'Rust' Armorer Convicted: Involuntary Manslaughter

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Snattlerake

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https://lawandcrime.com/celebrity/a...at-loading-blanks-is-like-the-scariest-thing/

Gutierrez spoke to the podcast from Livingston, Mont., on Sept. 11. The fatal shooting in Santa Fe, N.M., occurred on Thursday, Oct. 21.

“I just finished up working on ‘The Old Way’ with Nicolas Cage, his very first Western,” Gutierrez-Reed said. “It was also my first time being head armorer as well.”

“How was that?” a podcaster asked.

“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, it went really smoothly.”

She said was “hoping” that working as an armorer on the Cage movie would be a “badass way to start off a really long and cool career.”

Gutierrez is the daughter of famous Hollywood armorer and stunt man Thell Reed. She said she considered acting and modeling but wished to undertake more substantive work. She said she generally used only the last name of her mother (Gutierrez) — and that is how her name appears on a New Mexico search warrant.

The conversation turned toward various production assistant gigs and working with Cage. She said he was “standoffish a little bit” but became “whacky” and “fun” toward the end of the production.

Gutierrez said she had to counsel the director of the Cage film to upgrade the lead character’s weapons given the shifting time frames depicted in the movie.

“There’s no way that he would have kept that same gun over 20 years,” she said while noting that gun technology advanced significantly during the period in which the film was set.

She said the Cage film didn’t contain much gunfire but did require her to work with both pistols and rifles. She said she preferred working with lever action rifles in cinema for their visual appeal but preferred to shoot Colt Peacemakers personally.

“I’m getting pretty good at quick draw,” she said while indicating she was trying to impress her father. “I’m getting pretty fast.”

Conversation later turned toward how Gutierrez would instruct an actor who came to draw a weapon from her armory.

She said some actors know nothing about gun belts or how to operate the hammer of a revolver. She said many need to be taught how to quickly draw a weapon and how to do “the whole trigger thing.”


Gutierrez later said she learned a lot from her father as an apprentice but was also self-taught through observation — though she admitted she was “still leaning.”

“I think loading blanks is, like, the scariest thing to me because I was like, ‘oh, I don’t know anything about it,’ but, you know, he taught me that, and eventually by the time I was, like, trying to figure out how to make a specific blank go when you want it to rather than it hitting, like, the empty cylinders and everything — I figured that out on my own.”

“Explain that process,” a podcaster asked.

“Uh, so, normally, if you, like, you know, you open the loading gate, you put the bullet in, you have to put it right around, so right before — you have to bring that bullet — that blank all the way around to right before the cylinder, so then that way, the next time someone pulls back the hammer and shoots it, it will go off, yeah, and you have to look at the front of it and determine which one’s the blank if it’s dummied up, you know, that’s how I tell, at least.”

The podcaster asked if the rest of the cylinder is generally filled with “dummy wads.”

Gutierrez said that usually it was.

Dummy wads look like real bullets but are completely inert. They do not fire or produce a noise because they do not contain explosives or propellants. Blanks contain gunpowder and therefore produce a muzzle flash and a sound, but they do not contain projectiles.

“I try to dummy it up as much as I can,” she said.

“To make it look real,” the podcasters said while completing her thought.
 

Shoot Summ

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My Wife has been listening to the trial, sounds like she was not very good at the job she was hired to do. According to the testimony she was very lackadaisical about what she was doing. No control of ammo or firearms, not always present when firearms were in a scene, had an open cart that was strewn with ammo not organized, and kept ammo in her fanny pack.
 

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