Chapter 1: What happened during the shooting on the 'Rust' movie set?
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The scene up at the church was to be done. Ready and action. I let go of the hammer, bang, the gun goes off. Then there's a shot. There shouldn't have been a shot because they were dummy rounds. And then there was a screen.
Oh my God, what is that? Helena has instantly fallen back.
I noticed this bunch of roses right in the spot where Helena was when she was shot.
None of us can process that there was a live bullet even on set. Where did the live round come from?
You've already heard Alec Baldwin speak. Now, what do others on the set and those in the know have to say?
Two other people that handled and or inspected the loaded firearm, armorer Hannah Reed Gutierrez and assistant director David Hall.
Sabotage is the most likely possibility. This was not sabotage, this was incompetence.
So when someone dies, I've been told that it's highly unlikely I would be charged with anything criminally.
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Chapter 2: Who were the key people involved in the 'Rust' shooting incident?
She was a very sort of calculating, collected person who also had a deep reservoir of emotions.
It's more about, yeah, let's continue with everything.
She was, you know, working really hard to establish herself in the film industry, and in particular, really a male-dominated branch of the film industry.
Okay, so setting up this one.
There's this one image I have in my head I think of a lot. She wanted to see what was behind a very high up window. So she sat on the shoulders of a tall camera department guy. It was a superhero movie and she looks, she looked just a little bit like a superhero herself. In my mind there's always like a spotlight on her whenever she's around everybody else.
After Arch Enemy came up, I was getting a lot of calls from people saying, can you put me in touch with Helena? We want her. Rust was a big break and it was an opportunity for her to just show how good she was. Helena was very gifted and she had a vision and she knew what she wanted and she commands the room. She would sometimes reach out and grab my arm and pull me over in front of the monitor.
that every single person here was here to create this dream, and that excitement was infectious. Also on set, there's director Joel Souza and assistant director Dave Hulls, and also first camera assistant Lane Looper, who meets Helena for the first time on this project.
And we became friends pretty quickly.
Describe that working relationship between the head of the camera department and the cinematographer of a film. It's basically myself, the camera operators, and Helena, you know, all creating the frame.
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Chapter 3: What role did armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed play in the tragedy?
It is the catering budget on a DC Comics movie, okay? And part of the low-budget nature of this film, they were trying to do more with less, producers even combining some crew roles for people. They were insisting upon having one person do two very important jobs, the armorer role, taking care of the guns and ammunition, and then they wanted that person to also be an assistant prop person.
And this is a Western, so there were a lot of firearms in this movie. That's a lot of responsibility. The person who's hired as both the armorer and the prop assistant is a young woman who's just starting out in her career, named Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. Hannah was only 24, so being the lead armorer on a movie is a big role.
Her dad is a man named Thel Reed, who is a very well-known gunslinger in Hollywood. He's especially known for something called the quick draw. He demonstrated his quick draw ability in a video about the making of Django Unchained. As you can see, it doesn't take much time to get it out of the fire.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed has spent her life watching her father handle and oversee the use of firearms in any number of movies.
She's been raised around gun safety and all that stuff. She's a little girl. She's so safe with the guns and the way she handles them. I don't have to worry about anything when I got her on the set.
You trust her on your sets?
Any set. Yes, absolutely.
Within days of getting the job on Rust, Hannah was posting on Facebook about how excited she was to have gotten this job.
And she specifically noted, excited to be working with Armory and to step into the world of props. Before the job started on September 29th, just right after she had secured it, she wrote on Facebook, how is it that life's been so good lately?
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Chapter 4: What were the safety protocols on the set of 'Rust'?
She knew that the clock was the enemy and we have to move forward. I felt like it was a good pace for the level of the budget that we had. It ran smoother than anything of that budget I've ever been involved with. It really did. But some crew members said the production felt rushed.
The tone on set was like, we need to go now, now, now.
It just was a beat the clock kind of thing. I arrived on the 11th. I had dinner with Helena. Baldwin posted a video of himself on Instagram shortly after he arrived on set. I want to say, I look at myself in the mirror and I have a reflection of this and I'm really kind of appalled. It's appalling. We're here shooting a film. We start tomorrow. And no, I'm not playing Santa Claus.
On the 12th, I had a safety demonstration with Hannah Reid, the armorer. We spent an hour and a half shooting the pistol. Her giving me all her safety instructions. We were told by several members of the crew that Hannah sometimes had the guns in her waistband or she would carry them underneath her armpits.
Now this is a young woman who was around guns her whole life, but for other members of the crew, this was sort of alarming. Hannah's lawyer tells ABC it's not unusual for armors to carry firearms like this to various places on set as they need to. He says there was never a safety issue with Hannah's carrying of the firearms. Did you think she was up to the job?
I assumed because she was there and she was hired, she was up for the job. And nothing she did raised any red flags with you? The second week of filming, some members of the crew said they were starting to have concerns with how weapons were being handled on the set. Saturday, October 16th was a big day on set. There were several major shootouts scheduled to be filmed that day.
And in the midst of that, there were two accidental discharges.
The prop master, Sarah Zachary, was loading the gun. The gun was pointed down, and it went off in her hands. It definitely caused a commotion on set. Several people I talked to described it as something that upset people. There was, you know, a sound, and it was unexpected. There is no projectile in the gun. It's just a bang and some smoke. Sarah did self-report what had happened.
There was another accidental discharge on this Saturday, and Alec Baldwin's stunt double had this missed fire with a gun. When you hear about something like two accidental discharges of weapons, guns going off, that's serious business. The Rust production team told ABC News, the safety of our cast and crew is the top priority of Rust Productions.
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Chapter 5: How did the production crew react to the accidental discharges?
They thought they could make up their own rules, and they pushed it too far.
The audacity to put someone else's life in such danger.
The entire crew was put in a situation where we all had to basically run for our lives.
There were so many lives at risk. And when Randall Miller is put in the hot seat, he tries to pass the buck. You didn't ask CSX how many trains were coming down that truss, did you? That's not my job.
Vapaus matkustaa raiteilla. VR. Yhteisellä matkalla.
The crew had no idea that the filmmaker was there stealing a shot.
Fortunately for investigators, there was video, later used in court, of the midnight rider accident.
The train comes through the set at about 58 miles per hour. It was pandemonium. A camera mounted on the locomotive shows the crew on the trestle had a lot less time than they thought to get off the tracks. 26 seconds before impact, the engineer starts to blare the horn continuously as members of the cast and crew try to flee the safety.
Three seconds before impact, it's too late to get the bed off the tracks. William Hurt and Wyatt Russell, the actors along with two crew members are scrambling just to make it off the trestle. One second before impact, people cover their ears. They're clinging to the bridge for their lives because the bed on impact becomes a deadly weapon.
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