Prop Gun Shooting. One crewmember dead New Mexico filmset

[MT2008]

Originally Posted by MoviePropMaster2008

As an armorer this sickens me. Also I can't tell you how many times I've YELLED at actors and crew for fucking with the firearms on set. They don't know what they're doing. They dry fire the weapons. In the case of Brandon Lee, they squib fired a dummy bullet that had a live primer in it, but no one SHOULD have dry fired the damned revolver in the first place. I get pissed off when I see primer marks in my dummy rounds with 'fake intact primers' for the camera. But it's mostly ANTI GUN or folks who don't know shit about guns who do all that horseplay on set.

Prayers to those who have died and are injured.

This will probably make your blood boil as much as it did mine:

Firearm experts, writers and producers have wondered aloud how the incident on the “Rust” set occurred. While some producers insist on using prop guns with blanks to closely capture the sound and look of a real gun firing, others have been calling for them to be banished from film sets, saying that computer-generated imaging offers a safer alternative.

“There’s no reason to have guns loaded with blanks or anything on set anymore,” tweeted director Craig Zobel, whose credits include the 2020 film “The Hunt” and HBO’s “Mare of Easttown.” “Should just be fully outlawed. There’s computers now.”

Quote comes from here, but there's a more in-depth story here.

Setting aside the tastelessness of the fact that this liberal idiot is using this tragedy to promote his political agenda, does anyone else get just as annoyed that someone is calling for yet more CGI in movies? It's bad enough that Hollywood over-uses CGI as it is (not just for "special effects" shots, but now everything from actors' appearances to weather). It's not even politically partisan to agree that CGed-out movies are diminishing the artistic merit of film production; I have almost never heard anyone arguing that more shots in movies using more CG effects is a good thing. Well, at least now I know to boycott Craig Zobel...

Side note: Movie armorers have a record of only a handful of fatal accidents (or even serious injuries) with movie guns in more than a century. The WaPo article cites exactly two from the past 50 years that are known well (Brandon Lee's death in the set of "The Crow", and John Erick Hexum). I'm pretty sure that pyrotechnics and various stunts have killed far more people than prop guns. Where will the Nanny State proponents turn their attention next?