WHAT WENT WRONG - Below The Line - Armorer (Django Unchained)

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Armorer Larry Zanoff (Django Unchained, Captain America: Winter Soldier, The Matrix Resurrections) is a combat veteran, a bonafide gunsmith, and a weapons trainer for both actors and law enforcement officers. Join us for a discussion on the responsibilities of an on-set armorer, cross-collaboration with departments you wouldn't expect, and what we need to learn from the rare but devastating on-set firearm tragedies that have captured Hollywood headlines for decades.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Below the Line with What Went Wrong, where we interview folks who have worked in key positions on some of your favorite films. Last week we covered The Crow, and as promised, today we are dropping our full interview with legendary armorer Larry Zanov. He was a joy to talk to, and we cannot emphasize enough how grateful we are to have had him as a below-the-line guest. With the recent sentencing of Rust Armourer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, we hope that this episode helps you understand the critical role

armorers play on movie sets and appreciate how invaluable they are on all films without incident where things did not go wrong, which is of course the overwhelming majority of them thanks to the great work of armorers like Larry and his peers. We hope you enjoy this episode, but before we let you go, we want to remind you that if you are enjoying this podcast, there are three easy ways to support us. The first one is simply to a cost, any family members. members, friends, coworkers, people sitting close to you at the park, and tell them to give it a listen. We really appreciate the word of mouth support. The second way is to log on to Apple Podcasts,

leave us a rating and review. And of course, the third way is to join our Patreon, where you can secure perks, including voting on which films we cover next. We actually have a poll live right now called The Stinker Bowl, and you can decide whether or not Lizzie has to fish a turd out of the toilet by the name of Speed 2, Gigli, Glitter, or Burlesk. You can also sign up at our five tier for an ad-free RSS feed or at our $50 tier for a shout-out on the show and quarterly merch. You can also head to our website www. www. What Went WrongPod.com slash merch if you just want to buy yourself a mug or a t-shirt. All right, enough of the plugs. With that, we give you Larry Zanoff. Hello, What Went Wrong patrons. We are very excited to be presenting you with another episode of

blow the line. And today, Lizzie, we have a very incredible guest, which you do the honors of telling our audience who we're speaking with. Absolutely. So on this podcast, obviously, we talk about what can and does go wrong on film sets. But here's the thing, dear listeners, we are not experts in onset safety. It may surprise you to learn. We are certainly not experts in onset gun safety. however our guest today is. Here to shed some light on an incredibly important job is legendary armorer Larry Zanoff, who has worked on a few films and TV series you may have heard of, including Django Unchained, Ant Man, Spider-Man, Homecoming, The Matrix Resurrections, and most recently Special Ops Lioness,

and so many more. Your IMTP page is very intimidating, sir. Welcome. Intimidating. I mean, you just called me legendary. I think that you just intimidated me a little bit. I don't know if I can live up to that, but thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Oh, my gosh, absolutely. So I think we want to start where we usually start, which is in the simplest possible terms, as though you're describing this to a three-year-old or me, what is the primary function of an armorer? Well, your onset armor is the crew member who deals with all aspects that have to do with firearms for production. And the aspects that have to do with firearms might surprise you. You know, you talk about firearms and you think, oh, well, it's guns and it's blank ammunition. But it's so much more than that. There's licensing involved.

there's locations that you have to scout out. There's all kinds of city ordinances that you have to figure out. You might have to interact with the stunt department, with the special effects department. Believe it or not, you might have to interact with the wardrobe department because you're making decisions like, oh, this particular character has to carry a gun. Are they carrying it as a belt holster kind of firearm? Or do they need to have a shoulder holster? Well, it depends on their wardrobe.

If they're wearing a wardrobe with no belt, guess what? We have to figure out a shoulder holster rig for them. So the armor is a very key cog in the machine of production when there are firearms involved in your film or television or stage play project or whatever it might be. So it's just like an art director, just like the director of photography, just like the stunt coordinator. It's kind of a department within a department. We work as part of the property department. So the prop master, you know, a firearm is something that the actor picks up and interacts with.

