The Death of Halyna Hutchins
Who was Halyna Hutchins? What happened on set that led to her death? Who, if anybody, should be held responsible?
(In this post I attempt to provide as detailed an account as possible surrounding the chain of events that led to the death of Halyna Hutchins. I’m especially interested in examining the nuances of the case and as narrator, I stay as objective as possible and let the story tell itself, which deserves the attention.)
Halyna Hutchins
Halyna Hutchins was born in Ukraine but grew up on the Soviet military base at Murmansk, Russia because her father was in the Soviet Navy. While there Hutchins became interested in film because “there wasn’t that much to do outside.” She studied journalism at Kyiv National University and then found jobs working for British documentary films in Eastern Europe, which included “traveling with crews to remote locations and seeing how the cinematographer worked.” While in Kyiv she met her future husband Matthew, an American.
Hutchins moved to Los Angeles after becoming more interested in filmmaking and worked her way up through production assistant positions. She even pursued fashion photography to learn about the “aesthetics of lighting — how you create the mood, the feeling.” In 2010 she graduated from the UCLA TFT Professional Program in Producing and then completed the American Film Institute Conservatory master’s program in 2015. Hutchins recalled from the program that the “one thing I learned is that cinematography is not something you do by yourself. It’s a group [project]. You need to develop your own vision, but the key to a successful film is communication with your director and your team.” Her thesis project from the AFI, Hidden, was screened at the Camerimage International Film Festival and the Austin Film Festival.
American Cinematographer named Hutchins one of the "10 up-and-coming directors of photography who are making their mark" in 2019 for her camera work. She became a member of the IATSE and Local 600, the International Cinematographers Guild that represents over 8,000 cinematographers, camera operators, camera assistants, etc. When the IATSE held a strike authorization vote to support the working conditions of film crews, Hutchins posted a photo in solidarity on the set of a Western film called Rust.
Rust
Rust started in earnest after a conversation between Alec Baldwin and Joel Souza about the youngest person to be hanged in the American West, which turned out to be a young teen. Baldwin had produced Souza’s previous film, Crown Vic, which he also wanted to star in but was impeded by scheduling problems. So once Baldwin found out about Souza’s next project, he was excited to work with the 48-year-old writer and director.
Baldwin and the other producers (Allen Cheney, Ryan Donnell Smith, Nathan Klingher, Ryan Winterstern, Matt DelPiano, and Anjul Nigam) scheduled a three-week production for Rust at the Bonanza Creek Ranch, which is located 19 miles (31 km) southwest of Santa Fe and 51 miles (82 km) northeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Since the 1950s the ranch has been used to film Westerns including Silverado, The Legend of the Lone Ranger and A Million Ways to Die in the West. Some experts claimed that a three-week shoot for a period piece is an ambitious time frame.
The producers reported Rust would cost $7,279,305 not including the tax rebate from the state of New Mexico. The producers hired 75 crew members, 22 actors, and 230 extras from New Mexico. Baldwin would receive $150,000 as lead actor, the same amount for all the producers except Nigam, which for a household name actor is little considering he would be the driving force for the film’s financing and distribution. This reflects Baldwin’s commitment towards the production as a passion project, which would go straight to a streaming platform. Souza was set to receive $221,872 for directing and the production budget allocated $7,469 for “armorer crew,” $17,500 for weapon rentals, $5,000 for rounds, and $350,000 as contingency in case anything went wrong. Hutchins was to have earned $48,945.
Production of Rust officially began on Wednesday, October 6, 2021. After some crew members arrived on set, they found out they would have to drive from Albuquerque twice daily as opposed to Santa Fe. This would add an extra one hour and 40 minutes to the already 12–13-hour workdays standard for film productions. This especially irked the camera crew. One of the crew members slept in his car overnight rather than drive back drowsy.
On Saturday, Baldwin’s student double accidentally discharged a weapon with a blank that he had thought was “cold,” meaning without rounds capable of exploding. Another day a woman working in the props department shot herself in the foot with a blank round and an SFX explosion accidentally went off. A crew member texted the unit production manager that these were unsafe working conditions and was particularly concerned about gun safety.
