Mystery still surrounds the fatal shooting on the set of Alec Baldwin’s Western Rust, an incident that claimed the life of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Did the actor pull the trigger on a prop gun as he rehearsed a scene (he denies that), or did the weapon malfunction and misfire? How did a live round get into the revolver and who brought the lethal ammunition to the set? Why were prosecutors in Santa Fe, NM so intent on charging Baldwin with a crime for what many impartial observers — though not all — saw as a tragic accident?
The answers to some of those questions are provided in the new documentary The Trial of Alec Baldwin, directed by Rory Kennedy, which opens in Los Angeles on Friday. The film begins by dispelling one false rumor – that Baldwin initiated the project as some sort of attempt to repair his damaged reputation. Text on screen states flatly, “Baldwin was given no editorial control, nor did he provide any financial support or receive any compensation.”
Kennedy underscored that point at the Bend Film Festival in Oregon over the weekend, where the documentary played. At a Q&A that followed the screening, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker told the audience it wasn’t Baldwin who came up with the documentary idea, but the other way around. “I approached him,” she clarified.
They had met many years before the Rust tragedy. “I have known Alec probably for 20 years,” Kennedy said. “I would say we were friends. We wouldn’t go out and have dinner, but I knew him. Alec is actually a great supporter of documentaries and is associated with the Hamptons Film Festival and also does a summer doc series. And so I’ve been lucky enough over the years to have a number of my films be a part of that. I’ve gotten to know him largely through that.”
The documentary project began at a point when it didn’t appear the actor would face criminal allegations.
“When we entered this story,” Kennedy told the festival audience, “it really seemed like the Rust story was going to be resolved pretty early on and that [the documentary] was really going to be much more of a biopic with the Rust story interwoven maybe as a through line, kind of the backbone of it, but would be pretty thin. And then it just kept coming back and continuing. And we were always there when it had sort of dramatic turns.”
Those dramatic turns included Baldwin and Rust armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed being charged in January 2023 with involuntary manslaughter. A few months later, the charges against Baldwin were dropped. But then in January 2024 a grand jury indicted Baldwin on felony involuntary manslaughter charges and special prosecutors re-filed their case. The prosecution of Baldwin, the film strongly suggests, had less to do with the evidence than with the special prosecutor’s personal animus toward him as a Hollywood star with a history of volcanic behavior.
“It just seemed pretty clear that people were going after him and he was being taken to task [for the Rust shooting] in a way that seemed not entirely justified or fair,” Kennedy observed. “And then it started raising questions about how in this day and age with the internet and social media, we hold people to justice outside of the judicial system. Then as the film and the story unfolded, you started seeing how that narrative in social media started impacting the justice system.”
Kennedy described the larger concerns raised by the Baldwin prosecution. “You start thinking, okay, how does this kind of [social media] chatter that we’re all doing… how is it affecting our larger institutions? How is it affecting government, for example? …How is it affecting the judicial system? I think it’s an important question that we should be observing and asking ourselves.”
Baldwin, it becomes clear, was being tried twice – in the court of public opinion and in a court of law. The film builds to an astonishing crescendo, resulting in the case being dismissed in the middle of the trial (I won’t give away what happened. Close watchers of the case, including my colleague Dominic Patten who covered it for Deadline and appears as an expert in the documentary, know the ins and outs, but they came as a revelation to me).
There would seem to be plenty for Baldwin to appreciate about Kennedy’s film, given how the court case ended. And yet…
“When they [Baldwin and wife Hilaria] initially saw the film, they did not like the film,” the director reported. The cause of their displeasure has to do with scenes woven throughout that illustrate how Baldwin got his reputation for angry outbursts – confrontations with paparazzi through the years, for instance. Kennedy also explores a serious stain on Baldwin’s reputation from 2007 – the infamous voicemail he left for his then 11-year-old daughter Ireland in which he called her a “rude, thoughtless little pig.” That ugly lambasting came in the context of a bitter custody battle over Ireland between Baldwin and his ex-wife Kim Basinger.
It’s a crucial piece of background because the special prosecutor referred to that incident in private communications in which she expressed loathing for the actor. “Because the prosecutors were, in my opinion, going after his reputation and not after what he did on the set,” Kennedy said, “we had to show what that reputation was, and we had to show it honestly.”
A bit too honestly, perhaps, for Baldwin’s liking. “I think it was just very hard [for him] to see all that… showing his ex-wife in there and then [him wondering], ‘Why are we doing that?’ Well, the only way to really get to the voicemail is to understand that history, to understand what the motivation of the voicemail was. And you can’t get there without having that context.”
Baldwin seems to be warming to the film, after hearing feedback from viewers.
“I think he’s now come around and is much more supportive of it,” Kennedy noted. “I think there are a lot of people who say… this film is important and in many ways redeems him and also really helps people understand him and understand what he went through and understand the injustice of what happened to him.”