Gun Safety on Film Sets - How it's handled and what went wrong on RUST and THE CROW

On October 21, 2021, at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in Bonanza City, New Mexico, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot and director Joel Souza was injured on the set of the film Rust when a live round was discharged from a prop revolver that actor Alec Baldwin was using. - Wikipedia

This film set tragedy ignited a discussion in the world of film and video production on the handling of guns on sets as well as raising questions about how accidents such as this can be prevented. Now TRUE FILM FAN brings you a comprehensive 63 minute interview with Dutch Merrick, a long time property master and armorer with three decades of film industry experience.

Both the RUST shooting as well as the 1993 death of actor Brandon Lee on the set of THE CROW are discussed in detail.  Dutch also talks about a book he wrote on film set gun safety practices and talks about the courses he offers in gun safety both in Los Angeles and touring the country.

John Wesley Downey
TRUE FILM FAN

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to True Film Fan on our iHeartMedia podcast.
This is the program where we talk about movies and
all different aspects and look at movies from all the
different angles everywhere, from talent to how they're made, to
the behind the scenes and whatever else comes up. So
welcome to the show. Today, we're going to talk about
something that I want to preface this by saying one

(00:23):
of the reasons that I thought to do this show
is that while I'm not into guns, I have a
lot of friends that are a lot of friends that
like to hunt and like to shoot guns for sport
and it just as a hobby. And one of the
things they have complained to me about over the years
is they'll watch a movie and an actor won't hold

(00:44):
the gun right, or there'll be a particular gun on
screen and it won't make the correct sound for that gun,
all kinds of things. They're very picky and they're very
funny about the authenticity of what they see. So later
in the interview, I'm going to ask our guests to
get into that with me and explain why that happens sometimes.

(01:05):
But anyway, our guest today is Dutch Merrick. He has
been in the industry for many many years. He's worked
with props and is what is called an armorer. So Dutch,
welcome to our program today.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
Thank you very much for having me, John, I appreciate
being here.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yes, first of all, tell us what an armorer is
on a movie production.

Speaker 2 (01:24):
Well, so we have to back out one more step
and talk about what a prop master is. And a
prop master is responsible for any object that an actor
interacts with on a show or that helps drive the
script forward. And perhaps the best examples of a prop
might be in the movie Castaway with Tom Hanks. There
was Wilson the volleyball that was a great prop. Or

(01:45):
if they wear a wristwatch or a wedding ring is
also a prop, and it can be something like a
time bomb or a gun. Now, an armorer specifically handles
the firearms for the show, so that might be the
pistol in a police duty belt or as I when
I worked on Seal Team, we're working with machine guns
things like that. So armors choreographing the scenes, they're making

(02:09):
sure that they're safe, how they're all lined up, and
they're figuring out what type of guns for the scene,
what drives that character would they be using a glock
or would they be using a six hour things like that.
So I see we helped, we work with the director
and stunts and the actors to make that scene come alive.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
How did you get into the industry initially?

Speaker 2 (02:27):
Well, I was living in la I was driving a
limousine for a company here that worked for the entertainment industry.
So I had an opportunity to pick up actors sometimes
from a film set, which oftentimes meant waiting long hours
while they were finishing a scene because they're not sure
when they're done. And so I had a chance to

(02:48):
be on film sets and I saw the synergy with
which the actors worked. I saw the sort of collaborative
capacity while they're creating art, and I really that appealed
to me, and I said, I really want to be
a part of that. Friend of mine in the business.
She was a script supervisor and at the time I
had no idea what that was, and I said, I
want to get into the business. So she says, what's
your craft? And I said, well, what do you mean,

(03:10):
what's my craft? She goes, well, what do you want
to do? What position on the film set do you
want to do? I said, oh, well, I did see
a guy handling the guns one time, and I've been
a competitive shooter at that time for ten years, so
I can handle the guns on a show. So she said, well,
i'll keep my ears up. If there's something coming along,
I'll see if I can get you in. And there

(03:30):
was some tiny, little no budget show at a Warehousela
del Rey, and she said, hey, they got this little
show we're doing, and the propmaster's definitely afraid of guns,
and there's a bunch of guns in the script. Why
don't you come down and interview with the production manager.
So I did. I went down there and he I
told him about my skills as a competitive shooter. He said,

(03:54):
I think you'll be safe and you'll be fine. We'll
bring you on the show. And my friend said, did
you get the job? And I said, well, I got
the job. She says, well, how much are they paying you?
I said, well, they're paying me one hundred dollars a day,
which was not very good money even at that time.
You know you're starting out in the business. She says,
We're going to go right back in there and I'm
going to get you one hundred and twenty five dollars
a day, just like everybody else on the crew. So

(04:15):
my very first day in the business, I already got
jacked by my first producer and I also got my
first raise on that day. So that was my segue
into film on a low budget, non union film, and
then from there I got my propmaster card in the
Union a couple of years later, and I eventually was
the president of my union. IATs Local forty four in Hollywood.

(04:36):
We represent all of the property crafts, about eight thousand
members strong. And now I'm on my twenty ninth year
of working as an armorer and a propmaster in film
and TV.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
Now, when I was looking over some of your information
on your website, you have an enormous Over that twenty
nine years, you have accumulated an enormous amount of credits,
and it looked to me like you've done TV, movies
and commercials.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's right. Those three are very different animals, and there
are plenty of people in the business that don't cross
over between them. And I've had the good fortune I
started in films and then I segued into commercials. For
many years, I worked with a guy named Joe Pitka,
who is the most awarded director in any kind of
directing at all. But he was the eight hundred pound
guerrilla director in Hollywood for many years, and I got

(05:22):
a chance to cut my teeth under him for hundreds
of commercials, which was an amazing thing. We watched the
Super Bowl and I'd watched five or six commercials that
we did come up during the Super Bowl, that's how
good he was. And then I had a chance to
get into television. So now I sort of bopped back
and forth. Feature films honestly had left Los Angeles. They
left for other points east where they could make tax

(05:46):
and centives and things. So television and commercials has been
the bread and butter for Los Angeles, and I'm glad
to say that that's how I've made my living for
three decades.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
We're talking with Dutch Merrick. He is an armorer in
Hollywood and he is the person behind the scenes that
when you see a movie or a TV show, he
handles the guns. Now, that's a pretty simple clumsy phrase
I'm using there. But when I say handles the guns,
what is the extent, what's the range of your responsibility
as the armorer on the show so.

