Actor Alec Baldwin shared a lengthy string of social media posts written by a crew member of the Western movie “Rust,” who blasts co-workers for describing the New Mexico set as “chaotic and unsafe.”
Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounded director Joel Souza on October 21. He says he was told the gun he was using in a scene was “cold,” meaning unloaded or loaded only with blanks.
“Read this,” Baldwin wrote about the multiple Instagram posts penned by Terese Magpale Davis, who worked in the wardrobe department for the movie.
“I am so sick of this narrative,” Davis wrote. “I worked on this movie. The story being spun of us being overworked and surrounded by unsafe, chaotic conditions is bull***t.”
“We never worked more than a 12.5 hour shoot day. That was once,” Davis wrote. “Most days were under 12. The day Halyna died we had come off of a 12 hour turnaround after an 11 hour shoot day. We had (including camera) gotten off by 6:30pm.”
“We had just had a 56 hour weekend right before that. No one was too tired to do their jobs. This is all provable by daily time sheets.”
Several crew members said they had been given hotel rooms in Santa Fe but were later informed they had to make a 50-mile drive from Albuquerque each day to the set near Sante Fe.
Davis said that isn’t true. “The camera crew HAD hotels. They just didn’t feel they were fancy enough. NOT that they were unsafe. You can’t tell me that 6 big men felt so unsafe in their hotel but were fine sleeping in their cars in parking lots (which never happened) like they also claimed.”
“And our set was only 35 minutes from Albuquerque. Santa Fe is an hour from Albuquerque, but the set was 25 minutes south of that. So they aren’t even traveling that far to go home,” she said.
Davis also said safety was not compromised on set. “Our AD never seemed flippant about safety,” she wrote, referring to assistant director Dave Halls, “who reportedly handed Baldwin the pistol that killed Hutchins and insisted that it was a ‘cold gun,’ according to a search warrant,” the New York Post reported.
“Am I angry with him? Yes. But I won’t jump on the bandwagon and pretend he was uncaring about our safety the whole way through,” she said.
Davis also defended the head armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, 24. Crew members have said she lacked experience.
“I’ll fight to have our armorers have higher standards they must pass to be in that position where they hold all of our lives in their hands,” the costume designer wrote, according to the Instagram screenshots.
“But I’m not okay with using her to be the poster child for better hours,” she added before ripping the “pitchfork” mob blaming the movie’s producers.
“Maybe you could just not be one more person with a pitchfork in a mob that has no idea what you’re talking about because you weren’t there,” she wrote.