Because of the three discharges along with the long working hours, long commute, and late paychecks, the camera crew decided to walk off the set to protest their poor working conditions. In his resignation letter on Wednesday, October 20, first camera assistant Lane Luper explained these problems in detail, later saying that “in my 10 years as a camera assistant I’ve never worked on a show that cares so little for the safety of the crew.” Normally a walkout of below-the-line (those involved in the day-to-day production) IATSE members would halt production to retrieve new union members. But New Mexico allows producers to hire non-union workers due to its “right to work” law and continue the shoot.
Thursday, October 21
At 6:30 A.M., six camera crew members arrived and started packing their gear and personal items. After an hour, their non-union replacements arrived and one of the producers threatened to call security if the union members stayed any longer. There were about 100 crew members who showed up to work this day. From the camera and electrical departments, the only remaining crew members from the first day was the Steadicam operator and cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.
Leading up to the camera crew walk-off, Hutchins was an outspoken supporter for better working conditions as a fellow IATSE member. She posted this picture on Instagram two days before with the caption: “"Standing in #IAsolidarity with our @IATSE crew here in New Mexico on RUST.”
When her friends in the camera crew left, she was tearful.
Meanwhile, the crew ate an early breakfast and the day proceeded pleasantly. Reid Russell remembered that as cameraman, he more work to do in the morning than usual because of the walk-off and only one camera was being used for filming that day. Souza remembered they started the morning late, therefore having less time for rehearsals. Before breaking for lunch, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, working as both armorer and key props assistant, checked the “dummy” rounds (completely inert rounds with no primer, propellant, or explosive charge) and loaded them into an 1880s era Colt .45 revolver. When the production broke for lunch at 12:30 P.M., Gutierrez-Reed secured all the firearms in the prop-truck safe along with ammunition. More ammunition, however, was left outside on a cart unsecured. The crew was then shuttled off-site for lunch.
Souza and Baldwin had been rehearsing inside of a small church, which they returned to after lunch. Sarah Zachry, the props master responsible for all physical property used on set, pulled the revolver out of the safe to which only a few people have the combination of, and handed it to Gutierrez-Reed. To inspect the revolver, Gutierrez-Reed opened the hatch and spun the drum while David Halls, the first assistant director (AD), watches carefully to make sure the rounds are dummies and not live. In this instance, Halls failed to recall how many rounds were present or if Gutierrez-Reed spun the drum. Halls was handed the revolver outside and took it into the church for the rehearsal while Gutierrez-Reed dealt with her other positions’s duties.
Inside the church, Baldwin was sitting on a wooden pew facing south towards the camera and crew. Halls entered, announced that the gun as “cold,” and gave it to Baldwin, who also didn’t check it. Russell had walked away from the camera for a few minutes and came back to find Baldwin in front of the camera with Hutchins and Souza behind checking the angles. Because it was just rehearsal, nothing was being filmed and no audio recorded. Russell noticed an outside light creating a shadow, so they moved the camera over a couple feet. Hutchins was looking at the camera angle through a monitor next to the camera operator and Souza was directly over her shoulder.
From this new angle, Baldwin was practicing a cross-draw to show where his arm was going to moving with the revolver. Baldwin draws once and places the revolver back in the holster. During the second draw, Baldwin quickly aims the revolver at the camera and Souza remembers hearing a whip and then loud pop. Russell remembers a loud bang. Hutchins complained about her stomach, grabbed her mid-section, and fell back while saying she couldn’t feel her legs. Souza was bleeding from his shoulder and saw blood on Hutchins. She stumbled and was helped to the ground. Crew members applied pressure to the wound to try to stop the bleeding.
The script supervisor Mamie Mitchell called 911. During the call, she is talking to another crew member saying: “This fucking AD that yelled at me at lunch asking about revisions, this motherfucker … He’s supposed to check the guns. He’s responsible for what happened.”
A helicopter transported Hutchins to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque and Souza by ambulance went to Christus St. Vincent Hospital in Santa Fe. Hutchins was pronounced dead at UNMH at the age of 42. Souza recovered and left the hospital the following day.
What Went Wrong and Who’s Responsible?
Of the 100 crew on set that day, detectives interviewed more than 55 of them. One of the first was the film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed. The person who recommended her for this position was Arizonan gun expert Seth Kenney, who was hired in late September to mentor the 24-year-old Gutierrez-Reed. Kenney also supplied the firearms for the film, including the lethal Colt .45 revolver.