Anything on set that an actor picks up and does something with is considered a problem. clearly a firearm then is a prop. So we work under the prop master, but firearms can also be kind of a department unto itself. And so that that crew member that deals with all that is the onset armor. It's a great explanation, very thorough. And it brings us to our next question, which is it's such a clearly crucial role, but it's such a specific role. What's your background, how did that lay the groundwork for you ending up in this role? You know, was it a, oftentimes it could be a series of left turns that lead people to the eventual onset job that they have if they're a fan of movies. I'm curious, what was your journey like and how did you end up as an

onset armorer for film? Yeah, so I usually answer that question of how did you become an armor by saying I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I had a misspent childhood. It's usually, you know... Can we get some details? Sure, haven't we all? So, you know, one thing that's pretty unique about the film industry is that we have people from so many varied backgrounds.

And, yeah, some people go to film school, and really all they teach you in a film school is they teach you some stuff about cameras and some stuff about lenses and stuff. But the actual work of making films, no matter what field you get into, whether it's camera work or grips or electrical, you really learn it out on set. That's where you really learn it. And so most of the people out on sets, they kind of fell into it somehow. And I kind of fell into it, to be honest with you. I've always been fascinated by firearms. My goal in life was always to be a gunsmith.

That's all I wanted to do. I was fascinated by the mechanisms and the history of firearms. And all I wanted to do was sit at a bench with tools and kind of tinker with firearms. My father, may he rest in peace, was a mechanical engineer who specialized working with defense contracting companies. He, with my family, of course, he moved to Israel when I was about four and a half years old. So I grew up in Israel. I served in the military in Israel.

I came back to the United States when I got out of the military, went to gunsmithing college, got a degree in firearms technology. prior to going to college, I wanted to go right away, but I found that it was a lot more expensive than I had been led to believe. Right. So while I was saving up money for that, I wound up getting involved in U.S. law enforcement. Oh, wow. Wound up with a degree in law enforcement and the administration of justice. Wow.

Left that when I had saved up enough money to go to gunsmithing college, got a degree in firearms technology. and I was working in the firearms industry. And, you know, it was my dream job. I was working for a firearms company. We were designing little submachine guns for the military and for law enforcement here in California. And then the 1994 assault weapon ban put our company out of business. Oh, wow. And so I, you know, kind of worked in the sporting goods industry for a little bit, fixing guns.

at a sporting goods company, you know, selling guns at the sporting goods counter, fixing guns, putting scopes on rifles for people. And then one day I got a phone call. Someone had called up to the college where I graduated from saying, hey, it's Hollywood calling. We're looking for a gunsmith. But Hollywood, you know, you don't see movies that deal with, like, fancy hunting rifles. Sure. And stuff like that. Hollywood wants to see military machine guns and 50 cows on tanks. And they had called up to the gunsmithing college to see if anyone had experience with that type of thing. And the college said, oh, this is the guy you want to talk to. That was about like four years after I graduated. And so I got this phone call out of the blue from someone down here in Hollywood that said, hey, you know, would you be interested in working in Hollywood and converting guns to shoot blanks. And I said, well, you know, I might be interested in something like that.

So I started out part-time, and I was working at this sporting goods chain. And then on my days off, I'd drive down to Hollywood. And I'd blank some machine guns and was working, still doing like basic gunsmithing stuff, you know, in the shop. Okay, Larry, I have a really, really, really dumb question. Okay. I wonder if Chris also has this question. What is the definition of a gunsmith? Does it just mean someone who builds guns, works on guns? I don't actually know what that is.

So to be a smith, you know, the general definition, whether you're a blacksmith, like someone that makes horseshoes, or whether you're a goldsmith, someone that does jewelry, or, you know, a gunsmith. To truly be a smith, it means like a master craftsman. It means I can, you know, dig the iron ore up out of the ground and turn it into steel. I can chop down the tree and take the wood and make it into a woodstock. I can turn the iron into metal and make a barrel. And, you know, that's what the term Smith actually means.

