Once upon a time in Hollywood, a tragic death changed how movies were made.  Although several names probably popped into your mind, you'll be surprised when you find out which death truly improved conditions in Hollywood.  And moreover, it improved conditions using a simple, market-based solution that does not require any legislation or regulation.

When I speak of a tragic death, I'm not talking about Brandon Lee, whose death was certainly a tragedy that made filmmakers more aware of how dangerous guns are but did not essentially change the filmmaking industry.  The industry had been making movies for decades, with hundreds of guns shooting off many thousands of rounds of ammunition.

There were no fatalities until 1984, when actor Jon-Erik Hexum started playing with a gun on the set of his TV show CoverUp and fatally shot himself in the head.  Hexum's death was shocking, but all the safety protocols in the world could not have prevented it.  People took note that guns were not toys, and there were no further fatalities until Brandon Lee was killed on the set of his movie The Crow in 1993.

Lee's death was entirely preventable.  The prop crew manufactured their own dummy cartridges, and, because they were not qualified, they did not notice a projectile left in the gun.  Lee died, and there were some industry guidelines established to make sure that no one would be killed on a set by a gun again.  No one was until Halyna Hutchins died on the set of Alec Baldwin's movie Rust.

But I started this piece by saying there was a time when a tragic death changed the movie industry.  It wasn't a human who was killed.  It was a horse.

The American Humane Association had been pushing for more humane treatment of animals in the movies since the 1920s, especially as westerns and war movies took off.  Those particular productions had many scenes of horses falling violently to the ground, usually with the use of tripwires.  In Errol Flynn's 1936 movie The Charge of the Light Brigade, over two dozen horses were killed.

Image: 1926's The Highwayman.  Library of Congress.

Hollywood went blithely on, but in the 1939 movie Jesse James, the producers literally threw a horse off a cliff into a river.  The horse survived the fall but was so terrified that it thrashed around uncontrollably and drowned itself.  It was the horse that broke the camel's back.  The public was so furious and created such an outcry that the motion picture industry agreed to let the American Humane Association regulate the treatment of animals in motion pictures.

I doubt that Hollywood cares very much about the welfare of animals in its pictures, but these people do care about their bottom line.  Mistreating animals in a production is a sure way to go broke.

Dustin Hoffman's HBO series Luck was canceled after three horses died.  The 1980 movie Heaven's Gate didn't even break even after animal abuse on the set was widely publicized.  Peter Jackson's movie The Hobbit suffered from negative publicity about animal cruelty on the farm where movie horses were stabled.

There are no laws that state that a production must allow the American Humane Association to monitor filming, but without the AHA signing off that no animals were harmed, audiences in America will not fork over money to watch the movie.  Going forward, it seems clear that the only way to get Hollywood to make gun safety a priority is for audiences to care as much about the safety of human actors as they do about animal actors.

It's not legislation that is needed for the movie industry.  A producer could skirt any laws by filming where those laws are not in effect.  Alec Baldwin filmed away from Hollywood, where he could get away with minimal costs, an inexperienced armorer, and non-union workers.  If laws are put in place to regulate movie-making in the United States, a producer like Baldwin who doesn't care about safety could film in another country.

It's up to the audience to change how Hollywood works. The  public can demand that the movie industry partner with the NRA to have every production monitored by NRA-certified range safety officers.  Hollywood would listen if the public also refused to patronize movies and TV shows that do not have authorization from the NRA that all guns were monitored by range safety officers and that no actors were endangered by unsafe gun use.

If people can boycott and picket and muster outrage for horses, they can do the same for their fellow human beings.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st-century black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the Old South.

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