Film set safety: 5 times accidents in Wilmington made national news

It didn't take long after last month's fatal film-set shooting in New Mexico for Wilmington's name to come up.

While rehearsing a scene for the western "Rust" in October, actor Alec Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said he didn't know the gun he was using was loaded with a live round, and the incident is being investigated.

Almost immediately, comparisons were drawn to the fatal shooting of Brandon Lee on the set of "The Crow" in Wilmington back in 1993.

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Charlie Coleman said that when he heard about the incident on the set of "Rust," "My first thought was, 'Oh no, it's happened again.' And I'd had a feeling for the last eight or 10 months that it was going to happen again."

Hitting 'pause' after 'Rust'

Coleman grew up around the film industry and around firearms, and for the past decade has worked in Wilmington and elsewhere as an on-set "armorer." Armorers are tasked with making sure all weapons and firearms used on film sets are safe, and it can be illegal to use certain weapons on set without the presence of a licensed armorer.

Coleman said the explosion in the number of productions due to demand for streaming content, along with the stringent COVID-19 protocols that have been in place for the past year or more, have combined to create an environment on some sets where safety can become compromised.

As a result of the shooting on the "Rust" set, Coleman said, "A lot of shows and studios are hitting the pause button" in terms of using guns.

He's currently working on the Netflix shows "Echoes" and "Florida Man" in Wilmington, which Coleman said have started using "silent blanks," which provide realistic recoil and weapon function, but without noise or projectiles.

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Some have called for an end to real guns on set altogether in the wake of the "Rust" shooting, arguing that CGI and other new technologies make their use unnecessary. But Coleman said there's room for a variety of approaches to the use of firearms on set, as long as safety isn't compromised.

That can be challenging at times, Coleman said.

"If I only worked with firearms, there would never be any problems. But I also work with people," he said. So while safety is his main concern, other factors do come into play.

In Wilmington in general, "Things have improved dramatically since ('The Crow') in 1993," Coleman said, noting that there have been no major accidents locally in more than 20 years. "But do I get complacent? No."

Almost all of the well-known on-set accidents in Wilmington took place in the 1980s and 1990s, which would seem to indicate set safety locally has improved.

Here are five times that accidents on film sets in Wilmington made national news.

'Maximum Overdrive,' 1986

Based on a short story by Stephen King — who also directed the movie — about machines that come to life and start to attack people, "Maximum Overdrive" is also known for an on-set accident that seriously injured director of photography Armando Nannuzzi.

During the summer of 1985, while shooting a scene in which a lawnmower rushes at the camera, the mower hit a wooden camera support and shot splinters into Nannuzzi's right eye. He lost the eye as a result of the injuries and later sued King and others, eventually settling the case out of court.

'Cyborg,' 1989

During a fight scene in 1988 for this action movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Van Damme accidentally hit another actor in the eye with a rubber prop knife.

Jackson "Rock" Pinckney, a real-life Army soldier playing a bad guy in the movie, later sued Van Damme and was awarded nearly half a million dollars in a settlement.

'The Crow,' 1994

By far the most famous on-set accident in Wilmington, and one of the best-known of all time.

While shooting in Wilmington in 1993, leading man Brandon Lee, son of martial arts superstar Bruce Lee, was killed when he was shot by a projectile from a prop gun that was supposed to be shooting blanks.

More: Brandon Lee's fiancee breaks silence after similar 'Rust' shooting death

'Black Dog,' 1999

Three people were injured in an on-set explosion during the 1998 filming of this movie, which starred Patrick Swayze, Meat Loaf and Randy Travis.

While setting up for a scene in which two trucks were to collide, causing an explosion, the explosives in one truck ignited, sending three people to the hospital, two of them with serious burn injuries, according to an Associated Press story about the incident.

'Iron Man 3,' 2013

This is a relatively minor one, but it did make national news.

Robert Downey Jr. broke his ankle while shooting a scene for the movie during the summer of 2012. It pushed back production of the movie, still the the largest-grossing one made in Wilmington, by a few weeks.

Contact John Staton at 910-343-2343 or John.Staton@StarNewsOnline.com.

This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: 5 times that film set accidents in Wilmington NC made national news