Gutierrez-Reed was nervous to be an armorer for a couple of reasons. On a podcast in September, she doubted her experience level, which almost led her to turn down her previous job. “You know, I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready … but, doing it, like, it went really smoothly.” The scariest thing for her was loading blanks into prop guns because she didn’t know how to do it before her father helped her through the process. Her father, Thell Reed, is a veteran armorer who worked on numerous films including Django: Unchained, 3:10 to Yuma, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. “You have to like look at the front of it and determine which one is the blank, if it’s dummied up,” Gutierrez-Reed stated in the podcast. “That’s how I tell at least. Every movie I’m learning new and new things — it’s all very quick.”
David Halls has worked in various AD positions for 25 years. He was handed the revolver by Gutierrez-Reed to then give to Baldwin because as AD, he oversees all safety on set as well as keeping the shoot organized and on time. This puts them in an uncomfortable position under the producers, who want shoots on time and within the budget. Because they’re beholden to the producers in this way, it’s difficult for the AD to speak up about safety concerns for fear of being fired. Producers prefer an AD “who will go with the flow and make things happen.” On the other side, the crew is fearful of the AD because of their insistence on being on time. If anything is late then delays can threaten to drop scenes and important rehearsals, which can lead to complacency and carelessness.
A crew member working with Halls in 2019 on an episode of Into the Dark complained to the producers about his personal behavior on set. They described Halls as “very aggressive” and “intimidating on set.” And according to another co-worker, Halls didn’t inspect the weapons on set and joked about the pointlessness in double-checking firearms. Sometimes Halls scrapped safety meetings altogether, which is what happened on his former productions as well as with Rust, which for 12 days of shooting only had three safety meetings.
One of the crew members from Rust recalled that “there were no safety meetings. There was no assurance that it wouldn’t happen again. All [the producers] wanted to do was rush, rush, rush.” Klingher, Winterstern, Nigam, and Baldwin were the producers on set every day. Another crew member said that “corners were being cut — and they brought in nonunion people so they could continue shooting.”
Rather than being a singular instance of saving money by hiring non-union crew, many under- and unqualified people are having to work multiple jobs with little experience (both for instance occurring in Gutierrez-Reed’s case) because of the massive demand for streaming content. Similarly, streamers are increasingly giving funds to inexperienced producers in smaller companies before the production begins, which leads to producers shooting larger budget productions with less experienced crews and equipment.
The production of Rust certainly applies to both cases. Lane Luper, who sent his resignation letter the day before Hutchins died, claimed beforehand that the production favored fast shoots and cheap labor over the lives of crew members. Before the tragedy, it was the withholding of paychecks and long commutes that led Luper to write that “the producers on that movie are treating the local crew like dog shit.” He added that they often played “fast and loose” when filming gunfights.
In a Facebook post after Hutchin’s death, the gaffer Serge Svetnoy echoed Lane’s comments: “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. It is true that the professionals can cost a little more and sometimes can be a little bit more demanding, but it is worth it. No saved penny is worth the LIFE of the person!”
As a producer for the film, Baldwin has a more complicated position as not only the one who pulled the trigger but also as someone responsible for the hiring of the crews and ensuring the overall safety on set. But like Halls, Baldwin also failed to inspect the revolver that contained a live round. One Hollywood armorer claims that the armorer must clear the firearm with the AD when it’s brough to set and verified that the chamber is unloaded, which the armorer should do again with the actor. At neither hand-off was this precaution taken.
The firearms on a film set fall under the supervision of the art department, specifically with the props master. They fully inspect, monitor, and clean all the weapons and at no point are real guns or live ammunition allowed. Most firearms seen on screen are typically real guns modified into safe and reliable prop guns. For action films or Westerns that require bigger and more firearms, an armorer is hired to always monitor them. Prop masters often prefer having an armorer on set any time an actor fires a weapon.
A trained armorer teaches three golden rules on set, which are the same rules when one goes to a shooting range: act as if the gun is loaded, never point it at another person, and always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. After teaching these rules, all crew on set during a scene with a firearm should become comfortable knowing where exactly the actor will be standing, walking, pointing the firearm, etc. These two protocols were not followed on Rust.
The revolver used to shoot Hutchins was not a prop gun. Bullets cannot be fired out of a modified firearm that can only shoot blanks. Blank ammunition appears different from live rounds, which have crimped tips instead of a projectile bullet. But when fired, a blank produces a loud bang that can imitate the sound and muzzle flash of a real bullet. Dummy rounds on the other hand look identical to live rounds but have no explosive potential, nothing can be fired out.