You know, I haven't chopped down a tree in a long, long time, but that's what the term actually means. So to be a gunsmith, it's someone who builds gunsmith. from... Basically, you can make it from scratch. Yeah, I can whittle out the wood and make the stock. I can take raw metal and turn the barrel on a machine. I can make the parts and the mechanisms and things like that. Okay, so you understand like every single detail of a firearm inside that.

Yeah, every facet of it. I can stain the wood. I can engrave on the metal and all the make a spring and stuff like that. And that's what happened And I made a custom gun And then they needed someone to go out on set And run the gun Because it was so complex

And that was my first time out on a movie set It was like, well, he built the gun Why don't we send him out? Yeah, might as well have you handle it And it's all been downhill from there What was that first movie that you? So the first movie that I was out on set It was called Showtime

and it was a movie with Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy. Yeah, I know that movie. The movie was about this kind of underground gun-making thing that was happening in LA. And it was supposed to be about this guy that was building a gun that he could like rip off armored cars with, that he could blast through the armored protection of armored cars. the movie went through some editing and that's not really the story

that it came across as and everything but that's how me building this gun became you know the part of the movie the gun itself was very unique

and it was so unique that it then had like a second life because it became a very we modified it just a little bit more, and it became a gun that was moved in a, used in a science fiction show called Firefly. Oh, yeah. Love Firefly.

So there was a gun that actually got a name. Yeah. It was Adam Baldwin's character, had a gun that he called Vera. So I built Vera. Oh, wow. That's amazing. That was the gun from the movie Showtime. So it's kind of become like a cult class.

classic kind of gun. Which would be such a fun show because that show is effectively a Western in space. It was. And that's such a fun thing. It's like the sci-fi Old West. Yes. That is awesome. So is every armorer by definition a gunsmith?

Do they have to be a gunsmith? No, not at all. Oh, no. Okay. There's probably 30 people, and I might be being generous. But there's probably 30 people in the country. I take that back. There's probably 30 people in North America, so we'll count Canada in that, that are professional motion picture armors that actually earn their living.

Their entire income comes from working on movie sets. And of those, there's probably three or four that are actually. actual formerly trained gunsmiths that know the full spectrum. Wow. They can run the gun. They can fix the gun. They can alter the gun. All the rest are what we call weapons handlers.

They can take the guns out on set and they can run the gun on set. But if something goes wrong, they set it aside and they grab the backup gun. and and they run that or they pick up the phone and they say hey larry i got a problem here you know or something like that so the number and it's it's not um it's not like something to be surprised about because to run the gun on set it's there's not a requirement that you be an actual gunsmith just to run the gun on set to run the gun on set you need a certain skill set it's not required that you know how to run a lathe or a mill or be able to weld or anything like that. If you know how to do that, it's a really, really great bonus, but it's not a requirement.

Okay. It's like the cinematographer that could build their own camera if they needed to. Right. Or develop their own film. I mean, there's probably a lot of cinematographers out there that are great at running the camera, but they don't know how to develop the film. It's, it's, I take the canister and I send it off to the lab, you know. Mm-hmm. How many guns on set is a single armorer allowed to or expected to manage? I'm thinking of movies saving Private Ryan to John Wick, you know, most recently that feature

dozens, if not hundreds of weapons. That scale seems daunting. What's the solution? So I'm going to answer that. that question with a story. And I know you're going to hate that because I know you don't want to listen to stories, right? We want the stories. So here's the deal.

I get a phone call in the middle of the night. Hey, Larry, this is such and such a production. Our armor got sick. And we don't have an armor for tomorrow. We need you to come out and fill in. So cold call. Get up at five in the morning, run out to the set. It's a SWAT team.

Twelve guys with machine guns. I am running my butt off all day long. And we get through the day. Everything works. Nobody gets hurt. Everything's safe. But I walk over to the AD, the assistant director at the end of the night. and I say, look, if we're doing this again tomorrow, I need another armorer.