Speaker 2 (06:17):
We interact with other with several other departments. Obviously the actor.
There's a sort of a sacred relationship between an armor
and actor because we are the only other person to
touch a firearm that's going to be used as a prop.
It's between us and the actor. But we will also
coordinate often with a stunt coordinator, and definitely with the
director and the prop master, and at times other departments

(06:40):
as well. We will help break down a script from
the very beginning and say, well, which type of firearm
would with this particular character have. Is he sort of
a James Bond type and he's got the little Walter
ppk Ors, he got the big forty four magnum like
Dirty Harry. And so we help drive the character forward,
and then we prepare those guns to make sure that

(07:02):
they're ready for the scene. If it's a semi automatic, let.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
Me ask you a quick question, is the type of
gun ever indicated in the script that you receive.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Sure, it's very often that a writer will know exactly
what they want the actor to have because they've done
their research and they wanted to drive the character forward.
When I was working on Seal Team, our writers and
producers from that show were from military and they knew
exactly what they wanted to have on screen. And then
there's just as many times when writers are not familiar

(07:34):
in the gun world, and they'll lean in on the
armor and say, hey, what would be good in this situation?
Or if there may be something where the script drives.
Let's say that the character needs to run empty at
a certain time, So I can't give that character a
SIGs hour with seventeen rounds. I've got to give them
a little single stack forty five or something because they've

(07:54):
got to run out at eight rounds. Like there may
be something that drives the narrative forward that determines what
the gun's going to be, and often that'll be like
a revolver versus a semi automatic, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
I interrupted you. You were talking about the importance of
the relationship between the armor and the actors.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, so we will collaborate with the director and the
writers and the stunt people, but most importantly the actor.
Sometime an actor will come to us and say I
think my character should really have a three point fifty
seven magnum Well, okay, and we'll work around that, and
often more often than not, we have actors that don't

(08:31):
have a lot of firearms experience, and they'll say, I'm
ready to learn anything, because I'm an actor and I'm
going to adapt to any prop put in my hand,
but I don't know anything about guns. Would you help
me figure this thing out? Or they're even afraid of guns,
so we will you offer them some training and instruction
in a safe space in which to handle a gun. Now,
you know, part of the job of a prop master

(08:53):
and armor is to make the scene as realistic as
possible on every level, yet at the same time make
it entirely safe. So whether it's going to be a
sharp looking dagger that's actually an aluminum knife, or a
retractable knife that the audience can't see but it looks
deadly and nasty, or it's a real firearm that breeds
fire out the front like a firecracker, but it doesn't

(09:14):
shoot any lead bullets. We're going to make sure the
actor has everything they can to interact with that. If
the scene requires they've got to do a magazine change,
or they got to clear a jam or something, they
get to load the gun getting ready for the big
gun battle. We will have the dummy rounds or the
blanks or whatever is necessary for that scene, so that
they're fully immersed in that space and they're in that world,

(09:35):
and they believe they're in that world, but ultimately they
know that we're handing them something that is not going
to hurt anybody.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
Where are the guns stored when they're not on screen.

Speaker 2 (09:43):
So generally we will have gun safe. In the case
of when I just finished Seal Team, we had a
forty eight foot tractor trailer, just like all the other departments,
and our tractor trailer was this huge, not quite walk in,
but very massive be safe that are bolted into the
chassis so that you can't get them out of it
very easily. And then every prop master has if they're

(10:07):
on a stage, they'll have what it's called a gold room.
And the gold room is where the proper tea master
keeps and secures all of the expensive and potentially volable things.
It could be liquor bottles, it could be firearms, or
a chandelier, or diamonds. And there's an important differentiation between
a and a property master. Property, which is our official title,

(10:28):
means we were in charge of all the property of
the studio. At one point so we would have lock
up cages and gold rooms to lock up the chandelier
and the lamps and the lights and everything. And then
over the years they've scaled back our responsibilities and we've
more specialized into just the prompts. So that's the prop
that an actor uses to help portray that character. But
we still do, for example, director's chairs, those tall telescope

(10:51):
wooden director's chairs. That is property of the studio, So
it is property at the prop department, even though it's
never seen on camera.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
If you're working with an act that has done a
lot of action and has used guns quite a bit,
I guess that makes your job a lot easier, doesn't it.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
Well, it depends, honestly. There are some actors I've worked with.
You know, if the guys on Seal Team, these guys
are pros and they pick up a Burretta and they
can field stirf at blindfolded as well as I can,
and they'll know exactly what to do with it. But
often as not, there are actors that have been they
have training scars, if you will. They've learned to do
something in a way that it may not be the

(11:28):
best way in real life, but it may not be
appropriate for that scene or that show, so we may
have to retrain them. No, you're going to do a
mag change this way, you're going to load the gun
that way. So yeah, if someone's a seasoned firearms user,
it does help us, but we also have to be
aware of what they might have learned that's not appropriate
for this particular show. Maybe they're doing it that way

(11:50):
on that show. Maybe they're doing a seventies cop drama
and the guy's got a thirty eight and he's doing
what's called cup and saucer or tea cupping it where
you hold the revolver with your shooting hand and then
other hand cuts the base of the grip. That was
you know, LAPD circa nineteen seventy eight, and that's great
for that show, but you're not going to now have
the tactical guys go blast in the door of the

(12:11):
Taliban holding guns that way. That's not appropriate. So we
got to make sure that they're period correct for the
era in which we're portraying this story, and that they're
correct for whatever their position is. The guy's a novice
is the characters in Novice is just being handed a
gun for the first time, Well, he's got to look
like that, or is the guy seasoned pro that's a
hired assassin, so he's going to look like that too.

(12:32):
So that's part of what we will help choreograph with
the stunt coordinator.

Speaker 1 (12:36):
How often does the you know, when I think of
somebody off the top of my head, I'm thinking of
James Cameron. I've seen some back behind the scenes things
and read interviews, and he seems like the kind of
director that would be very, very involved in the use
of any guns in a scene. I guess it varies
from director to director how much expertise they have on

(12:56):
what you do.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Yes, that's correct. You know, teach a class called prop
gun safety, prop gun set safety, and one of the
things that we talk about is languaging and how to
interact with other people in other departments, such as a
director or a director of photography. And a big part
of that is being aware of their position on the

(13:17):
set and acknowledging that and being aware of our position.
And you know, you can call it politics, that's totally legitimate,
but we just need to establish Yeah, you the director
are in charge of the set and the story. I'm
in charge of this piece of safety. So yeah, I'm
going to accommodate anything you want. We're going to find
out a way to do it. We're going to come

(13:38):
hell or high water, We're going to find a way
to do it. Ultimately, if it's not safe, I say
what goes and we can or cannot do this thing.
So I've had some big directors where I've had to say,
you know, with all due respect, you're asking us to
do something that is dangerous, So let's modify it. We
offer you to versions. We can modify it this way.
We move the camera over here, or we modify it

(13:59):
that way. We point the gun into different direction, where
we go with lighter loads and less fire come out
the barrel. You decide, but we can't do what you
initially wanted to do. But I'd say ninety nine times
out of one hundred, we can accomplish whatever their vision is.
We can facilitate and do it diplomatically.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
That's interesting because it just as you were saying all that,
it occurs to me a lot of people on the set,
whether it's you, the armor or the actor. Part of
the job is to give the director choices on how
to do different things. Because the director can't be an
expert on every single thing, right, That's true.

Speaker 2 (14:34):
There are times when a director is dead set on
a particular thing. I worked with a director that wanted
a particular type of a vase for an urn on
a mantle, and he had it in his mind because
there's something he grew up seeing as a child, and
we wanted just that. Earn Well, okay, this earned from
the nineteen forties that your grandmother handed down. We can't

(14:54):
find one exactly like that, and it's going to be
cost prohibitive to paint it exactly like you want. Why
don't you try this one from the nineteen fifties and
this one from the nineteen thirties, and here's a third
and a fourth choice. Hopefully you'll find something in there
that you like. And the same thing with firearms. Will
will often if the scene dictates that it needs a
particular action. Like I said, the most commonest when does

(15:17):
the gun run out of ammunition? Is it a small
little revolver or is it a big, full size semi automatic.
We will shape and cast, like casting an actor. We
cast a gun for a scene, will pick the one
that works most appropriately in that instance, and hopefully the
director will find something you likes. I have worked with directors.

