Trivia question: what two actors died from wounds sustained from a gun firing blanks? [NB: I’ve got the screen cap, should common sense get the better of these safety-challenged shooters.]
Trivia question: what two actors died from wounds sustained from a gun firing blanks? [NB: I’ve got the screen cap, should common sense get the better of these safety-challenged shooters.]
Two I can think of: Lee Horsely (sp?) from some action movie series in the early 80’s and the other one was Brandon Lee (son of Martial Arts legend Bruce Lee) while filming the movie “The Crow” in Wilmington, NC.
Lee Horsley that’s it…wasn’t the show named Time Bandits or something?…it had something to do with time travel anyways…
I remember Brandon Lee in the Crow, who’s the other one?
Brandon Lee and the first star of the show Cover Up (I forget his name and don’t want to cheat by looking on IMDB, but it was not Lee Hoarsley, star of the classic cheese fest Sword and the Sorcerer), about male model government agents. I believe the Cover Up guy was killed by a blank by itself and with Brandon there was a bullet stuck in the cylinder of a revolver and when the blank went off it propelled the bullet forward.
Not sure what exactly happened with Brandon Lee but as I understand it he was not killed by a blank but by an actual bullet, possibly in the manner you describe.
Brandon was killed by a blank, kind of. Apparently, the pistol previously had fired a squib, lodging the bullet in the barrel which went unnoticed. When a blank was subsequently fired with the same pistol, it dislodged the bullet that struck and killed Brandon Lee.
For Brandon Lee, there was supposedly a stuck bullet in the barrel from a squib. He then loaded a blank which managed to push the stuck bullet out.
I’ll cheat: Jon-Erik Hexum was the guy on Cover Up. He deliberately put a gun with blanks to his head and shot himself. (Wikipedia says he was playing Russian Roulette; I originally remember the story being that he pulled a deliberate “watch this” moment.) Hexum drove a quarter sized piece of his skull into his brain.
Lee Horsley is still alive, well, and working.
Jon-Erik Hexum shot himself in the head with a blank .44 on the set of his TV show, Cover Up.
And if you wanna get into the world of music, Terry Kath, original guitarist for Chicago, mixed drinking with a game of Russian Roulette. He lost.
While filming “The Crow”, the production company actually purchased a full pawn shop, including all contents, to use as a prop/set for filming. Unfortunately, the pawn shop had live ammo in it. One of the prop guys found it and the guy in charge of guns/blanks immediately removed it from the set. However, he didn’t actually get rid of it. Later, someone took it (with or without his knowledge) and pulled the bullets from the cases, dumped the powder out, and reseated the bullets back in the now empty cases. He was trying to make realistic looking bullets for some publicity shots. They were showing the business end of a large (44 magnum?) revolver and you could clearly see the cylinder wasn’t loaded. Blanks wouldn’t work for this either, thus the rounds with no powder. During the publicity shots, someone pulled the trigger with one of these loads. Remember that the powder had been dumped, but it still had LIVE primers. The primer itself was enough to put the bullet into the barrel where it stuck. No one reported this back to the gun prop guy. This gun was then later used in filming with a full powered blank. Shooting the blank pushed the bullet out of the barrel and into Brandon Lee. End of story.
The worse negligent discharge I ever witnessed was with a safety checked rifle with a blank. I was sitting in a briefing room after MILES training, 52 filthy M16A1s lying across the tables with the blank adapters freshly removed… The idiot behind and one over from me was “bored” and pushed the muzzle to the back of the head of the person next to me and pulled the trigger. The results were not pretty.
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