“Incompetence” isn’t illegal, though, and “negligence” has to rise to a pretty high standard to hit the criminal level. If she was taking crew out to do target practice with prop guns using actual ammo and forgot to clear the bullets out, that obviously hits it. But if somebody else put the bullets in there after…

It’s not really a question. The producers will be up to their ears in civil lawsuits, but it’s unlikely anything they did here rose to a bar that will end up with them getting criminally prosecuted. “Criminal negligence” is a much higher bar than negligence in a civil case. Hiring underqualified people isn’t illegal,…

I don’t know how much it will lead to a reform of the safety protocols, because the protocols that exist now are more than sufficient. They just weren’t being followed. If they had been, there are about six different ways this would have been prevented.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s that complicated—there’s no real system for tracking violations. The previous movie didn’t publicize the incident, Halls surely didn’t put that job on his resume or use them as references, and given the nature of gig work, an empty spot on a resume isn’t going to raise eyebrows in Hollywood.…

IATSE local 44 (Los Angeles) said none of their people were on set. Local 480 (New Mexico) hasn’t publicly commented yet. Their website listed a bunch of their crew members working on the set, including a prop master, but the armorer wasn’t among them. I don’t know if the list was exhaustive, though.

Standard practice is something along the lines of the armorer checking once, and then handing it off to the first AD, who is supposed to check again in front of the cast/crew to show them what they’re working with and explain any precautions they need to be taking. (In some cases the armorer might do the second check…

Yeah, insurance generally doesn’t want actors checking the guns themselves. (They want the actors touching them as little as possible as required for the scene, and otherwise only in the hands of people who are specially trained.)

Yeah, the walkout—at least as described by these two articles—was limited to the camera crew. It’s not clear whether any other crew walked out. Given the conditions described, I certainly wouldn’t blame them if they did, but I haven’t seen it confirmed anywhere. I hope we get some more details!

It’s still very unclear whether the crew members were union or not. The statement from the IATSE local 44 (in Los Angeles) just said that the crew was local to New Mexico and none of them were members of local 44. That doesn’t mean they were non-union, though—New Mexico has its own IATSE local they could have been…

That tweet contains zero link to a source, and googling the quotes from it returns no results. It should be blatantly obvious from those two factors alone that it’s fake.

Also, the reason the media keeps using the term “prop gun” (whether correctly or incorrectly) is obviously to make it clear to readers as soon as possible that the death was unintentional, not Alec Baldwin running around shooting up the set. Especially for readers who don’t read past the headline, which is most of them…

It’s also not been established that the shoot was non-union. The (Los Angeles-based) IATSE 44 local just said that there were none of their members on set—the crew was local. Local crew could still belong to the local union (and the local union’s website implies that they were working on this movie—not going to link…

If it was an actual live round, it’s not out of the question that a single live round could have gone through one person and into another. I don’t see that happening with blanks, though. (If the blanks had multiple pieces of shrapnel in them, though, I assume that could have hit two people at once.)

It looks like union members in New Mexico would belong to local 480. The article isn’t clear whether the ones on set are union or not, just that they’re not local 44.

I would definitely take it with several grains of salt, but I’m sure they have a ton of contacts on the set regardless. The cinematographers’ guild were the ones who released Halyna Hutchins’ name to the media, so they obviously knew about it before it was public. It wouldn’t be that weird if IATSE was getting plenty…

IATSE 44 says it wasn’t one of their members. It’s unclear to me whether that means it was a member of another local or non-union crew.

Jamie got pregnant at 16. Officially, the father is the guy she was on-and-off dating at the time, who was two years older than her. There have been rumors that that was a cover-up and it was actually by a producer on the show instead, but no real evidence. The kid looks a lot more like the ex-boyfriend than the…

The alleged problems with Emmy’s on-set behavior predate Shameless. Thus why her career never really broke out post-Phantom of the Opera like it should have.

The definition the Grammys uses seems to be “the existing country artists on the nominating committee say at least 51% of the tracks are country,” which needless to say, presents some problems. Given the country genre’s ongoing insularity and gatekeeping problems, and no further instructions on how to define…

To be clear, I don’t think either album is particularly country. But star-crossed and its singles have, thus far, only appeared on the country charts—while Golden Hour had a couple crossover songs that charted both on the country and pop/adult contemporary charts (“High Horse” and “Rainbow,” I think). Based on that,…