(15:39):
We get them twenty choices in a row, and nothing
fulfills their vision until we get to that twenty first choice.
And that's okay too. That's part of the job. The
part of the job is to bring them options. Great.

Speaker 1 (15:50):
We're talking with Dutch Merrick. He works in Hollywood. He
has a cool job working as an armorer and as
you just heard him say, working as a prop master
to try to make sure that the show gets on
the screen. Come John Wessey Downey. This is true film
fan and on the iHeartMedia podcast heard on many many
podcast platforms. You can get us everywhere. Today we are

(16:12):
talking about the job of the armorer on a movie set,
a TV set, or a commercial. And we're talking with
Dutch Merrick. He's been in the business twenty nine years.
He's worked on everything you can imagine, and as you
can tell from this interview, he is extremely experienced and
knowledgeable about his job. What do you think would surprise

(16:32):
people the most about your work?

Speaker 2 (16:34):
Oh boy, I wasn't expecting that question. I don't know
what I was expecting. What would surprise people? I would
say one of the challenges that we have is that
people that come out of the real world shooting community
have been trained in a certain way, whether they're a farmer, soldier,
or police or an instructor, and they have a sense

(16:55):
of what gun safety is and how you can use
a gun. Yet in our businessiness we break some of
those rules. Those everyday you know, a man on the
street rules often don't apply to us, because you know,
if you're at a shooting range, they'll tell you a rule.
Number one, never point at somebody, or don't point. They
may say, don't point something you don't wish to destroy. Yet,
in the film business, how often have you seen a

(17:17):
gun pointed directly at the camera and you're looking right
down the barrel of the gun, or in the case
of a revolver, you're seeing the fronts of the chambers
of the cylinder. You could see that there's rounds in there.
So we and we do on occasion, point a gun
at a person, but we do it choreograph very carefully.
We do with a bulletproof glass in between people. We
do with different camera angles. So I think that a

(17:40):
lot of people have a false impression about how to
do this job, and I get approached pretty regularly by
people that you know, Hey, I just came out of
twenty years in the military. Hey, I was an instructor
for the LAPD, and I want to get into, you know,
being a studio armorer. And it can't be all that
different than what we do. And they have an entire
learning curve. It's not only learning the language of film

(18:03):
and learning the language of how to show things on
a camera lens and how to portray things to show
up a certain way, but it's the gun part is different. Yeah,
you keep your finger off off the trigger until you're
ready to shoot. You treat the gun as it's loaded.
But you sometimes you break that sort of that rule
of don't point at something you're going to destroy. And

(18:23):
I've done it countless times where we pointed a gun
directly into one hundred thousand dollars camera lens, but through
like loads and bulletproof glass, were able to get the
shot and it looks amazing and no, nothing got broken,
nobody got hurt.

Speaker 1 (18:37):
One of the frequent words used on a film set
is cheating, and most people think that means doing something
dishonest or illegal, but you're constantly cheating things to make
it look better on camera than it does in real life.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Right, that's absolutely right. I give a great graphic example
of that in the class that I teach, where we
have a cinema camera and it has a zoom lens
that will go very very wide out to about a
twenty four millimeter or very long out to maybe one
hundred and fifty two hundred milimeter, and that changes the
perspective for the camera and the perspective of the audience.

(19:13):
And so I'll do a graphic example where we'll have
two people, two volunteers in the class, be the actors,
and each one will have a training pistol, and I'll
have them point It looks like they're pointing at each other,
but instead they're doing what you just said. They're cheating,
so they're favoring towards the camera and they're actually not
putting their muzzle on each other. They're putting them just
past each other towards the camera, and the camera lens

(19:36):
on about a medium lens, maybe a fifty looks like
they're pointing at each other. It cheats it. It pretends
that they're actually pointing at each other where they're not.
And then we much the camera all the way in
as close as we can get. We go on as
wide a lens as possible, and the actors haven't moved.
They're pointing the guns in the same way, but now
you can see it's really exaggerated, and those guns look
like they're pointing way out of way off a screen.

(20:00):
Then we move the camera back to a third position
and go back as far as the room will allow us,
and you go on as long a lens as possible.
Those two actors pointing a gun sort of near each
other look like they're pointing straight at each other. And
I'll take it one level further. I'll have them points
straight ahead, they're facing each other, and I'll have one
person take three or four large steps away from the camera,

(20:20):
still pointing ninety degrees to the camera, So it looks
like they're pointing pistols at each other. But that long
lens compresses the focal plane and brings them on to
the same focal level, and it looks like they're smack
dab pointing at each other, but they're three or four
feet away and they're entirely safe. So yeah, that's the
magic of cinema where we can really cheat things and
make them look like something, make it look like it's

(20:42):
something it's not.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
You know, I haven't done anywhere near as much filmmaking
as you have, but I've been on some sets and
I've made some shorts and different things, And in talking
to people that I know that love films but don't
know too much about them, sometimes they'll say, well, you know,
they might ask me a question about the production and
I'll mention something about a lens, and a lot of
people will go, lens, what's the what's the big deal

(21:03):
about the lens? And It's like, at a certain level
of filmmaking, it would it would absolutely amaze people at
how much difference the lens makes in what is in
how how the audience perceived something. I even saw Barry Sonnenfeld,
who was the big director and was a DP for

(21:25):
a long time and has made quite a few comedies,
and he said the I can't remember which which len
lens length it was, but he said, the twenty eight
millimeter lens is the funniest lens to film people. And
you know, he and he had that feeling that when
he put that on people, it did something that that,

(21:45):
you know, made it funnier. And I assume he knows
what he's doing. He's a very famous comedy director, so
there's so many tricks of the trade that even people
that are film fans don't know. That's one of the
things that makes it such a fascinating Are there movies
when you go to see a movie, you must be
awfully critical when you're watching things on screen. Are there

(22:09):
movies that you could could call out that are particularly
good at representing the use of firearms. I've heard people
say john Wick was pretty accurate.

Speaker 2 (22:20):
Yeah, the first john Wick and the next couple were good,
and then the fourth one they used all replicas and
I think it just sucked after that. Pardon me, but
being really honest, I think the first one was really
well done. And part of how they'd made the first
john Wick so spot on and so incredible was that
that stunt team and Keano and the director had all

(22:40):
been working together for ten years, so they had built
up methods and a trust that you don't just walk into.
So it was definitely one of the better, one of
the very best films for that. And I think what
is widely regarded as about the best firearms film ever
done was Michael Mann's movie heat a pacino and to

(23:01):
Niro and there's a bank robbery scene toward the end,
and uh, what's his name, Dal Kilmer. He is so methodical.
Everybody in that film is so spot on. The training
was impeccable and to the point where that scene, that
bank robbery scene is used as a reference for training
law enforcement and military around the country. That's how good

(23:21):
is that's that has how good? That was so level? Yeah,
that is that is next level stuff. And I was
going to say, when you were talking about lenses, one
of the really popular tricks that we do is called
a Dutch angle, and I and it comes up with
me a lot because my name is Dutch, so it's
always a funny, huh. But a Dutch angle is when

(23:43):
you instead of having the camera level and flat looking
at the horizon, you tilt it and sort of rotate
the camera so that maybe the water is running out
of the frame. And the two most common uses of
a Dutch angle are one is suspense or terror, when
you kind of throw everything off kilter. You've seen it
in the midi in suspense films. And the other one
is comedy. So if it's the Mecis Brothers or whatever.

