Alec Baldwin Fired Prop Gun That Kills 1 on Set of 'Rust'

[Hym]

On September 30, 2024 the armorer on the "Rust" movie was denied her request for a new trial.
This report by Winston Cho of The Hollywood Reporter is the best summary of the ongoing court proceeding and their impact on the lives of those involved:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...es-1236017943/

In conclusion the judge in the case, Mary Marlowe Sommer, summed it up best by addressing the armorers actions:

“In her own words, she’s said she didn’t need to be shaking dummies (dummy rounds) all the time,” Sommer said. She stressed, “You were the armorer, the one that stood between a safe weapon and a weapon that could kill someone. You alone turned a safe weapon into a lethal weapon. But for you, Ms. Hutchins would be alive, a husband would have his partner and a little boy would have his mother.”

What the state of New Mexico did not address is JUST why the film union in the state allowed such an extreme atmosphere of danger to be so commonplace on that set, that filming location, let alone all of the unreported and unpublicized, unsafe conditions that those of us in the union have survived.

By the time that the criminal justice system is involved, all we know for sure is that the union failed in its duties to prevent the death and injuries we now know as "Rust", which is an accurate description of the union itself, "Rusted". By the time that OSHA, the national safety administration, and the state safety office intervened by issuing any fine or suspension laid upon the production itself, all on site workers view those fines as another written and paid failure of the union itself. Most expect little to change.

Prevention is simple to understand. When a set of workers agrees to stop production in its tracks, safety steps in. I have seen crews walk off of sets and in so doing push producers and directors to slow production down to have a real safety meeting.

The worst productions, the most deceitful line producers, the self-entitled investors, those producers investing soley for profit, can only be pushed to respect the safety of everyone on set when their bottom line is affected. That is maybe the only real power of a group of people who care enough about each others safety and thus longevity in a career, especially any group of professionals who call themselves a union.

2nd unit coordinators who strive to be as efficient and as timely as possible, know well how much any delay in the schedule can cost a production. Our focus is still on safety, if only to a productions bottom line in their eyes because, to that bottom line, injuries often delay filming and often predict future, more serious injuries and deaths when not immediately addressed, and in the best of conditions prevented.

All responsible union members who do care, and those who are duty bound to prevent foreseeable dangers, for the most part do their best to keep the resolution of those cases in house and prefer them not to be publicized, not to hide the dangers from public view, but to resolve the conditions that created the dangers in the first place. The exercise of publicizing something that can be internally resolved is probably a political move with ulterior motives, moves not connected to preventing further injuries. In this case any publicity is due to preventing further danger to union workers, an exposure that may or may not help solve the deeper ills that exist in a very sick union.

When, as in this glaring case of the irresponsibilities and negligences of many union members that cannot be laid upon productions themselves, the unresolved dangers end up in death and injury, the public exposure should produce actions by the responsible parties to prevent further tragedies. In this case so far, any of the public admonitions by the film union acknowledging responsibilities for the unsafe on-location conditions have been weak and shallow.


This next series of notes details what many of us, if not all of us present and former film union members, know to be matters that created the unsafe working conditions in the union:

Regarding the decades long history of this one union and being further to the point, the blacklisting of qualified, responsible, compatible professionals, an abuse so common in the film union in the state of New Mexico, goes hand in hand with the general atmosphere of unsafe, dangerous working conditions. They are inseparable. It seems that The State of New Mexico alone has the ability to add any solid, positive and legal change to this union.

The best step would be in forcing the union to actually be a HIRING HALL, as its members are told to list it when filling out unemployment forms. This actionable step would be a valuable and effective way to keep so many good, ethical and safety conscious union members employed, at least the ones who haven't yet left. I've said before that any newspaper asking for replies from former union members, listing their specific reasons for leaving the film union in this state, would likely gather replies in the hundreds, maybe even in the thousands. It would be as fact based a document as opening up the film unions books from the date of its certification, likely identifying a majority of the discriminations against the qualified and experienced union members who more often than not lost their careers to that deep seated corruption.

