Alec Baldwin has shared comments made by a crew member on social media dismissing allegations that the set of "Rust" was unsafe.
Last month, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins died in an accidental shooting during rehearsals for the film when Baldwin fired a gun that he had been told was not loaded. Director Joel Souza was also injured.
Since then, questions have been raised regarding the film's safety measures but costume designer Terese Magpale Davis stated that the "story being spun of us being overworked and surrounded by unsafe, chaotic conditions" was untrue. Baldwin shared the post to his own Instagram account with the caption: "read this."
In her post, Davis stated that the team had "several safety meetings, sometimes multiple per day." She added that accidental discharges are "more common than you think" on film sets before going on to defend the film's weapons expert, armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. She had given the gun to assistant director David Halls before he gave it to Baldwin.
"The armorer had apprenticed to a well-known armorer and had been in the same position on the same type of movie a few months before," Davis wrote. She also defended Gutierrez-Reed against remarks that she was inexperienced.
"How do you suppose anyone will get that experience? We all had a first and second job at one point or another," Davis continued, adding that the film's assistant director also "never seemed flippant about safety."
"I won't jump on the bandwagon and pretend that he was uncaring about our safety the whole way through," she noted.
Davis stated that the issue was a matter of gun safety, and she vowed to fight to have live guns banned from film sets. Hers was among other voices calling for an end to the use of all "functional firearms" on set. A statement featuring 200 signatures from prominent cinematographers has been making the rounds.
"We vow to no longer put ourselves and our crew in these unnecessarily lethal situations," the statement reads, according to BBC. "We have safe alternatives in VFX [visual effects] and non-functional firearms. We won't wait for the industry to change. We have a duty to effect change within the industry ourselves."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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