Assistant director who gave Alec Baldwin gun had past safety concerns – National

A crew member says she has raised security issues prior to now concerning the assistant director who authorities say unwittingly handed actor Alec Baldwin the prop gun that killed a cinematographer on a movie set.

Maggie Goll, a prop maker and licensed pyrotechnician, mentioned in a press release that she filed an inside grievance with the manager producers of Hulu’s “Into the Darkish” collection in 2019 over issues about assistant director Dave Halls’ conduct on set. Goll mentioned in a telephone interview Sunday that Halls disregarded security protocols for weapons and pyrotechnics and tried to proceed filming after the supervising pyrotechnician misplaced consciousness on set.

Halls has not returned telephone calls and e mail messages looking for remark.

This week’s deadly taking pictures and a few of her earlier experiences level to bigger issues of safety that must be addressed, Goll mentioned, including that crew member security and wellbeing are prime points in ongoing contract negotiations between a union that represents movie and TV employees and a significant producers’ group.

“This case will not be about Dave Halls. … It’s under no circumstances one individual’s fault,” she mentioned. “It’s a much bigger dialog about security on set and what we are attempting to attain with that tradition.”

Baldwin fired a prop gun on the New Mexico set of the movie “Rust” Thursday, killing 42-year-old Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza, who was standing behind her.

The gun Baldwin used was one in every of three {that a} firearms specialist, or “armorer,” had set on a cart exterior the constructing the place a scene was being rehearsed, based on courtroom information. Halls grabbed a gun off a cart and handed it to Baldwin, indicating that the weapon was protected by yelling “chilly gun,” courtroom papers say. However it was loaded with stay rounds, based on the information.

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Baldwin, 63, who is understood for his roles in “30 Rock” and “The Hunt for Pink October” and his impression of former President Donald Trump on “Saturday Night time Stay,” has described the killing as a “tragic accident.”

Goll mentioned it shouldn’t have occurred as a result of there are “so many steps that you need to undergo … that the opportunity of it even getting there ought to be unimaginable.”

Actor Ray Liotta agreed that the checks on firearms are normally intensive.

“They at all times — that I do know of — they verify it so you’ll be able to see,” Liotta mentioned in an interview Sunday on the Newport Seaside Movie Competition. “They provide it to the individual you’re pointing the gun at, they do it to the producer, they present whoever is there that it doesn’t work.”

Rust Film Productions has not answered repeated emails looking for remark.

Baldwin, who’s a producer on “Rust,” met with Hutchins’ husband and 9-year-old son Saturday at a lodge in Santa Fe the place the actor had been staying throughout filming. Baldwin and Hutchins’ husband will be seen embracing in a photograph printed by the New York Put up. One other exhibits a defeated-looking Baldwin strolling on the lodge grounds pushing a baggage cart.

Goll mentioned in her e mail that Halls’ conduct on set has involved her prior to now.

She mentioned that, throughout work on “Into the Darkish,” Halls didn’t maintain security conferences and constantly didn’t announce the presence of a firearm on set to the crew, as is protocol. The assistant prop grasp admonished Halls a number of occasions for dismissing the actors earlier than that they had returned weapons to the props desk, she mentioned.

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Alec Baldwin fires prop gun on movie set, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins

She grew to become most involved, nevertheless, when the supervising pyrotechnician, who’s diabetic, was discovered unconscious in a chair, she mentioned. Halls needed to renew filming after the person was faraway from the set although Goll, the remaining pyrotechnician on website, didn’t have the {qualifications} to oversee the sophisticated collection of pyrotechnic results that had been deliberate.

“One of many issues that caught out to me most about that day is the truth that he known as out on radio over channel one, `Hey, Maggie says we will hold going!’ and I mainly held the button down so he couldn’t transmit to anybody else on that channel whereas I yelled out, `No, Dave, that’s not what I mentioned. We’re not doing that,”’ she recalled in a telephone interview.

She filed an inside grievance with the manager producers of Blumhouse Productions about that day, she mentioned.

“To my information nothing was completed after my complaints,” she mentioned in an e mail.

“I’m gutted at not pushing more durable for higher accountability and security,” she wrote. “Many people have messaged one another questioning the identical factor: is there one thing we might have completed then that might have prevented the tragedy?”

Flaccus reported from Portland, Oregon. Related Press writers Jake Coyle and Jocelyn Noveck in New York; Ryan Pearson in Los Angeles; Walter Berry in Phoenix; and Michelle Eaton in Newport Seaside, California, contributed to this report.