(24:05):
They're tilting the camera at a Dutch angle for a
zany funny moment, it kind of throws you off balance.
So another use of where you put the lens, of
what lens you choose, and how that affects the perception
of the audience.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
Yeah, the tools that the modern filmmaker has are just
amazing to create the illusions. We're back. I'm John Wesley
Downey and you're listening to True Film Fan the PODC.
We are talking with a master armorer and prop master
in Hollywood, Dutch Merrick. He has been working twenty nine
years in Hollywood and helps the production get the guns

(24:42):
on screen and make sure they're used properly and handled
correctly on the set. Dutch. I was working on a
production myself a while back with a film, and I
tried real carefully to organize it, but we kept having problems.
And I said to the deep who was a friend
of mine, I said, I'm sorry, I've tried so hard

(25:03):
to organize the shoot correctly, but we keep having all
these problems. And he said to me, because he was
old and wise, he said, John, I've been working on
movie sets thirty five years. He says, I've never worked
on a movie that didn't have problems to be solved.
That is, I think the average person would be surprised

(25:23):
to know that that is a huge part on a
daily basis of what goes on in a film set
is solving a problem that nobody expected.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of our job
in the property department, It probably most departments, maybe all
departments of the film business, is you're going to come
up against something unexpected, and whether it's related to the location,
or the wind and the hair is not staying in place,
or you didn't get enough ammunition, whatever the thing is.

(25:53):
And I just want to set the record straight for
a moment because you had called me a master armor,
which is actually a role that I'm not qualified for.
I am a propmaster and have been in the Union
for all twenty nine years, let's say a prop master
and I'm an armorer. But I have a couple of
friends or what you would call a master armorer, and
that is someone that is qualified to more or less

(26:14):
build a gun out of a block of metal. They're
an incredible machinists and incredible craftsmen with creating those things.
And I can run guns all day long, and I
can take them apart and do some modifications. But I
just want to set the record straight because I know
I'm gonna have friends that will listen to the show
and I go, wait, you're not a master armor. Well,
the general audience doesn't know the difference, but I want
to make sure those guys they're honored for what they

(26:37):
can do.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
Well, thanks for correcting my verbiage there. I didn't know.
That's another thing though, that you know, there's so many
I find so many people apparently out just there. I
was guilty of being one of them. So many people
think they know so much about films because everybody watches films,
But the deeper you get into it, particularly at the

(26:58):
professional level or if you've gone through a production. I mean,
I had a friend of mine come to a set
and by the end of the day he was exhausted
and he didn't do anything but stand around and watch,
and he said, I had no idea. There was so
much hard work that went into making a movie, and

(27:18):
it's really an apprenticeship for life, really, because no matter
how many things you worked on, as you said a
minute ago, there's a new problem to solve every day,
and that's even on a well prepared production.

Speaker 2 (27:31):
Yeah. I remember my first days in the business and
at about eight hours I was ready to clock out
and go home. And on hour ten I was asking
everyone around, like how much longer is this going to go?
And everyone said, we don't know. I said, how do
you not know? Like there's a schedule, there's a call
feet and I said, well, you can generally plan on
twelve hours. And I said twelve hours. Because I'd been

(27:52):
working regular jobs, I was on eight hour shifts, and
the film business, for better or worse, has in LA
scheduled generally around twelve hour days, and that means you
may go longer, you may go a little shorter. But
there's few filmmakers and producers as courageous as someone like
Clint Eastwood who budgets a ten hour day. And a
ten hour day is humane and it's manageable. So you

(28:14):
get a little overtime, you get plenty hours to get
things done, but you also get to turn around to
drive home for an hour if need be, and then
you can shower, shave and sleep and live and live
a bit of a life. But you know, we're at
the whim of the production as an on call gig worker,
and I think that's something that people don't have a

(28:35):
strong sense of what that means. It's not like you
get a job at the bank and you show up
at nine o'clock and you clock out at five o'clock
and that's your job. You're going to have probably a
six am or seven am call, and you're going to
be expected to be there a half hour early or
an hour early for what we call a pre call,
and then we're going to film for twelve hours plus lunch,
so there's thirteen hours, and then you're probably gonna wrap

(28:56):
out for half hour an hour, and then may go longer.
I can't tell you the number of days I've gone
to sixteen hours or twenty one hours straight because they're
trying to get that final shot in that location, or
they're about to lose an actor because I've got to
go on to another show and we're on call. So
would they'll book us for a day, or they book
us for a week, or say this show run six months,

(29:17):
and then you're out and you're back looking to the
next gig. I have a friend of mine who took
a one day call on Star Trek and it was
one of the first of the series, not the sixties
Star Trek, the eighties and nineties Star Trek. He took
a one day call and it ended up in being
a thirteen year gig. So in this business, it's so
unpredictable it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (29:38):
Wow. You mentioned Clint Eastwood. He has a reputation as
being one of the most amazingly efficient filmmakers in the industry,
and apparently what I've heard, doesn't very often allow the
actors more than one or two takes.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Yeah, he's confident what he does for Libby, He's confident
what he sees on the camera. And I think that
there's a lo of ya or insecurity that most people
in the business possess. And I understand why, because if
you didn't get it in the camera the first time,
there's no finding out two days later when you get
your dailies and you look at the film you miss something.

(30:14):
There's no going back and re renting the location, getting
you know, a million dollars worth of crew there that day.
So people, and nowadays, especially with digital instead of film.
It used to be with film we would be limited
on a thousand foot magazine, we'd be limited to eleven
minutes of filming. And then if you're in a smaller space,
you want a four hundred foot magazine, so you knowne
for about four and a half five minutes of filming

(30:37):
and you'd roll out. You would have to change magazines
and it'd be a four stop. But now with digital,
they can just roll and roll and roll and roll,
and oftentimes the director is not thinking about that, Okay,
let's get another take, let's get another take, let's get
another take, and that just avalanches. That just varies the
editors because they end up with all this footage to

(30:57):
call through. Luckily, I mean most sinces, the director will
have the script supervisor circle the take, so while they're
making notes, they'll say, okay, circle that one. It's a
good one, so the editor can find it later. But
the problem is now not only they're shooting ten twenty
thirty takes, but then they're saying circle all of them.
So the editor's got to call through five or six
or seven good takes. Where Eastwood he's confident in what

(31:20):
he sees, he's watching all the monitor, he's listened on
the audio. He knows he's got it. Let's move on
and let's not you know, film this thing to death
as it were. So I honor him for that, as
I think he's a confident and a courageous filmmaker in
that regard.