I mean, you saw what this was like. And thank you for working with me, but you guys had to wait because it took me time to keep, you know, reloading everyone. This is not the way to do this. A very busy show. We need another armorer here. And the AD says, don't worry about it, Larry. Tomorrow there's only two people shooting guns. Oh, it's only two people shooting guns.

That's not a problem. I'll be happy to just come in and do it by myself. I come in the next day, and he was right. There was only two people shooting guns. One person was on the roof of a building, and one person was down on the street. Oh, my God. Guess what? I still need two people.

I still need two armors. And he's like, no, you don't. I sold you yesterday. You did 12 people all by yourself. And now there's only two. So why do you need an number? other armor because I can't control two guns when one's on the roof of a building and one's down on the street. So I use that story to try to answer your question of how many guns can one person

control. It depends on the geography of the set. It can depend on what kind of guns they are. Is it a big 50 cow belt-fed machine gun or is it just two hand guns? It depends on where they are within the set. So, you know, one armor and five guns within, let's say, a basketball court-sized set, I could probably do that easily enough. Maybe six. You start getting more than that, and maybe one of the guns is a machine gun and stuff like that.

You know, you kind of have to judge these things, you know, based on the scene. And that's why you have production meetings and you plan it out because you could have a scene where there's only one gun, but it's a gun in a moving car. Now you've got a start point

at one end of the set, the end point at the other end of the set, maybe you need an armor at each end, or maybe you've got to hide someone in the car so that there's always, someone with the firearm. There's, there's so many elements to filmmaking. And then when you throw in the safety issues and the legality issues of a firearm, it's so hard to just pin down a single answer. And that, of course, is the fun part of the business is that you're always challenged and

you're always got to come up and think of new stuff. But that is also the very hard part of the business as well. You're always thinking on your feet and you always got to be kind of, you know, razor sharp. You can't let your guard down for a second and everything. Well, you just said something I want to highlight for our listeners too in that story, which is that you said, you know, there's a gun on the roof, there's a gun on the street. I cannot control both guns. So can you kind of walk us through like what is the first rule of handling a weapon on set? And when you say control a gun, obviously at some point, you're handing it to an actor, right? But what has to happen before it gets to them?

What happens even when they have it? Can you kind of walk us through what that looks like and what the most important things are in that process? There's something that people have to understand, and I hope that your listeners will kind of follow along with me on this for a minute. when we're on set, we're in a bubble. We're in an isolated bubble. And that isolated bubble has nothing to do with the real world. Okay? Right.

So people who are listening to this, who might be firearms enthusiasts and maybe some of them are firearms professionals. Maybe they run their own gun range or something like that. And they're all going to be standing there preaching to you before. four rules of gun safety and the number one thing is never appoint a gun, you know, those four rules of gun safety that work on a gun range, they don't work on a film set. And you know what else? They're gun rules. They're not gun laws.

So I'm not obligated to follow them. Okay. The number one thing you got to remember on a movie set or a television set, and it's really the only number one rule, let's say, for an actor. is follow whatever it is that the armor tells you to do. That's it. Yeah. Because the professional armor is the professional who's been hired to guide you through your night on set. If the production is hired a professional armor, they're there to get you through the night safely.

And so whatever they tell you to do, that's what you need to do. and the armor is there is there to control everything. Now, obviously, I'm always in control of the gun. I am in possession of the firearm. I don't leave it unattended. If it's not in my hand or in the hand of the actor, it's locked up. Okay. It's not laying on a cart and being supervised.

It's physically locked up. I have a cart. There's a box on the cart, and there's a lock on the box. and the guns inside the box. Or maybe it's a rolling cart that is like a box. In other words, it's like a giant metal hamper with a lid, and the lid has a padlock on it. There's all kinds of ways to control firearms out on set.

I don't really care what kind of method you use, but you have to maintain control of firearms out on set. And then there's a chain of custody. where it goes from the secure lockup to the prop master armorer. We check things in with the first AD because the first AD controls the set. You're bringing a firearm onto his or her set. You check in. It's a courtesy thing.

