Cal, Frank and other thespians....

[nitrah55]

...here's a story you may want to post to your dressing room mirror:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28775677/

[silverscreenselect]

Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son, was killed in a bizarre on-set mishap involving blanks. Apparently, the gun with which he was shot had previously had dummy bullets in it. A dummy bullet looks like a bullet but has no explosive charge; it can't fire but in a closeup, it looks like a "real" bullet because it actually has a projectile on the end of it. A blank, on the other hand, has an actual, low level explosive charge but no projectile on the end of it. In Lee's case, the projectile from a dummy bullet had accidentally come loose and lodged in the barrel of the gun. Nobody checked it before it was reloaded with blanks and the blank charge actually wound up firing the lodged projectile out of the gun and into Lee. To make sure things like this don't happen, people who fire blank guns in a production are usually instructed to fire slightly to the side of their target, which also didn't happen in Lee's case.

Blank cartridges themselves can injure people because they have an actual explosive charge and paper and wadding are sometimes shot out of the gun. Another actor, Jon-Erik Hexum, wound up accidentally killing himself on a set when he was clowning around and put a gun with a blank charge up to his head and pulled the trigger. The paper that came out of the gun penetrated his head and killed him.

[Bob Juch]

Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee's son, was killed in a bizarre on-set mishap involving blanks. Apparently, the gun with which he was shot had previously had dummy bullets in it. A dummy bullet looks like a bullet but has no explosive charge; it can't fire but in a closeup, it looks like a "real" bullet because it actually has a projectile on the end of it. A blank, on the other hand, has an actual, low level explosive charge but no projectile on the end of it. In Lee's case, the projectile from a dummy bullet had accidentally come loose and lodged in the barrel of the gun. Nobody checked it before it was reloaded with blanks and the blank charge actually wound up firing the lodged projectile out of the gun and into Lee. To make sure things like this don't happen, people who fire blank guns in a production are usually instructed to fire slightly to the side of their target, which also didn't happen in Lee's case.

Blank cartridges themselves can injure people because they have an actual explosive charge and paper and wadding are sometimes shot out of the gun. Another actor, Jon-Erik Hexum, wound up accidentally killing himself on a set when he was clowning around and put a gun with a blank charge up to his head and pulled the trigger. The paper that came out of the gun penetrated his head and killed him.

Many prop guns now have been modified so they can't fire anything out of the barrel as a result of the above and similar accidents.

[nitrah55]

After I posted this, I recalled a story my mother told about when she was in high school, appearing in a one-act play.

There was a scene where she and someone else were to tussle over a shotgun, which was not to be discharged during the scene. (This was in rural Ohio, sometime in the early 1930's.) During the tussle, someone pulled the trigger- and, of course, the shotgun was loaded. Fortunately, it was pointed straight up and only opened up a hole a few feet wide in the ceiling.

As long as I knew her, my mom was very shy and not given to public speaking. You think this may have had anything to do with it?