Speaker 1 (31:34):
Now, when you're working as either a prop master or
an armor, do you have an assistant or assistance to
help you.

Speaker 2 (31:40):
Well, depending upon the size of the job. I like
I did the show Euphoria for HBO. I was their
armor for season two, and there would often be a
scene where it's just someone reaching for a revolver on
the seat of a car, and so that's just that's
just me coming in for the day to handle that scene.
And then we did a scene where we choreographed a

(32:01):
gun battle with a dozen SWAT officers and we had
real off to the LAPD SWAT officers. They come in
all their gear and we switch out their gear with
our gear in the sense that we have blank adapted
M fours and all blanks. And then we would choreograph
a scene with six or seven guys firing at once.
Imagine an M four. It's like your standard military assault

(32:25):
rifle has a thirty round magazine, so they'd completely unload
full auto a thirty round magazine for AP and then
they'd change magazines on camera to the next one and
they'd unload that one perhaps, and then they'd go to
a third one they unload that one, And so they're
firing ninety rounds each person in the take and one take.
I'm well looking at maybe six hundred plus rounds in

(32:46):
one take where they're rolling for a minute and a half.
So that requires a team, so I end up. You know,
sometimes when I work on Seal team, we'll have as
many as eight armorers because there might be these ten
bad guys up on a hill with AK forty seven's,
there's our main Bravo team with their HK four sixteens,
and then there's another unit of armorers working on Blackhawk

(33:09):
helicopters and they've got mini guns. So we've got guys
spread out all over because they're filming this with six
cameras from every direction and it's a major gun battle.
So yeah, it can be one person with a revolver
and a holster, super simple, and then it can be
a whole team that we're choreographing. You know, it's like
a major dance number for just our department.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Pretty complicated. Who is ultimately responsible for the safety on
the set when guns are involved, who is the where
does the buck stop?

Speaker 2 (33:37):
Well, the producers in there wisdom designated the first assistant
director to be the safety officer, the chief safety officer
on set. Now, the first assistant director or stage manager,
depending on your film or stage is kind of like
the conductor in an orchestra who waves a baton and
has a sheet of music and brings in the base

(33:59):
and the string and everything else the drums on queue,
but they never touch an instrument themselves. Now, a first
AD or a stage manager is going to have a
walkie talkie, a call sheet in the script, and they're
going to have the actors hit their mark. They're going
to make sure they show up on time. They're going
to call cut an action, and that's it. They don't
touch anything themselves, So they're also since they're the chief

(34:19):
safety officer, there's sort of the second set of eyes
for the armorers. When the armor brings the gun on
a firearm on set with some blanks, it is the
opportunity for the first AD to observe that and I
can say, here's the six blanks. They can go on
this a revolver, sir or ma'am why don't you take
a look at these. Oh okay, great, those are all good blanks.

(34:42):
I see what you're doing, and I'll load them in
front of them and we'll go. Now on larger scenes
like con Sealed Team, when we've got so many sub
units going all during the same thing, we don't have
an ad to stand over our shoulder. So they know
that we've done this for a lot of years. We're
all trained professionals, and we get it done. Load the blanks,
will hand them to the actors. They call action, they

(35:03):
do their magic, and they call cut. We come get
the guns. We clear them out, period. So ultimately, the
armor is the only person handling the ammunition and the
firearms unless the actor needs to. During the scene. They
obviously the actor will handle the firearms. If it's scripted
that they're loading or unloading a gun, then they're working
with the ammunition. But that's a sacred relationship between the

(35:24):
armor and the actor, and the av can observe it,
but they're not to touch it. They're not to get
their nose in the process. They're there to be an observer,
just a second set of eyes.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
Our guest today on the program is Dutch Merrik. He
is an armorer on Hollywood films and TV shows and commercials,
and we're talking about the way guns are used and
handled on a set. Probably one of the when this
particular issue of gun safety on sets comes to mind
the last few years, the first thing that the mind

(35:54):
jumps to is the situation where there was an incident
on a movie called Rust, involving like Baldwin and a
cinematographer being killed. And it's gone through a lot of
different legal hurdles, and it's been very complicated, and I
was going to see Dutch if you could capsulize what
happened in your take on that situation.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, that was honestly a day that shook our industry
to the core, and it shook the entire industry. It
wasn't just armors or the property Department we in the
wake of that. The day after that happened, I was
interviewed by Variety magazine because at the time I was
the president of our union local that represents all the

(36:37):
propmasters in Hollywood and all the armors in Hollywood, and
I'm an armor myself. So that interview led to Good
Morning America, CNN, CORE TV, and I've done more than
one hundred interviews just about the rust incident, and I
created a class. I got together with other armors and
I put together an eight hour hands on course unlike
anything the industry has ever had, so that people can

(36:59):
really experience this. And we fire blanks, we film it,
we go through all the all the beats. So this
is a topic that I'm well versed on, is why
I say all that to preface this. So when rust happens,
all of the armors we're calling each other very quickly, going,
who do you know on that show? What happened? What? What? What?

(37:20):
What could possibly have happened? Because we all do this
day in and day out, and in fact, Hollywood shoots
fires tens of millions of blanks each and every year
for filmed entertainment. Let that think in tens of millions
of blanks fired every year safely because we choreograph it

(37:41):
and we only use blanks, we don't use real ammunition.
When rust happens, we're all scratching our heads, going, how
do you kill someone with a blank? You can't point
a blankt somebody kill somebody. It's just not possible. There
had to be something in the barrel. Or a live round.
And when they investigated it, they figured out that there
were six live cartridge that had been inserted onto that

(38:02):
film set and whether they were brought in and a
box of dummies. Now, dummy rounds are there to portray
real rounds on camera. So when an actor is interacting
with a gun, they're loading it unloading it. We have
what looks like a real bullet, but it doesn't contain
gunpowder or a working primer. And I'll give you a
quick lesson on ammunition, real quick. It's relevant to the story.

(38:24):
A cartridge, A functional cartridge is made up of four components.
There's the bullet that's the part that travels out, that's
the point of the thing. And then there's gunpowder, which
is a propellant. And then there's a primer which sparks
off the gunpowder, causes it to burn and expand and
cause gases and push the bullet out. And then there's
the brass case that holds it all together. So those

(38:44):
four things you need for a live cartridge. In our world,
a dummy cartridge will look like a real bullet. So
it has the bullet, the projectile, and it has the
brass case, and it has what looks like a primer,
but it will be a dead primer, either a fired
old real primer or something that's been made to look real,
but it's not a real primer. It's just a little
piece of metal in there and no gunpowder, so that's

(39:05):
the dummy round. Into the blank will have no lead projectile,
so it'll have the primer, the powder, and the case,
but no projectile to leave the barrel, so when you
hit it, it's like a firecracker going off. Now, on
this film set they had a box or two of
dummy rounds, which is very customary when you're especially when
you're doing a Western, because actors are going to have
cartridges in their Western belts. You're going to see them