You check in with them. They're also the lead safety officers on set. The first AD runs the set, so you check in with them. They don't touch the gun, right? but you check in with them, you show them the firearm. Only the prop master slash armor and the talent. They're the only people that should touch the firearm. Then you hand it off to the actor or the stunt person,

whoever the performer is. Then when they yell cut, the armor goes back in and takes the firearm again. And then if the AD says, okay, we're done, then it goes back into the lockup again. And it's a circle, right? That's the only circle that should happen with a firearm. The director doesn't get to come over and say, oh, it's so cool, I want to take a picture with it.

The technical advisor doesn't get to come over and say, here, give me that. I want to show the actor how to do that. No, I'll give you a rubber gun to show them. You're not part of this little wheel of chain of custody. That's the way it needs to be handled on set, you know. and it can come across, you know, as, oh, that guy with the guns, he's just kind of being a butt head. You know, because we're all, you know, the crews, everybody's out there.

Everybody's kind of creative in their own way. And everybody's out there just trying to have fun at work and everything. And I get that. Not with guns. No. Yeah. We're not doing that with firearms. It would be like, oh, this helicopter is.

so cool. Do you mind if I can't, you know, in the, in the driver's seat for a minute, I guarantee you the pilot's going to say, yeah, not, not today, little boy, please stay away from the helicopter, right? Yeah, we've covered such incidents on our podcast before. Yeah, you know, and I think that by in large, most professionals in the film industry respect that, you know, oh, oh, you're the, you're the gun guy. That's, you know, I hate that term. But, that's kind of the way they refer to us sometimes. It's like, yeah, I'm the gun guy. And they'll respect it. It's like, you know, you turn your back for just one second. And when you turn back around your lockbox, which is always on wheels, right, because we roll every place. You know, okay, now we're turning the

camera around. You got to roll all your stuff someplace else. Right. You turn around for one second, and here's someone who's left their coffee cup and their snack plate and all that. Hey, you know, would you mind please moving that off the box and it's got the machine guns and, you know, all that kind of stuff on it? You know, oh, gee, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know the guns were in there, you know. So I think they kind of respect that more than some of the other crafts and everything. But, yeah, you know, you just, you got to keep on top of things. It's just there's very few aspects on set that extend outside that bubble that we were talking about, that bubble of illusion.

And the firearms is one of those few things because there's also legalities. The legalities are from the real world. And that's the one spot where the fake world of movies and the real world of legalities, they intersect. and the armor has to make sure that we're okay in both worlds. So obviously we're going to be talking about The Crow on this podcast. That's a film, I believe, from before your beginnings as an armorer. But is there anything that you can tell us about what led to that tragedy or other, there have been other similar onset incidents across the history of film?

It kind of, to me, seems like perhaps there's always some risk, there's a risk in everything that's done on a film set. That's just the reality. And firearms can, you know, carry their own inherent risks. But, you know, could you walk us through maybe some of the anomalies or the products of oversights on these sets? Because that seems to be the consistent thread with all onset accidents, firearm-related or not. Yeah. So I was already working in the firearms industry.

Mm-hmm. When that happened, not in the film. industry with firearms, but in the real world firearms industry. I remember that happening. I remember it being an item in the news, you know, when that happened. And I think you're right. There's a thread that goes through all of the high profile incidences, specifically in the movie industry, because that's what we're talking about right now. And one thing that you always see, is there's no one particular thing that you can point at that's the cause of the incident. In other words, it's a series of events that lead up to the incident.

So I teach a lot of firearms safety. In fact, tomorrow I'm going to be teaching another one to a government agency that interacts with the film industry. And we did a lot of research for this program with this particular government agency. And for the crow, because we use that as kind of like a teaching aid, the research that got done not necessarily by me, but I teach based on that research, there were like 14. different things that led up to that incident. Wow. So along the way, there were 14 different moments where they could have picked the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do.

