When Alec Baldwin shot and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust in October 2021, it led film and television workers to speak out about the flouting of weapons safety standards on sets. As one Rust crew member told me at the time, the film’s first assistant director (1st AD, the person who oversees a film set during production) was nicknamed “Safety Last” and never seemed to take weapons safety as seriously as crew members felt he should. Other workers in the industry recounted incidents in which they caught weapons-safety errors that could have proven dangerous and claimed they were mocked and retaliated against by producers for taking such issues so seriously.

The problem persists — and not just with weapons used in the film production itself. Last month in New York City, German director Uwe Boll was filming First Shift, an New York Police Department (NYPD) drama meant to mark his return to cinema after an extended absence. Boll has been referred to as “the most hated man in Hollywood” for his sloppily made film adaptations of video games, as well as his abrasive manner on set (a documentary about Boll is entitled Fuck You All: The Uwe Boll Story). He also once held a boxing match in which he fought some of his critics.

For First Shift, he enlisted Ari Taub of New York City–based Hit and Run Productions, Inc. as his line producer. On day three of shooting the feature, Taub, who runs a “prop house” that provides for film productions and was providing props for the shoot, brought a gun to a church a few blocks away from the set in which department heads were meeting before lunch. Less than a week after the incident, several crew members had been fired, and the crew was on strike.