(39:27):
all over the place, and they're firing revolvers, and in
the instance of revolvers, you often can see in the
front of the cylinder, and you want to be able
to see the nose of those bullets, so you put
dummies in there as well. In this box of dummies
were six live cartridges that looked like dummy rounds. It
looked like the other rounds in there, and they had
migrated all over the set. They found one on the

(39:49):
prop grt They found one on the prop truck. They
found one in Alec Baldwin's gun belt. They found one
in another actor's gun belt. These live rounds had migrated
all over the place at the hands of a young
inexperienced I don't even want to call her an armorer.
She was given the job of armorer, but she was
at best a gun wrangler. I tend to call hannicaturers

(40:10):
read a gun gal. She was given this department head
role to manage a Western with a lot of gunfire,
and this was her second time ever working with guns
as an armorer on a film set. The previous job
she had done was with Nicholas Cage. I think it
was called The Old Way. And on that show she
had two accidental discharges. Two times that a blank gun

(40:32):
was fired unintentionally, and that should have put event on
everyone's radar. On Rust there were already two accidental discharges,
one at the hands of the young propmaster, again a
young gal in her early twenties, new to the business.
She'd only done this a few times, and Hannah Hannah Reid,
who had only done this one other time. They had
two accidental discharges. Now one of the biggest things that

(40:55):
happened was, remember we talked about the first ad being
the second of eyes or the safety officer. This particular
first assistant director, a guy named Dave Halls, I should
say a character named Dave Halls. He called in this
young gun gal to bring in the gun for the scene.
Right after lunch. She brought in the gun. He says,

(41:16):
give me the gun. She hands it to him and
she leaves. Now her excuse was that they're in the
small church set that was limited occupancy because of a
pandemic restriction because of COVID, so you can only have
so many people. So she hands the gun off and
she leaves. But there were sixteen total people in that church,
I think two customers, three grips, three special effects. There's

(41:37):
all these people in there, still photographer people that didn't
need to be in there. But the armor absolutely has
to be wherever the crop guns are. The armor has
to stay. But this young gal walks out of the room,
leaving the gun in the hands of the first assistant director.
So he sat in for a rehearsal. He's pointing the
gun at the camera. They're lining it up, they're getting
their focus marks. And then he calls in Alec Baldwin,

(42:00):
bring in what they would call number one on the
call sheet. Bring in number one on the call sheet.
So here comes Alec Baldwin. Dave Hall says, here's your gun.
It's cold, which implies to the actor that it's been
checked by the ad and the armor, that they've already
made sure that there's no blanks in it. Cold gun
means no blanks. Of course, there's no live ammunition. That

(42:20):
goes without saying, because we do not work with live
ammunition on a sound stage or film set. So here's
Alec Baldwin taking direction from the cinematographer Helena Hutchins and
the director Joel Susa. He's pointing the gun right at
the camera where they're telling him to point the gun.
Now there's another piece of the recipe. Is important to
know here that the show was really poor conditions for

(42:42):
the crew. Safety violations, long hours, Some of the crew
felt that the guns weren't being handled safely, and so
the camera crew, I think six people of the camera
crew walked off that morning. They send an email to
the producers the night before saying, hey, we're done, We're
sick and tired. Of this show in the way it's
being run. We're leaving tomorrow, we're packing our gear. One

(43:03):
of the people with the camera assistant who had rented
his monitor to the production for them to use as
what they call video village. It's a remote place that
you can put slightly away from the set that the
director and the actors they can position themselves at this
monitor and see what's happening on the camera. This camera

(43:24):
assistant took his monitor home with him. He was running
it to the show. They were walking off, he took
it away, so there was no video village for the
director of photography, director scripture provisor to be stationed at offset.
So instead they're standing right next to the camera on
the camera Dolly and the dollar Grip had turned his
monitor to the right of camera, so as a courtesy

(43:46):
for the DP and director to use. Here you go,
and you can use my monitor, which planted them smack
dab in front of where that gun was. Had there
been an armor, any qualified armor, or a conscientious first
ad on that they would have seen here's an actor
pointing a gun where there's a crowd of people. There's
literally five or six people standing right in front of
the muzzle of that gun, even though you know it's blanks,

(44:08):
even though you're only working with dummies, it's customary to say,
all right, let's move you guys out of there, and
not have you standing down range of where this gun's pointing.
This bad for him. So they didn't catch that. And
here's Baldwin who on cue pulls the gun out in
this sort of rehearsal for the camera, and he pulls
the hammer back. Whether it hits the trigger or not
is irrelevant. If you drop that hammer, there's a good

(44:29):
chance it's going to strike around. And even after all
of that, there's only one in six chance there would
be a live round on that cylinder that came up
at that time when he was pointing at those people,
and that happened infinitessimly infinitesimally small odds that this cascade
of events could happen. And so he dropped the hammer

(44:50):
and it was pointed right at Helena Hutchins, it went
through her into Joel Susa, and it killed one and
took out another person. That was a really dark day
in Hollywood, and badly people think, oh, guns on set dangerous.
That's not true. The guns on set are safe the
way we've been doing it for one hundred years are
absolutely safe. The hiring practices of hiring a n income

(45:11):
book a brand new person to do this really important
safety job. And they had a first ad who negated
the rules and he's this rush, rush, rush guy. Give
me the gun, give me the gun, give me the prop,
give me the chair, give me the whatever. No, I
will do it when we are safe and ready, is
what her answer needed to be. So she wasn't present.
He hands a gun without inspecting it to an actor.
The actor trust is that trust that it's safe, and

(45:33):
it absolutely wasn't. So any of the dominoes that fell
to make this happen. If you remove any domino from
that sequence, Helena Hutchins would be alive today.

Speaker 1 (45:42):
Wow, that was quite a presentation that I feel like
I've been brought up to speed, definitely, And obviously it's
something that you have strong opinions on. And like you say,
the hiring practices were the issue, because it doesn't seem
like you would put a person that young and inexperienced
into something that is literally can be life or death.
So anyway you need to, you.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Know, for something for something like being an armor. You
really must apprentice. You must apprentice under a qualified person
for a number of years and really cut your teeth.
And that's one of the challenges in the film business
is there's not really an apprenticeship program. It's a unionized craft.
So you can't just bring your nephew on. Hey, why
don't you come hang out on set. No, you've got

(46:23):
to be in the union and you've got to be
on the clock and on the insurance. So there's no
sort of cutting your teeth for that actually being in
So without a mentorship program, without apprenticeship program, that's what
I've created the prop gun Safety Class, so that people
do get at least eight hours of onset experience of
working with blank guns in front of cameras, an actual
study in a filming environment.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
You touched on something there. I'm sometimes surprised when I
have mentioned the word insurance about on a film production
to somebody that isn't in the industry and they kind
of seen their eyes kind of pop open.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
It.

Speaker 1 (46:55):
Gee, I never thought about that. I guess. I guess,
like everything else in the world, you would insurance on
a film project, and there's people that's actually a very
important part of the budget.