And at any time along the way, had anyone picked the right thing to do, that chain would have been broken, that chain of events would have been broken, and the incident would have never occurred. Wow. Right? And that tragedy would have been averted. And so that's true, not just in the movie industry, but almost any event that leads to a tragedy, that's true. And in the crow, the most researched version of the story, I mean, I wasn't there. You weren't there. So I don't know that any of us can definitively say exactly what happened. But the most researched version of the story is that they needed what's called an insert shot. In other words, it wasn't action-related or anything like that. It was a hand holding a firearm with the camera just looking at the firearm.

So there's an action event happening, and then you know when the camera just cuts away to like a hand holding the gun and then it cuts back again, that's called an insert shot. So they needed an insert shot of a hand holding this firearm. And it was a revolver. And on a revolver, when you look, you know, when the camera looks right down the barrel, if you look at it from the front, you can see the cylinder. And if it's empty, the viewer would be able to see that it's empty. Right. Well, we don't want that, right?

Because, again, we're trying to create an illusion. And if the viewer sold that the gun, was empty, poof goes to the illusion. So in the film industry, we use what's called a dummy cartridge. It's not real.

It can't go bang, right? It looks real, but it's not. Problem was they didn't have any dummy cartridges with them. They were filming this in North Carolina. It wasn't in Hollywood.

There was no place to run out and get a dummy cartridge. So somebody went to a gun store. Oh, man. And they bought live ammo and they took the bullet off the cartridge. They pulled it off and they dumped out all the gunpowder and they popped all the primer caps and then they put the bullet back on the cartridge case. And so they kind of made homemade dummies, gave it to the first AD and they went off with what they

well, a splinter unit. Because all they needed was a camera and a hand and the gun. And oh, by the way, they sent the armorer home to save budget because there was no more gunfire. Right. And so you start, so what are we hearing based even just on the conversation that you and I have already had in this short amount of time? Nobody was in legal possession of the gun, right? because the armorer wasn't there. So who was maintaining control over the gun?

Nobody. We don't make dummies out of live ammunition. Right. Specifically to prevent this kind of thing from happening. Who was in control of the gun? The AD. Why was there a prop person there? You can see where this is going, right?

Yeah. And so they put the dummy cartridges into the revolver, pointed it in a safe direction, because they wanted to be safe, when click, click, click, click with the gun to make sure that nothing went bang, but one of the primers was still live. And it's like a cap. And it went pop. And it had just enough energy to push the bullet out of the dummy halfway down the barrel.

and now there's a bullet stuck halfway down the barrel that nobody realized. And they film the insert shot and then they give the gun back to the prop department and everybody goes home. And a couple weeks later, they put a blank into the gun that now has a bullet stuck in it. and they pointed at Brandon Lee, because in the scene, his character's getting shot, and the blank pushes the bullet, which is a barrel obstruction now, right? It pushes it out of the barrel,

and it leads to a fatality. Now, our guidelines say that the armor or prop master before and after every use of a firearm needs to check the barrel for barrel obstructions. So that didn't get done either, right? Because had they done that, even though they screwed up before, if they had checked it for obstructions, they would have found that, right? And I mean, from what you're saying, you can literally look down the barrel

and you would have been able to see that there's something in it. Yes, I, you know, for the sake of your viewers who can't see this, I'm showing you, I always have a flashlight in my pocket. That's what I walk around with. A good prop person always has a flashlight, and it's there so that you can shine it down the barrel and check for that. If you don't have a flashlight, don't go on set. You know, and so that's yet another step along this horrible chain of events that leads to these incidences. And I do want to point something out. You said it once or twice, Liz, but you notice I have not once. use the word accident. Yeah. Right? Because an accident implies that there's nobody to blame.

Oh, it was an accident. There's an act of God. No. You know, the crow and all these other high-profile things, there's people to blame. There's enough blame to go around. If you don't do your job correctly and it leads to an injury or a fatality, you're to blame.

Yeah. It's not an accident. An accident is when you do everything you can possibly do to prevent it, and something still goes wrong. That's an accident. These are not accidents. You know what I mean? Charles Chandler, he worked on a film called The Captive in 1915. It was a Cecil B. DeMille movie.