AS it now stands the union has used apprentice hires to ostensibly remove those union members who they have "problems" with, problems that most often involve those union members who are the most safety aware, which means they are the ones who face problems and work to resolve them. Of course many of those problems also involve discriminating against those who do not cater to the whims of higher ups, a condition that also caters to nepotism and allows abuse on so many levels. Those apprentice hires, from a so-called "overflow list", are only supposed to be hired when all other experienced, available union members are either already hired or otherwise unavailable. That has never been the case, for a very long time, if it ever was.

Talking to union members from other states, this New Mexico "condition" (of forced, unlawful compliance) is hard for them to believe, as similar conditions are not accepted by union members in other states.


That union lies when it calls itself a "hiring hall" when apprentices, with much less incentive to object to unreasonable and unsafe, discriminatory practices, are hired before those with experience who are supposed to be listed as available. Although the union claimed to have a list of available, experienced workers to be presented to productions I don't know a single union member who was contacted from that imaginary list. I do know that in a real union those Available lists exist because I was on one of those lists when I was in another unrelated union in another state, where I too waited in line as an apprentice before I was hired, and as time went on I was chosen from that list based upon availability and experience alone, which is the exact legal and fair employment reason for their use.

In the extremes of the recent illegal, unconstitutional and unhealthy mandates, imposed by what I consider to be a collusion between the film union and the producers guild's 2021 agreement, the malfeasance is even worse. These last four years have been a very well programmed attack on workers rights, abuses that the union and productions have taken full advantage of.

In the constant vigilance necessary to retain our rights, especially those temporarily removed, there are many opportunities now available to be addressed and resolved. Is this union going to step up to its opportunities and do some real work? That too is up in the air with the October Balloons. At least they are enjoyable.

If citizens in New Mexico were to be honest to newly arriving residents they would put up 'Welcome to Our State' signs that have the added and very helpful lines saying "Do You Have an Attorney? If not, Get One, Now. Integrity is not protected here.", and "New Mexico. It's not New, and it certainly isn't Mexico. Prepare accordingly", as well as the obvious, "Enjoy the Beautiful Skies and the Fall Balloon Festival".



An Addendum and Prognosis of The Future of Film In New Mexico...

Hidden in the almost unrestricted movements of film equipment and film workers there lives a dirty underworld that does have something to do with just why the rights of film workers are often disregarded and may be at further peril in the near future.

I even bring this up because of how far removed from accountability film productions have been in this state. Unions effectively removed workers who unions should have been prosecuted by the State of New Mexico for removing. I don't doubt that the same group, the same industry would have any qualms at all about somehow turning a group of immigrants into dues paying members, new dues paying members who would be even less motivated than native born union apprentices to speak up about inequality and unsafe working conditions.

Getting to some of the further hidden agendas of why and how film sets and their finances are run, I was told experiences from drivers about the activities, but have no experience of nor proof of, some series and movies being fronts for money laundering from every illegal criminal activity available, like all of the present u.s. gov't, NGO and foreign cartel collusions that have been used to move millions of illegal aliens into the country, many times more now since Jan.20, 2021 than ever before.

It will be of note to see just how unions deal with the influx of those possible, future film workers here in the states. In the midst of most of those obviously illegal immigrants there lives a preponderance of mostly hard working, moral and hopeful people escaping poverty and abuse.

Irregardless of the deep and karmic truths that this country is now reaping, which are the natural outcome of all of those decades and centuries of lost wars that are the consequences of murderous, abusive and genocidal colonial activities taken against foreign citizens.........

........the difference now within the absorption and reconciliations of those people should be our reminder that we are always bound to treat those people with the best of our compassion, just as readily as we remove the criminals and military infiltrators invited in by the present governmental and corporate cartels. The best of our actions, of our lived intentions, will take momentous planning and massive concentrations of human resources to vet those now in the country that we would have otherwise wanted in, without being abusive.

In this case the deliberate acrimony, programmed against those many who came for freedom and opportunity alone, offers little room for compassion and understanding, yet not just from the profiteers, including those present in the film industry. Just as well, all of the promises made to immediately deport the illegal immigrants will be our biggest opportunity to take such actions, against those who have already suffered in their own homelands, and who then have suffered great abuses transiting into our country, with a great deal of compassion, however that turns out to the best of our abilities....and I am clueless how those measures will turn out.

We as a people are much more complicit in the way many of those countries abused their people than we have yet to honestly come to terms with.

Well, the days of reckoning are at hand. One way or the other the measure of our own humanities is being found or lost.........