Speaker 2 (47:06):
Yeah, that's a big part of the budget, and they're
going to make sure that. You know, if you're working
with a camera that costs a half a million dollars,
you're sure going to want an insurance policy. If you
have brought in seventy crew members and you're paying their salaries,
and you've rented a location and picture vehicles and all
this and Art Department built sets, you're going to want
to cover that because that forbid, there's a fire or

(47:27):
something and you lose the set, or there's a weather
Suddenly there's a snowstorm that comes in it was unpredicted
and you shut down. How are you going to recoup
those costs? So insurance is a really important part of
our process, and the insurance wants to make wants to
make sure that the people you have, particularly in key
safety roles, are vetted and qualified to handle those positions,

(47:48):
especially post rust.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
Do you have any knowledge of what happened on the
set of The Crow with Brandon Lee For people that
don't know, that was a nineteen ninety four movie and
Brandon Lee, who was the star of that movie, In
the Sun of Bruce Lee, died as a result of
a gunshot wound on it, and I remember reading that
it costs the producers of fortune to try to finish

(48:11):
the movie without their star. Do you know what happened there?

Speaker 2 (48:17):
I do. It's one of the cases that we study
in the class that I teach. We break down all
the elements and what happened. I believe it was in
nineteen ninety three. There was a chain of events that
happened that kind of created this perfect storm, this recipe
for a perfect disaster. And it started months earlier. They
were using a revolver as a prop, and they were

(48:39):
using it to do some still photography, and in order
to do that, they put some dummy rounds in the cylinders.
So when they're taking a picture down the front of
the revolver, you can see that it looks like it's loaded,
and they, unfortunately, the special effects team had made dummy
rounds for the prop department. I don't know the politics
of why they did that, why they didn't rent dummy

(49:00):
rounds from a prop house, but the special effects team
made dummies by taking live rounds, dumping the powder out,
putting the bullet back in the casing, and they left
the live primers. And you remember the four parts of
the cartridge, the bullet, case, powder, and primer. That primer
has a certain it's like a firecracker. When you strike
it with the hammer, it explodes, and it's got enough

(49:20):
energy to sit off the gunpowder, or enough energy to
push the bullet out of the case. So got to expand.
So they used these hand prepared dummy rounds with live primers,
and at some point someone holding the gun for the
still shoot clicked off around and when they fired that primer,
it pushed the lead projectile out of the case into

(49:40):
the barrel slightly. When the prop assistant who was running
that little photo unit, cleared the gun, he pulled out
five cases or five full cartridges and one empty case,
but he didn't think to check the barrel, like, where's
the bullet. That's weird. It didn't dawn on him. That
gun went back into inventory in the gun safe. They

(50:01):
used it again for a photo shoot. Didn't have the
same results, but they it's been handled a couple of
times by a prop person now, and they didn't check
the barrel for obstructions. Laying in wait in that barrel
was a bullet, the actual projectile part. Now fast forward
to the day that Brandon Lee was shot. They had
let the armorer go home that day, saving money. They

(50:23):
let the propmaster go home that day. Again, let's save money,
you can go home. And then they moved the scene
up on the schedule, having a scene where there's gunfire
where Michael Massey, another actor, was supposed to point a
revolver toward Brandon Lee and pull the trigger. The prop
assistant brought out full flash blanks and the revolver. They
choreographed the scene and so remember a blank is the

(50:47):
case primer powder, and what is laying in weight in
the barrel is the bullet. That's your fourth ingredient to
a full cartridge, basically at the full bullet. So the
proper assistant hand in the gun. Michael mass he made
the mistake of pointing right at Brandon Lee, which we
talked about earlier. You cheat. I wouldn't point a gun
directly at an actor. I would cheat it slightly toward

(51:09):
the camera, and if anything did come out the barrel,
it's going to land next to him. It's never going
to hit the act because I'm not pointing at the actor.
So Michael Massey pointed the revolver right at Brandon Lee
on cue. Brandon Lee's holding a grocery bag that's rigged
with an explosive squib. When the gun fired, Brandon Lee
sets off the squib and falls backwards instead of forwards

(51:29):
as you're supposed to. And it was two or three
minutes and people are like, are you okay? He's laying there,
and thought he was staying character and the blood drained
out him and he died because they had inadvertently created
a live round over a series of months, had kind
of cooked into this revolver a live round. It was
the odds of this happened are one in its heart,

(51:51):
you can't even calculate it. But again, it was a
series of errors, a series of dominoes all lined up
that if any one of those dominoes had the assist
check the barrel the first time and every time they
handle the gun as we always do, had they taken
the blanks and fired him into the ground or the
farm me it, had the propmaster been there, had the

(52:13):
armor been there, had the ad checked everything. None of
that would happen had the actor not pointed at Brandon Lee.
So it was a series of failures that all added
up to a death. And again, any one of the
normal checks that we do in the business would have
prevented that, and it didn't happen. So it's a case
study for the class on what not to do, on

(52:34):
being present, on making sure to check the gun every
single time, choreograph the scene properly, and again it also
comes down to hiring. If you're going to let your
key people go home and then have the assistant to it.
I'm sorry, impossibly frustrating to hear how that event went
down and someone lost their life needlessly.

Speaker 1 (52:55):
Absolutely, you know. One of the things is I'm hearing
you talk about rust and also the brandom. I suppose
each time one of these tragedies happens, though, it is
an opportunity for you guys to recalibrate and learn and
maybe develop some procedures, I don't know, something that might
help to try to prevent some of these things in
the future.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Yes, after the crow, nobody would allow their special effects
departments and just make some dummies for them, especially not
taking live ammunition and then just kind of making dummies
out of the parts we take them from. We have
our dummies and our blanks made by reputable blank manufacturers
only the uh. You know, we have many professional prop
houses all over the country and that's they have an armory,

(53:38):
that's exactly what they do. They also instituted the role
of the first assistant director as the chief safety officer,
so they can be a second set of eyes. We
make sure that we have adequate staffing. And in the
wake of Rust, unfortunately, there's been an overreaction, and it's
an overreaction that I think has been costly because immediately

(53:59):
after the rough thing, a lot of producers would say, well,
we're not going to go with real guns. Well, why not,
We're just not going to for safety. Well, okay, we
don't even know what happened on rust yet, and you're
already making that determination for safety. What I do as
a professional has been proven safe for a century, and
you're in good hands with us when they say, well, no,
we're going to go with these airsoft guns. Now, airsoft

(54:21):
are these toy guns that kids can play with that
have a little six milimeters plastic pellet that fires out
the barrel and they use a charged gas. These what's
called a green gas, and it's got a lubricant in
the gas. It's a canister that you charge the gun
with that lubricant is flammable, and so you're working in

(54:42):
a tight space with a thing that is it's built
to fire projectile, so you've got to make sure it's
clear and there's none of those little babies around. You
shouldn't have those anywhere near the set. But it is
the potential, so you treat it like a real gun
and grow off the trigger point in a safe direction
and treat a zero. It's loaded. But this flammable gas
is one of the most concerning things, because I've seen this.
People have sent me videos of shows where they're firing

(55:06):
off these green gas filled airsoft guns, especially in a
small space, and then some ignition source. It could be
a hot lamp, it could be a spark hit going
off lights this gas up and I have footage that
I use in my class that shows an actor firing
an airsoft and unintentionally they set off a squib and
unintentionally it creates a fireball around the actor's head that

