LOS ANGELES - A long-awaited showdown will take place this week in a historic Wild West frontier town, with both sides seeking justice for a fatal bullet fired from a six-shooter. But if Alec Baldwin’s trial for manslaughter sounds like the plot of a Hollywood movie, the victims, the stakes and the tragic consequences are all too real. In October 2021, on the New Mexico set of his low-budget Western “Rust,” a gun pointed by Baldwin discharged a live round, killing the film’s cinematographer and wounding its director.
Such is Baldwin’s A-list fame and the rarity of on-set deaths in the tightly controlled US film industry, the story quickly became a global sensation. It also polarized opinion, with sympathetic observers viewing Baldwin -- an actor who did not know the prop gun contained a real bullet -- as a victim, and others seeing the death as a result of his allegedly reckless behavior. Almost three years later, after multiple failed attempts by Baldwin’s formidable New York legal team to have the case thrown out, those same arguments will be settled by a jury at a court case in Santa Fe starting on Tuesday.
If found guilty, Baldwin faces a maximum 18 months in prison -- the same term already being served by the film’s armorer, who was convicted in the same courthouse earlier this year. The death of Halyna Hutchins occurred during a rehearsal in a small chapel on the Bonanza Creek Ranch, 20 miles (30 kilometers) outside Santa Fe, on a sunny afternoon mid-way t.
