As Alec Baldwin Heads to Trial, Dueling ‘Rust’ Documentaries Become Part of Tangled Drama

Among the many many individuals who might be intently watching Alec Baldwin‘s involuntary manslaughter trial when it begins in Santa Fe this week are two units of documentarians protecting parallel and doubtlessly competing tales from the film Rust. 

Each units of filmmakers have additionally turn out to be a part of the nonetheless unfolding tragedy of the indie Western set, the place Baldwin by accident shot 42-year-old cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021.

Rachel Mason, director of the 2019 Netflix documentary Circus of Books and a detailed household buddy of Hutchins, has been making a movie concerning the cinematographer since Hutchins’ widower, Matthew Hutchins, recruited her and producer Julee Metz for the duty in 2021 amid a flurry of media requests about his spouse.

Mason and Metz, who’re taking pictures their movie for Liz Garbus and Dan Cogan’s manufacturing firm, Story Syndicate, have interviewed members of the Rust solid and crew, together with director Joel Souza and cinematographer Bianca Cline, who joined the movie to switch Hutchins when Rust resumed manufacturing in Montana within the spring of 2023. A few of the crew engaged on Mason’s movie attended the American Movie Institute with Hutchins and, since her undertaking has the approval of Rust‘s producers, she was allowed on the Montana set. “My motivation is to protect somebody I misplaced,” Mason stated, of her purpose for making the documentary about Hutchins.

In the meantime, Rory Kennedy, director of the Oscar-nominated 2014 movie Final Days in Vietnam and 2007’s Emmy-winning Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, has been engaged on a movie about Baldwin with Baldwin’s participation for greater than a yr. Much less is thought concerning the origins of Kennedy’s movie, however, in an indication of simply how small the doc world is, Kennedy has an attention-grabbing connection to the corporate behind the Hutchins movie: From 1998 till 2018, Kennedy and Garbus produced nonfiction movies and tv collectively at their joint firm, Moxie Firecracker. Kennedy is making the Baldwin movie along with her husband and enterprise associate, Mark Bailey, beneath their banner, Moxie Movies, which has a multiyear settlement with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Think about Leisure. 

The Kennedy film was a supply of rigidity for the Rust solid and crew who convened in Montana in 2023, about 25 of whom had labored on the unique New Mexico set. With paparazzi trailing Baldwin on the gates and within the hills across the Yellowstone Movie Ranch in Livingston, the actor’s makes an attempt to get entry for Kennedy’s cameras angered some members of the manufacturing, who felt he was making the documentary in an try to exonerate himself, based on two sources who have been on the set. Finally Kennedy’s crew was not allowed on the set. “There’s no means in hell I’m doing that,” Souza says he informed Baldwin of giving Kennedy an interview, based on the New York Occasions. 

Seemingly unintentionally, each of the Rust doc filmmakers have turn out to be characters within the tales they’re attempting to inform, Kennedy most dramatically. In October 2023, after New Mexico prosecutors prolonged a plea supply to Baldwin, particular prosecutor Kari Morrissey discovered of Kennedy’s movie and received irritated sufficient to kill the deal, based on an April 2024 court docket submitting. “Undersigned counsel obtained info that Mr. Baldwin commissioned his personal documentary concerning the demise of the girl he killed and was actively pressuring materials witnesses within the case towards him to undergo interviews for his personal documentary,” reads the submitting, a part of a 316-page prosecution response to Baldwins’ legal professionals’ try to get his case dismissed. “It was at this level that the plea supply was rescinded,” the submitting says.

In April, prosecutors filed a subpoena in search of footage from the movie, saying Kennedy’s interviews with Baldwin and different witnesses comprise “important items of data regarding key parts of this legal prosecution.” In a movement to quash that subpoena filed in Might, Kennedy signed an affidavit saying that Baldwin “didn’t fee, solicit, encourage, or in any other case search out the Baldwin Mission.” The movement goes on to say that Baldwin isn’t paying for, directing or producing the Moxie Movies documentary, nor being paid for it, and that whereas he could also be consulted on factual accuracy, he has no editorial or inventive management over the movie. In June, a Los Angeles choose dominated that Kennedy isn’t required to show over the tapes, agreeing along with her attorneys that the interviews are lined by the California Protect Legislation, which protects journalists from having to offer unpublished materials to prosecutors.

Kennedy declined to remark for this story, however her prior filmography suggests the Baldwin undertaking could also be extra nuanced than a easy vainness portrait. A lot of her latest work, like 2022’s Downfall: The Case Towards Boeing and the 2024 HBO docuseries The Synanon Repair, a couple of drug rehab turned cult, is skeptical and investigative. Even her seemingly admiring sports activities doc, 2017’s Take Each Wave, about surfer Laird Hamilton, depicted the topic’s egomania. 

Prosecutors haven’t tried to subpoena Mason’s footage, and should even be contemplating her a useful determine to have within the courtroom. Throughout armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed’s trial in April, Mason and Metz, whose sons attended faculty with Hutchins’ son, Andros, have been the one members of the general public within the courtroom who knew Hutchins personally. Mason attended the trial sporting Hutchins’ wide-brimmed hat, one by which the cinematographer was typically photographed. When the jury delivered a responsible verdict for Gutierrez-Reed, the Courtroom TV digital camera panned to Mason for a response shot.

Baldwin has a small however attention-grabbing connection to each filmmakers. Years earlier than making Rust, the actor, who’s on the chief committee of the Hamptons Movie Pageant and helps curate and promote its SummerDocs choices, interviewed each Mason and Kennedy on stage about their earlier movies.

Whereas each Mason and Kennedy’s movies stay in manufacturing, the Rust film itself has been completed since February. Thus far producers have been unable to discover a distributor for the Western.