(55:28):
was not part of the plan. So you've added another
layer of danger. Flammable gas, and an airsoft gun can
shoot one of these pellets at five hundred to one
thousand feet per second. That little plastic pellet at one
thousand feet per second could take out an eye or
maybe even go beyond the eye into someone's brain. So
is that a faith alternative. No, you've just kicked the
can down the road. I think what we do is

(55:49):
inherently safe because we don't have lead bullets. We have blanks,
so it's essentially like a firecraft. So we choreographed the
scene very carefully. We know where everyone's standing every moment
of the scene, how many rounds are going to fire,
when their fingers on the trigger, when it's off the trigger.
And what we do you get reliable results consistently with

(56:10):
regular blank fire, and you get it in camera, meaning
when you've rolled film on it and the actor's firing
the guns, you see the flash on the film, you
know you got it, and you've got the brass flying away.
You got the action of the gun working. Whereas airsoft
if they do that, or a replica or a BB
gun or whatever you want to stake it with, you
then need to fix it in post, which is a

(56:31):
nice dismissive way to say, costs you maybe a thousand
times more money more dollars to accomplish the same effect.
I talked to the editor in one of the shows
I was working on. It said, how much is it
to put a muzzle blast in on an airsoft gun?
If we're just going to go with airstoft not real guns,
how much is it for that? Just the muzzle flash? Now,

(56:51):
you've got to think they got to paint in light
all over the front of the gun. They got to
paint in light on the actor's face and in the environment.
It's not just putting in little bomb blast. So I said,
how much is it? How much is it for one
muzzle flash? He says, well, it's about eleven hundred dollars.
I said, whoa, whoa, hold the phone. It's eleven hundred
dollars just for the flash. I go, how much how

(57:12):
about for the brass flying or the action of the
gun flying back. He says, no, no, that's more, and
it's a lot more. So you can you can buy
a blank for about a buck and a half, or
you can spend eleven hundred dollars to put the flash
in in post and it makes no sense. I've had
a few directors come to me and say, thank god,
we're using real blanks right this we get it in camera,
we know we got it, you move on and you're done,

(57:35):
versus I've had directors say I am in post production. Hell,
we decided right after Russ we're going to go all
with airsoft guns on this show. And now I've spent
an extra one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars and
it's taken us three more months of production because we're
painting in every single muzzle blash, every every piece of
brass flying and it's it's a night and day difference.

(57:57):
So anyway, that's some of the pushback from that was
not the best.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Okay, we're back. We're talking with Dutch Merrick. He is
an armorer on Hollywood productions and when he's not on
the set helping people make movies, TV shows and commercials
and working with guns, he is an instructor. And I
thought we would give you some time to talk a
little bit about what you do and let people know

(58:23):
how they can learn more.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Thank you, John, I appreciate that. One of my proder
accomplishments is writing a guidebook called prop Guns Set Safety
for Film and Television. And it's a slim guidebook, but
it's something crew and keep in their back pocket. Or
their gearbag. It talks a bit about the process and
the golden rules of keeping your finger off the trigger,

(58:45):
keeping a gunpoint in the safe direction at all times,
and just treating is loaded. And I've crafted an eight
hour hands on course to introduce people to the craft
of being an armor or a gun wrangler for FILL
on television. And I've now taught this all over the country.
I've been ever Worred from Wilmington, Charleston, Atlanta, Portland, LA.
I've been taking this class on the road, and I

(59:07):
teach it every month here in Los Angeles, and I
have opened the class up to every class of filmmaker.
If you're a first assistant director, I want you to
know this. If you're a key grip and you're in
charge of camera safety, I want you to know this.
And of course if you're an armor but you're planning
on being an armor or a prop master or a
property person. I'd even had people come to me that
I was really surprised that wanted to learn this material.

(59:29):
I've had set painters and so these are people that
are on set that are standing by to add a
fouk finish or to paint some wall or something and
I've had set painters come to me and say, hey,
I want to take your prop gun set safety class,
and I say, well, I don't know that this is
the class for you, And two painters in the row
told me the exact same thing. They said, Hey, you don't understand.

(59:51):
I sometimes come back to my paint bench where all
my painting supplies are, and there will be a prop
gun sitting there with a note on it that says,
please age this down. And I don't know if it's
a real gun. I don't know if it's loaded. I
don't know what's going on. But I got to handle
these things, so I want to learn. So I've opened
the training up to all the people that are in
the film business, even actors and stunt people have kind

(01:00:11):
of taken the class. The curriculum we has four parts.
We get into basic gun safety and handling, kind of
get everyone on the same page for an hour and
a half. Then we dig into the prop gun process
and we deal with blanks and blank adapted guns and
choreographing scenes. And then we get into a module where
we film scenes. We actually get scenes on their feet,

(01:00:35):
as we say in the business, and we go all
the way through the blank fire, roll camera, roll sound,
the whole thing, and then the fourth module we break
down rust and the crow and some other incidents where
we really even delve into the psychology of being responsible
on set and having a very different set safety awareness.
So this class is open to people that are film

(01:00:55):
students or existing film professionals, and enough people say, hey,
I really enjoyed this class on blank fire, but I
want to shoot real guns and I want to get
a sense of what it's like to really shoot and
to learn how to do that properly. So I also
teach a class called live fire learning. There's a contrast
between blank fire and live fire. It's live fire learning.

(01:01:18):
I teach in LA pretty much every weekend, and we
focus on pistol safety and basic gun safety. Right now,
we'll be expanding into other curriculums, but I run people
right through the fundamentals of shooting from stance, grip, site, picture, breath,
side alignment, and I bring people from zero to hero
in a very short order, in about a half a day.
I bring in a lot of folks that have either

(01:01:39):
been afraid of guns or just never been exposed to guns,
and people that are serious shooters people have been shooting
a long time come to do this course as a
refresher to build up their skill sets. So I'm proud
to say that I teach both leaded and unleaded in
the gun world.

Speaker 1 (01:01:54):
Who will That's a great way of putting it. Do
you have a website or that people could access to
try to learn more about this and get in touch
with you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Absolutely so. The prop gun site is TRIPLEW prop Gunsafety
dot com very easy, prop gunsafety dot com. And then
the live fire learning is TRIPLEW Live LA ve fire
fire Learning. You know how to spell that dot us,
so live fire learning dot us. If you want to

(01:02:23):
shoot let it or unletted. I've got a way to
help you out here in LA And if you get
enough people interested in the class, I'll bring him to
cities all over the country. I'm actually hoping to get
to Austin this year too.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Well, that would be great. That's certainly a very active
film community. Well, I must say this has been uh interesting,
it's been educational. I'm sure that the listeners have learned
a lot from it, and I really appreciate your time.

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
Thank you so much for having me on and thanks
for thanks for being curious about our craft. I'm really
proud of what we do and I think it shows
on the screen. And when you see really good armorer's work,
you see a show like John Wick or Keat, I
think we can take great pride in our craft.

Speaker 1 (01:03:01):
Awesome, all right, thank you. We've been talking with Dutch Merrick.
He is an armorer in Los Angeles. He works behind
the scenes to bring you the kype of cool stuff
that we're just talking about. And I appreciate you listening.
You've been listening to True Film Fan, the podcast