Some armorers, like Gutierrez-Reed in the podcast from September, express concerns over dummy rounds because they look identical to live rounds. Some dummy rounds are manufactured with a hole in the casing but not the expensive ones. The only way to tell the difference is shaking the round and listening to the sounds of small B.B.s inside. It’s unclear if Gutierrez-Reed performed this check. The only other two instances in which an actor fired a live round and mistakenly killed another was in 1915 on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Captive and more recently in 1993 with Brandon Lee on the set of The Crow.
Legal Consequences
Compared to actors, camera crew members have a higher chance of death on film sets. In the last ten years alone, four camera crew members have died while working on film sets in the US. In one of the more bizarre deaths, 27-year-old camera assistant Sarah Jones was killed by a freight train in 2014 during the filming of Midnight Rider. The film’s director Randall Miller and executive producer Jay Sedrish pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and served a year in jail. And consequently, the Safety for Sarah movement has raised funds to increase safety measures on film sets.
The day after Hutchins died, the producers of Rust claimed that “the safety of our cast and crew is the top priority of Rust Productions and everyone associated with the company” and that they weren’t aware of any official complaints about weapon safety on set. They are therefore lying or were unaware of Lane Luper’s email resignation two days beforehand stating his concerns over the unsafe weapon discharges. No official complaints of unsafe conditions from Rust were sent to the Occupational Health and Safety Bureau in New Mexico.
The producers hired a crisis PR team and a legal team from the high profile Jenner & Block law firm the following week to internally investigate among the cast and crew. Hours before they hired the firm, New Mexico district attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies issued a statement clarifying that “everything at this point, including criminal charges, is on the table.” She was initially concerned about the massive amount of ammunition the detectives found on set along with firearms that were not prop guns. Speaking alongside Carmack-Altwies, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza claimed there was complacency on the set of Rust and that New Mexico along with the film industry needs to address these safety issues.
During the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie, a helicopter crashed and killed three actors, two of them children. The director John Landis and other filmmakers were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter, but the producers were responsible for violating labor violations, which brought tighter child actor laws and bigger penalties for safety violations.
A group of 200 cinematographers called for a ban on functioning firearms on film sets. They claim that the industry has VFX alternatives that can reduce lethal situations. California state senator Dave Cortese plans to introduce legislation banning real firearms and live ammunition from sets along with New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham if the film industry doesn’t adopt these measures voluntarily. ABC’s police drama The Rookie banned real guns on sets a week after the killing and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson promised to avoid using real guns on set.
Two weeks after his wife’s death, Matthew Hutchins hired Brian Panish from the Panish Shea Boyle Ravipudi law firm, which specializes in personal injury and wrongful death litigation. Both Matthew and Souza could file civil lawsuits for financial damages in court rather than through workers’ compensation. The lawsuits would claim negligence defined as “a failure to exercise a reasonable level of care.”
One of the problems will be determining liability and who would have to pay financial damages. Because of the multiple hand-offs of the firearm, Baldwin unknowingly firing a “hot” weapon, and the producers responsible for all safety on set, the negligence will crisscross between defendants and could take years to unravel. Baldwin isn’t entirely safe from legal troubles as one of the producers. He most likely won’t be charged criminally for firing the revolver because Halls told him the gun was “cold,” but as producer, he could face involuntary manslaughter charges and named in a wrongful death lawsuit by Matthew Hutchins.
For a criminal case, intent is required instead of just negligence for a civil liability case. And for intent, the investigation will rely almost completely on how a live round was loaded into the revolver. Gutierrez-Reed’s attorneys Jason Bowles and Robert Gorence claim that she has no idea where the live round came from and that the two previous accidental discharges were due to the recklessness of the props master and stunt man. They further argued that Gutierrez-Reed was fighting for more safety training, but the producers overruled her. Regarding the live round, the attorneys claim that sabotage from a crew member is a possibility lacking any other reason.
The attorney for David Halls, Lisa Torraco, in a cringy interview couldn’t confirm the chain of events when the revolver passed from Gutierrez-Reed through Halls to Baldwin. Asked by the interview six times if Halls passed the revolver to Baldwin, the attorney deflected and refused to answer every single time. She claims other witnesses saw other things, that it wasn’t so straight forward as what was confirmed by the search warrant affidavit and first-hand accounts from Gutierrez-Reed, Baldwin, Souza, and Russell.