And back then, they didn't have special effects departments. So when they wanted to film bullet hits, they used real ammo. They would shoot real ammo into the dirt, and the camera would film the bullet hits, and then they would empty the guns, and they would put blanks in, and they would use that to film the scene with blanks. And they missed one. And one of the guys who was his buddy, he was right behind him, shot Charles Chandler in the back of the head and killed him with a live round back in 1915.

That's not an accident. That's someone whose job it was to make sure that all the real bullets were gone and nothing but blanks were being used didn't do their job correctly. You know, so this is where hiring professional people who know what they're doing, that's the key to safety, you know. Well, there's something else too, though, right? There's allowing you the space to do your job, right? Absolutely. And there's hiring enough people to safely be able to manage the amount of people in guns that are involved. So it's not just, I mean, it goes beyond just that level to the people that are making the budgets and, you know, allowing for this.

Like, you have to allow professionals space. Absolutely. You know, if you, if you hire me as an armor, a technical expert, I don't like the word expert, but it fits in this particular. spot. So you hire me as a technical expert for my knowledge, for my experience, for my expertise, and I come out and I make recommendations to you and you ignore my recommendations, then what are you paying me for? Why am I there? You know, if you're not going to listen to me, I might as well pack up and go home, right? If I tell you, okay, I've read this script, I've looked at the scene. My recommendation is we need three armors.

one up on the roof and one in the car and, you know, one back on the truck cleaning guns. And you tell me, well, we don't have that budget. Okay, well, then cut the number of guns in half. Exactly. Change the script. And, you know, let's change the script. Oh, no, we don't want to change the script. You know, we don't want to piss off the writer.

We don't, you know, we still wanted to look this way. Okay, well, you cannot have your cake and eat it to kind of, you know. And if you still want to try that, my answer is, good luck. Do it with somebody else. Because if I feel that it's not doable in a safe manner, and that's what it's all about, is safety, there's no reason to get anybody hurt doing this. We're not curing cancer. We're not bringing peace on earth.

We're creating entertainment is all we're doing. you know, so if we can't do it safely, I'll go find a different job to do, you know, it's not worth getting anybody hurt over. So you're absolutely right. It spreads out throughout the entire crew. There's a person whose job it is to collect all the parameters and all the suggestions from all the professionals. And then their job is to look at the budget and say, okay, this is the amount of money I have. Am I going to spend it on this expert's recommendation, or do I want lobster at the rap party? You know what I mean? You know, where, and if they don't do their job correctly, then bad things can happen as well.

Yeah. As you mentioned, it's a chain and every aspect of it is interlocked and interdependent. Yeah. That's why they, that's why they call it a crew. Exactly. Right. Everything's interconnected. Yeah.

Larry, this has been incredible. We don't want to keep you too long. I did want to just ask one last question, because I do think this is interesting. Are there any weapons that you won't work with for whatever reason or that are, that you suggest people avoid using onsets that don't, I don't know if the answer, this is the right way of saying it, but that don't translate well to being blanked, for example, or, you know, are difficult to work with. I'm just curious if there's anything that you found in your experience. I don't think that there's any that I would say absolutely, oh, no, I'm not going to work with that. There are certainly guns that I may have to look at them and say they are not safe to work with.

Like, oh, you know, we have production when I have. out before they hired the armor. And their purchasing department bought some collection out of an old museum. And the writer wrote a whole scene around this whatever it is that they bought. And it's great and it looks real cool, but the thing's 300 years old. And it's rotted away on the inside and it's rustling. and all that. And now they've decided

that they actually wanted to shoot. And I look at the thing and I go, look, here's your options. We can make a replica of it made out of new steel. That'll be safe. Or we can, in this particular instance,

use either special effects or CGI because this is exactly where CGI is meant to be used or you pick a different gun because that that one particular thing would be

unsafe to try to fire or there might be an instance where you might say look you've written in a 27 pound 50 caliber you know whatever

that's meant to be mounted on a tank and you've written in that a 13-year-old girl is supposed to fire and eld, that's unsafe to have the actor do that. So those are the only scenarios. And again, I would say we could build a dummy of that. We could build a plastic one and hide a little pistol inside of it so we could still get a muzzle flash. There's a lot of movie magic that we could do to still get the effect. but I don't think there's anything that I would ever say.

