NY Police Halt 'Robbery' During Filming; Confront Actor Holding Gun
By Frank Eltman
GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) --A filmmaker was taking the blame after New York police officers were summoned to what they thought was an armed robbery, but turned out to be a location shoot for his upcoming movie.
The confrontation ended peacefully when officers ordered an actor playing a gunman to drop his weapon.
“I made the mistake,” Fred Carpenter said in a telephone interview. “I was supposed to tell the local police precinct what we were doing.”
Carpenter was filming inside convenience store in Bellmore, on Long Island, on Tuesday morning in a scene in which a gunman takes a number of people hostage. A passer-by apparently thought it was the real thing and called police.
“All of a sudden I’m directing and 15 police officers come in,” Carpenter said. “And for a moment I’m thinking it’s part of the movie and then I said, wait a minute, I wrote the movie and this wasn’t in the film. And it was like, insanity.”
Nobody was injured, but police said the outcome could have been tragic.
“The officer went inside, the actor — it turned out to be — still had the gun in his hand,” said Detective Mike Bitzko, a Nassau County police spokesman. He said responding officers “showed great restraint” disarming the situation.
Because he was filming on private property inside the store, officials and Carpenter said he was not required to obtain a county film permit, but Bitzko said police need to be notified about scenes involving gunplay.
Carpenter had praise for the police response and noted his film, “Jesse” is about a fictional Nassau County police detective named Jessica Weinstein who investigates the death of her brother. One of the film’s stars is Burt Young, best known for his role in “Rocky.” The actor who played the gunman was Mike Tattoo, Carpenter said.
“When you’re doing independent films, you’re working on budgets of a couple hundred grand or less,” he said. “We try to use as many private locations as possible. We were so close to the highway, I guess we didn’t realize that people would be looking in.”
He said he would reschedule the shoot and promised to contact police ahead of time.
“They’re there to protect us and something bad could have happened.”
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More