> posted some
news:l49XJ.60230$dln7....@fx03.iad:

> If she had cleaned her pussy for the judge, she might have gotten off.

Earlier today, a New Mexico court shut down a request from the attorneys
for Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who had been asking that the case against
her—i.e., the involuntary manslaughter of Rust cinematographer Halyna
Hutchins, killed on the movie’s set in October of 2021—be thrown out of
court. Gutierrez-Reed’s team had been making the case that, after more
than two years’ worth of public information about the case (including
private messages from Gutierrez-Reed) being dropped into the public
sphere, it was now impossible for her to get a fair trial in a prosecution
for Hutchins’ death. (A judge, obviously, disagreed.)

Interestingly, the news of the failed dismissal—which arrives a week
before Gutierrez-Reed’s trial proper is set to start—comes alongside one
of the deepest dives to date into what sounds, increasingly, like the
horrifyingly messy state of things on the set of the low-budget Western.
THR’s Rebecca Keeganposted a sort of semi-profile of Gutierrez-Reed
earlier this afternoon, which serves, in its own way, as a timeline of the
confluence of terrible decisions that appear to have contributed to
Hutchins’ death. The piece is fascinating, even if it waxes a bit too
lyrical in places—it’s hard to really care what Gutierrez-Reed’s high
school drama teacher thinks of her these days, if we’re being
honest—because it lays out so much of the dysfunction apparently inherent
to the Rust set. While also making the not-wholly-unpersuasive point that
Gutierrez-Reed, one of the lowest-paid, least-experienced, least powerful
people on the movie’s set, is the one most likely to face legal
consequences for the events of October 2021.

(Compare, for instance, the treatment of Dave Halls, the first assistant
director on the film, who Gutierrez-Reed has testified told her “We don’t
have time” when she approached him for a weapons check on the gun that
killed Hutchins on the day of the incident. Halls, a film veteran, took a
plea deal last year on a charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon, and
has already fulfilled his six months of unsupervised probation; according
to Keegan’s piece, he’s since left the entertainment industry.)

Some of the most damning stuff in the piece is easy to fact-check, and
pretty shocking: Gutierrez-Reed, for instance, only got the job—her second
armorer job while working solo, outside the mentorship of her step-father,
veteran industry armorer Thell Reed—because multiple, more experienced
armorers turned it down. Not just for pay, which was low, but because the
armorer was being asked to split duties as a prop assistant, with at least
one person calling the splitting of attention on such a gun-heavy movie
“completely unsafe.” There are also multiple reports of both Gutierrez-
Reed and her boss, prop master Sarah Zachry (expected to testify at
Gutierrez-Reed’s trial in exchange for immunity) saying they disposed of
rounds or otherwise hid evidence in the aftermath of Hutchins’ death—to
say nothing of the general chaos surrounding multiple members of the crew
walking out on safety concerns before Hutchins died.

(Figuring out the origin of the live bullet that was in star/producer Alec
Baldwin’s gun when it discharged, killing Hutchins and wounding director
Joel Souza, remains its own infuriating can of worms; investigators
apparently left the film’s props unwatched, unsearched, and unguarded in
the immediate aftermath of the shooting, making tracking the provenance of
the live ammo extremely difficult. Baldwin, who’s back up on charges of
involuntary manslaughter himself, after prosecutors previously screwed up
and charged him with a law that wasn’t on the books yet when the shooting
took place, has thrown a lot of his considerable clout toward pushing
focus on the origin of the bullet, and away from any other factors that
might have made Rust an unsafe working environment.)

The upshot of all this is that Gutierrez-Reed’s trial is likely to be just
as messy as the awful events that led up to it. (Among the info that’s
been made public since 2021, there are a number of texts where she talks
about alcohol and drug use while working on the movie; expect to see that
point hammered unduly hard when the prosecution makes its case.) The thing
that keeps cropping up here is that criminal trials, as such, aren’t
really set up to handle situations where a bunch of people made a number
of terrible decisions, leading to a terrible outcome. (Although expect
civil cases against the producers of Rust to keep rolling out for a good
long while; Hutchins’ husband, Matthew Hutchins, has settled his case, in
exchange for profits from the yet-to-be-released film to help pay for the
care of the couple’s son, but there are still others out there pending.)

Keegan’s piece makes the case, though, that Rust was an inherently
dysfunctional set. The litany of improper safety procedures in the report
is as extensive as it is depressing: The lack of safety glass to protect
the people behind the camera; the failure by multiple people whose job it
was to check the weapon to actually check the weapon; the repeated
assertions that short shrift was given to training for the actors holding
firearms, which may have contributed to Baldwin failing to follow proper
procedures when he pointed the gun at people. (And, yes, the question of
why, in the name of god,at least eight live bullets—including the one that
killed Hutchins—were on the movie’s set.) The list of perpetual,
apparently systemic failures on display is horrifying. And yet, for now,
the finger of blame points solely at Guiterrez-Reed; it remains to be seen
how that’ll shake out when her trial actually starts next week.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/amount-stupidity-led-rust-shooting-
051400287.html