We absolutely can't use that unless safety was involved. All right, Larry, what is the craziest gun you've ever worked with? The craziest gun I've ever worked with. On a film set, let's limit it to that. Yeah, yeah. Not when you were working for the government. Now we're qualifying it. On a film set.

I will have to say that, and I'm not going to say that this fits necessarily crazy, but the most challenging, I will say, is I wind up going out a lot with the M134 mini gun, which is, you know, the predator gun, the thing with the six barrels that spins. When you said cutting down trees up earlier, I was thinking about that scene where it cuts down the entire jungle with the minigun, basically. And I will say that, you know, we've built a handheld version of that. And on the movie, Captain America Winter Soldier, the second one. Yeah. I love that one. We had to do a scene where one of the bad guy mercenaries jumps off of a freeway with. the mini gun off of a freeway and lands on a car as he's shooting at Captain America and

Captain America is deflecting this stream of bullets with his shield and there's a backflip involved and all that and the whole thing was done wirework you know and of course we had to do it take after take after take and the stunt guys that we worked with were like just the top notch kind of deal but the reload on that gun and it's got a lot of moving parts and its battery operated. So it was very, very complex. And I had me and one other armor, Ron LaCari. We kind of had the whole thing down pat as far as the reloads. But we literally had practiced that for days beforehand.

It was almost like this intricate ballet. And in fact, we call it gunfight choreography. where we had the whole thing set up and we had like we had like a stool, like a little three-legged milking stool. There was the exact height that we needed. So the minute they yelled cut, we could sit the stunt guy down and we could twist the gun around and reload the thing and then stand him back up and hoist him back on the wire. And that particular gun, whether it's mounted on a vehicle or you got someone jumping off a freeway with it or whatever, that's a very, very challenging. system to have to work with. I did the same thing with the same gun on a rubber boat with Rihanna on the movie Battleship.

Oh, my gosh. Same thing. Well, was it like handing Rihanna a mini gun? Well, now it was mounted on the boat. You were just firing it. But again, you're on the waves. The boat's rocking back and forth and you've got to reload it. It's just a very, you know, it's not an easy thing to do it.

looks easy in the movie, but it's just a very challenging thing to do in real life. Did she have good, did she have good gun safety hygiene? She did. She did. She did very well. Well, on that note, Larry, it has been such a pleasure chatting with you. This has been incredibly informative. For me, I'm sure for Lizzie, and I have no doubt for our audience.

Thank you so much for coming on to our podcast and chatting with us about the role of an armorer, gun safety in the film industry, and Hollywood, we love guns in our movies. So it's a very important job. And as you said, it's entertainment. No one should ever get hurt for any of this. And productions should always pay to allow people to do their jobs and to do them safely. Thank you so much. Yeah, well, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. And happy to come back any time. If you ever want me to come back again, I do want to say one last part. word to your viewers. Please.

The only reason that I agreed to you asking me to come on here is really that I want your listeners, I should say, to understand that armors that work in the film industry are a very small group of highly dedicated professionals, regardless of what you might think and what you might hear in the news media, the people who truly do this, that are true professionals that do this for a living are very safety conscious. We do know what we're doing in Hollywood. Obviously, there's always a couple of rotten apples, and they seem to garner all the headlines and everything.

But just think of all the millions of rounds and all the thousands of movies that you've watched without ever hearing a bad headline. That's due to the dedicated hard work of the professionals that are in our industry. And we hope you continue to enjoy the fruits of our work for many, many years to come. A great note to end on.

Absolutely. Thank you. Have a good night, everyone. Thank you. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at what went wrong.com. What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman.