Unsecured ammo, failed safety checks, and cut corners: What went wrong on the set of 'Rust'

That armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, showed the cylinder to David Halls, the first assistant director on the set of the Western movie "Rust." According to industry experts, Halls was supposed to visually inspect each of the gun's chambers and confirm it was safe before handing it to the actor Alec Baldwin for a scene.

But he didn't.

A film permit for the production made no mention of the use of live ammunition, and crew members expected the revolver to be loaded solely with non-explosive "dummy" rounds.

But it wasn't.

Instead, Baldwin went on to discharge a live lead projectile from the gun, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and injuring the director, Joel Souza.

Members of the "Rust" crew have spoken to media in recent days about what they saw inside the gray-brown, cross-topped building where they filmed at Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Taken together with court documents, their accounts begin to piece together how the deadly mishap rocked a set plagued with complaints about shoddy working conditions and inexperienced or incompetent staff handling firearms.

Authorities are still investigating how a real bullet ended up inside the revolver, but they believe the live round that killed Hutchins wasn't the only one on set that day.

How it ended up mixed in with dummy ammo before either Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, or Baldwin handled the weapon also remains a mystery.

Warning signs

Even after a replacement crew arrived, filming was taking longer than usual as the production went forward with only one camera. At least two of the four replacement camera operators looked "fresh out of high school," one crew member told The Los Angeles Times.

Amid the disarray, the crew broke for lunch around 12:30 p.m.

Gutierrez-Reed told authorities she had checked the guns and ensured the rounds were "dummies" earlier that day. The revolver was locked in a safe inside a prop truck while the crew ate, though Gutierrez-Reed later said the ammo was left unsecured on a cart.

She also told investigators that no live ammo was ever kept on set. But, sources told The Wrap and TMZ that crew members used both live ammo and Baldwin's revolver for target practice earlier that morning, lining up beer cans and shooting them down.

According to Tom Nunan, a lecturer at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television and an executive producer of the Oscar-winning film "Crash," Gutierrez-Reed was impossibly young and inexperienced for the job. The position of armorer is normally reserved for Hollywood veterans with previous military or police experience, he said.

The 24-year-old had even been yelled at by Nicolas Cage on a previous film set for firing a gun without warning multiple times near cast and crew, according to The Wrap.

Gutierrez-Reed herself appeared to have doubts that she was up for the project with Cage. She told the "Voices of the West" podcast she'd fretted about her lack of experience before joining that film.

"It was also my first time being head armorer as well. I almost didn't take the job because I wasn't sure if I was ready," she said. "But doing it, like, it went really smoothly."

Halls, the first assistant director, has come under scrutiny for his previous work as well. His former colleagues told Insider he had once pushed an actor to do an unsafe stunt on Hulu's "Into the Dark," resulting in the actor getting hit in the eye with a projectile.

Halls also had been fired from the film set of "Freedom's Path" in 2019, when a gun unexpectedly discharged and injured a crew member.

Had the production looked closely at Halls' track record, Nunan told Insider, "they would have really thought twice about hiring him."

Other crew members took note of Gutierrez-Reed's and Halls' reputations. The film's gaffer, Serge Svetnoy, blasted the producers in a Facebook post, saying "professionals" had been hired in every department except the one responsible for weapons.

"There is no way a 24-year-old woman can be a professional with armory," he wrote. "Professionals are the people who have spent years on sets, people who know this job from A to Z."

He continued: "To save a dime sometimes, you hire people who are not fully qualified for the complicated and dangerous job, and you risk the lives of the other people who are close, and your lives as well."

Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, and a representative for the production company behind "Rust" did not respond to Insider's requests for comment for this story.

"In all my years, I've never been handed a hot gun"

Gutierrez-Reed first showed Halls the gun, according to an affidavit from the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Office. The assistant director told investigators he could only recall seeing "three rounds" inside, although the gun had six chambers. He also didn't remember if Gutierrez-Reed "spun the drum."

Halls said he knew he should have inspected further at the time, but didn't. Instead, he declared, "Cold gun on set."

Larry Zanoff, a Hollywood firearms expert and prop weapons manager at Independent Studio Services, told Insider that Halls' description of his actions are "very confusing" and appear to be "a deviation from the industry guidelines."

"If he himself is saying that he only checked three chambers in a six-chamber gun, then clearly the gun was not inspected definitively to say that it was cold," Zanoff said.

In the scene Baldwin was rehearsing, he used one arm to withdraw the gun from a holster on his opposite hip, drew it across his body, then pointed it directly at the camera.

Crew members heard a whip. Then a loud pop.

Hutchins, who was standing behind a monitor just two feet away, according to The Los Angeles Times, clutched her midsection and stumbled backwards. Souza, who was standing behind her, noticed blood blossoming from a wound on his shoulder.

"What the fuck just happened?" Baldwin asked, according to the newspaper.

"What the fuck was that? That burns!" Souza yelled.

A live bullet from Baldwin's revolver had ripped through Hutchins' chest and pierced Souza's clavicle. Someone helped ease Hutchins to the ground, where she said that she couldn't feel her legs. Medics converged on her and Souza, and crew members locked down the set.

The script supervisor, on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, cursed out the assistant director.

"This motherfucker," she said. "He's supposed to check the guns. He's responsible for what happened."

First responders airlifted Hutchins to an Albuquerque hospital, where she was pronounced dead. Baldwin, who was in shock and didn't yet know he had just killed a woman, was also taken to hospital.

"In all my years, I've never been handed a hot gun," he kept repeating.

The ground rules

Dummy rounds look identical to live ones, except that dummies have a hole drilled into the side of the cartridge casing. Hall told investigators he saw four dummy casings, and one casing with no hole.

Thousands of American-made movies and television shows involve scenes with guns, and industry guidelines dictate a strict procedure on how crews must safely handle them.

The two key players are the armorer and the first assistant director. The armorer is responsible for all the firearms on set, and the first assistant director is the set's lead safety official. The guns, and their blank or dummy ammunition, must always be locked up when they're not in use.

Just before filming a scene with a gun, the armorer brings the gun to the first assistant director to demonstrate that it's a "cold gun" - meaning it does not contain live ammunition. The first assistant director then visually inspects the weapon, agrees that it's a cold gun, and announces "cold gun on set," repeating it over the radio for crew members out of earshot. (A lawyer representing Halls told Fox News her client was "not responsible" for checking the gun).

Importantly, whenever the gun is aimed into a camera lens, or near a member of the cast or crew, any person has the right to request that they also be shown the gun is cold, according to Zanoff.

Halls told deputies his normal firearms-handling practice was to "check the barrel for obstructions, most of the time there's no live fire, [Gutierrez-Reed] opens the hatch and spins the drum, and I say 'cold gun on set.'"

But Zanoff told Insider that Halls and Gutierrez-Reed's descriptions of their actions when they checked the gun before the scene appear to violate industry standards.

Zanoff added that the industry guidelines expressly forbid live ammunition on a film or television set. Gutierrez-Reed told sheriff's deputies the same, and yet investigators recovered "possible additional live rounds on set" that have been sent to the FBI's ballistics lab in Virginia.

In total, Santa Fe authorities recovered at least 12 revolvers and a rifle from the "Rust" set, and over 500 rounds of ammunition.

Zanoff said fatal shooting incidents on movie sets simply don't occur when everyone's following the rules.

"We shoot guns all day long, day and night, for decades. Millions of rounds of blank ammunition have been expended," Zanoff said. "Whenever there are incidents like these, it always winds up being because the person that was in charge and had the responsibility did not follow the guidelines. And then something bad happens."

Prosecutors in New Mexico haven't ruled out criminal charges in the shooting, though legal experts have said Baldwin isn't likely facing any criminal risk. Some film industry veterans suggest the actor has some moral culpability.

"Yes, it's on Baldwin as well," the cinematographer Michael May, who was unaffiliated with "Rust," said in a popular Facebook post. "Baldwin should know better. He's been at this game for a long time. Surely he should've recognized that the armorer was inept. Surely he knew what the crew was dealing with… There aren't a lot of secrets on a movie set."

Baldwin's representatives did not respond to Insider's request for comment for this story.

"These were people who were wildly inept or unqualified"

"It just feels like a production that came together quickly and in a roughshod fashion, and the wrong people were hired," Nunan told Insider. "These were people who were wildly inept or unqualified. As a result, they created tragic circumstances. Horrifying circumstances."

Despite being both a Western and an action movie, "Rust" was being produced on a budget of just $6-7 million.

Westerns are particularly pricey because of the elaborate sets and costumes required for period pieces, and adding action sequences on top of that can easily rocket up the costs, according to Nunan. Small budgets also have huge implications when it comes to hiring crews, he said.

"What I suspect is that this movie was profoundly under-budgeted, meaning people were getting hired at a lower cost because they just didn't have enough money to make this movie look handsome and be what it wanted to be," he said. "As a result, you hire crew that are less experienced, and probably doing not just their job, but two or three jobs at a time."

Gutierrez-Reed's lawyers said in a statement on Friday that she had been juggling another job on set in addition to her armorer duties, but they did not provide further details.

The lawyers also blasted the "Rust" production company for failing to provide adequate training, safety meetings, and time for Gutierrez-Reed to maintain the weapons and prepare for gunfire.

"Hannah was hired on two positions on this film, which made it extremely difficult to focus on her job as an armorer," the statement said. "The whole production became unsafe due to various factors… [Not] the fault of Hannah."

When a paparazzo tracked Baldwin down to the small Vermont town he and his family were staying in after the shooting, the actor said he couldn't comment while the investigation was active. But he said he'd be "extremely interested" in regulations against using real guns on sets.

"There are incidental accidents on film sets from time to time but nothing like this," Baldwin said. "This is a one-in-a-trillion episode."

"A woman died. She was my friend," he said. "She was my friend."