In an interview for Good Morning America after the statements from the attorneys, Carmack-Altwies claims that the sabotage theory has neither proof not even a possibility, and that Halls seems to have handed the revolver to Baldwin. A few days later the attorneys for Gutierrez-Reed are now more convinced of the sabotage theory, that their client is being framed, and that the scene was improperly tampered with before the police arrived. While the first two points are baseless theories, the final argument stands because Halls had taken the revolver immediately after the shooting and asked Gutierrez-Reed to open the hatch to inspect the drum and rounds.
While the attorneys and New Mexico authorities have been talking past one another in press interviews, Baldwin decided to lay low in Vermont immediately after the shooting before returning to his New York home. He deleted his initial tweets about Hutchins and re-tweets arguing he wasn’t guilty because of the “cold” gun. Then he gave an impromptu, informal press conference on the side of a Vermont highway with his wife. He couldn’t talk about the ongoing investigation but wanted to make the point that “she was my friend,” which he repeats twice.
Days later on Instagram he posted screenshots of a Facebook post by Rust costume designer Terese Magpale Davis, who had defended the producers against accusations of running a dangerous film set and that the camera crew union members were asking for too much. The producers were doing everything they could to run a safe set that pleased everybody, and the AD was stressing safety on the day of the shooting. Davis, clearly a dear friend of Halyna, misspells her name in the post after lamenting “my friend is dead.” After Baldwin posted this on his Instagram, Davis deleted her post.
What all the potentially accused have in common is deflecting blame away from themselves and towards someone else. They all make claims that they knew and were friends with Hutchins, that they think tougher safety measures on set should be set up, that this is a one in a trillion case, but not that they should have done something to avoid what happened. The producers should have hired an armorer with experience and focus less on the bottom line, Gutierrez-Reed should have been able to tell the difference between a live round and a blank/dummy, Halls should have inspected the revolver and rounds, and Baldwin should not have pointed a gun at another human being. They are all responsible for the death of Halyna Hutchins.
Coda
In an unfortunate twist of events, lamp operator and pipe rigger Jason Miller was bitten by a brown recluse spider while dismantling the set of Rust. Within a few days Miller developed necrosis of his arm (death of bone tissue due to a lack of blood supply) and sepsis (the body's extreme response to an infection). He was hospitalized and went through multiple surgeries to save his arm from amputation, which in the end was successful. Miller’s family set up a GoFundMe to cover the IATSE Local 480 member’s bills.
Rust gaffer Serge Svetnoy filed the first lawsuit for general negligence against the production, the financiers, Baldwin, Gutierrez-Reed, Halls, props master Sarah Zachry, armorer mentor Seth Kenney, and more. It claims that live rounds should never have been available nor be placed in a revolver that could endanger anybody’s life in its vicinity. The lawsuit provides a detailed account at each level in which protocols were not met, that it was the negligence of many people not following established safety rules. Earlier on a Facebook post he called out the producers for prioritizing saving money over saving the lives of crew members. Svetnoy was holding Hutchins in his arms as she was dying: “her blood was on my hands.”
The more interesting effect this could have will be on the ongoing IATSE negotiations for a better contract with the big studios. Several weeks before Hutchins died the IATSE made a tentative agreement with the studios that needs to be voted on by their 80,000 members. Some argued that the negotiations didn’t go as far as they would’ve liked in terms of benefits gained. But after Hutchin’s death, more members could be voting “no” because of the various unsafe conditions that obviously went wrong. Long working hours leading to drowsy driving was one of the bigger reasons the camera crew walked off the set, which then led to a rushed day of rehearsals and shooting. IATSE members are also more confident because of the strikes at Kellogg and John Deere.
Fellow members of Hutchin’s Local 600 set up a GoFundMe to support her husband Matthew and nine-year-old son, Andros, which so far has raised a quarter of a million dollars.
More lawsuits will be coming but the investigations and trials will probably take years to finalize the consequences of Hutchin’s death.
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This is a very insightful account and provides more details than I've read anywhere. You had to gather an enormous amount of information to piece this together. It's also extremely fair and does not make a judgement. You should be a reporter. One of the most accurate accounts I've read. You have a great blog. Thank you for your efforts!