Alec Baldwin's Rust gets a low-key release, years after the on-set shooting that killed its cinematographer
How do you plan the roll-out of a film that became notorious for an on-set tragedy?
The ill-fated western Rust has been trying to figure that out. The film was finally released in the
United States
at the weekend, 3½ years after its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins,
was shot and killed by a real bullet
fired from an old-fashioned revolver that its star,
Alec Baldwin
, was rehearsing with on a set in New Mexico.
Now that the film has finally come out after years of lawsuits, investigations and two criminal trials, its roll-out has been decidedly muted. Unable to find traction at better-known film festivals, Rust premiered last fall at a small cinematography festival in Poland.
Now, with its release in a limited number of US cinemas and on demand, it is forgoing the traditional red-carpet premiere, and Baldwin has not sat for any splashy interviews.
READ MORE
The film-makers say that their overriding goal in finishing the film and pushing for its release is to showcase the final work of Hutchins, who was a 42-year-old up-and-coming cinematographer when she was killed. And a legal settlement calls for some of the film's earnings to go to her husband and son.
'If I was to make a direct plea to someone about seeing the movie,' said the film's director, Joel Souza, 'I'd say that a lot of really good people worked really hard on finishing this movie to honour her.'
Souza was injured in the shooting by the bullet that killed Hutchins, which passed through her and lodged in his shoulder. He said that at first he doubted he would ever want to return to the movie business. But eventually a plan came together to finish Rust, with Souza back in the director's chair.
The plan not only had the blessing of Hutchins' husband, Matthew, but also was at the heart of a settlement agreement he reached with the movie's producers, including Baldwin, after he filed a wrongful-death lawsuit.
A poster for Rust. Photograph: Falling Forward Films
Brian Panish, a lawyer for Matthew Hutchins, said in an email last week that the Rust producers have still not paid the full settlement owed to the family, which was due in 2023.
The production company has said that part of the settlement is tied to the film's earnings, which will go toward paying Hutchins, who is now an executive producer on the film, and his son, Andros, who was nine when his mother died.
The film's original producers will not benefit financially from the movie's release, according to Melina Spadone, a representative for Rust Movie Productions.
So bringing out the film entails a delicate balance: earning money for the Hutchins family while taking care to market it with the sobriety required for a movie synonymous with real-life tragedy.
After Matthew Hutchins reached the settlement with producers, the movie finished filming in Montana in 2023 with a new cinematographer, Bianca Cline. The film-makers decided to use only fake weapons that were incapable of firing.
Cline and Souza's main priority was to salvage as much original footage by Halyna Hutchins as possible, which meant putting together a puzzle of old and new footage by employing editing tricks and, in a few instances, special effects.
As the film was being completed, the legal drama surrounding the fatal shooting only intensified.
Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armourer who loaded a live bullet into the gun that day in 2021, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Facing his own criminal case, Baldwin went on trial in Santa Fe on an involuntary-manslaughter charge, but a judge dismissed the case after finding that the state of New Mexico had withheld evidence from the defence. (Baldwin is now suing prosecutors over what he says was a 'malicious prosecution'.)
Rust: Alec Baldwin and Patrick Scott McDermott. Photograph: Falling Forward Films
Previous films marked by tragedy saw a wider release. After the actor Brandon Lee died during the filming of The Crow, the movie was released in more than 2,000 US cinemas in 1994 and grossed more than $50 million. (It had a bigger budget than Rust, which resumed production with a budget of about $8 million, or €7 million.)
Rust was released on about 115 screens around the United States. It was released simultaneously on US on-demand services including Prime Video and Apple TV+. Representatives for the movie said the distribution plan was made with the intention of maximising profits for the Hutchins family.
Some critics have questioned the decision to release the film, including several cinematographers who pushed back on the plan to premiere the movie in Poland.
But people involved in it said that they wanted to honour her memory. 'In the long arc of time, I believe it's better that at the end of all this there's a finished movie, rather than just a tragedy and then nothing,' Devon Werkheiser, an actor in the film, said in a video posted to his Instagram account last week.
Rachel Mason, a friend of Halyna Hutchins who made a documentary about the tragedy, was given permission to comb through her text messages about the making of Rust and her notebooks, where she recorded ideas for the film. 'Halyna wanted to make Rust, and people don't always give her that,' she said. 'She would not have touched a film that she didn't care about.'
In the documentary, Hutchins' mother, Olga Solovey, who is suing the production along with her husband and other daughter, says she wanted to see her daughter's final work completed.
Souza, the director, said that some cast and crew members gathered in Los Angeles late last week for a small private screening.
'It's a tough one to market,' he said. 'How do you message it? The best way I can think of is that you hope people will like the movie on its merits.' – This article originally appeared in the
New York Times
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
42 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Edmund White: ‘He never broke faith with the nobility of a literary life'
One of the reasons it is difficult to write about Edmund White is that he himself frequently speculated about what people would say about him after he died. Would he be a Genet, a Bowen, an Isherwood? Most artists nurse this vain anxiety somewhere, but generally they try and hide it. It was typical of Edmund to trumpet a vice: it was of a piece with the sometimes-alarming honesty and taste for shamelessness with which he approached his work (and sometimes wounded those who found themselves revealed or distorted in its pages). Entertaining conjectures about his posthumous legacy sprang, paradoxically, from Edmund's ferocious attachment to life, a result of his relentless, forever-unsatisfied curiosity. He could not abide the thought that there was this one piece of literary news he would never receive. Survival was, of course, a fundamental principle in Edmund's life. One of the very few of his generation of gay men in New York to survive Aids, he found himself in the role of witness, one of a handful of voices able to recount the rules, habits and customs of a world that had had only a brief flicker of existence before it was extinguished. READ MORE Being a surviving witness was a job thrust upon Edmund by accident, and he rose to it magnificently. But in any circumstances, he would have been a chronicler of lost ways of life. He had a passion for intergenerational transmission of many kinds, and took great pleasure in details and ideas, both obsolete and useful, passing between one generation and another. I first met him in the late 1990s. Edmund had just moved to Princeton to teach creative writing; I had come there from Ireland to study comparative literature. I already knew his fiction well – so well that meeting him at a party in Princeton felt almost like an encounter with a part of myself. A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty treated shameful, private longings as noble, universal feelings. They dealt with homosexuality not as a life sentence, but as a predicament that was exciting and filled with possibility. All the gay men in our small, fearful circle in Dublin had passed those novels back and forth. More than anything any of us read or heard or said to each other, those books gave us a vocabulary of feeling, furnished an emotional grammar for our inner lives. I was in Princeton to do a PhD, but I was also working on what would become my first novel. Edmund invited me to dinner in the house he and Michael were renting and suggested I bring some of my manuscript. I thought he was asking me to leave the pages with him, but after dinner, he had me read it aloud while he and Michael sat and listened, and Edmund read from the notebooks that would become his novel The Married Man . Later, it was partly thanks to Edmund's help that my novel found a publisher. Over the years that followed, we dined together regularly, sometimes with his friends in Princeton or with Michael at home in New York. As a student of French literature, I was an especially useful guest on the many occasions Edmund was hosting a visitor from France. He loved speaking French. It energised him, as though he had been plugged into a different power source. As he read French literature, he greedily stockpiled proverbs, idioms and turns of phrase, which he would then use to decorate his conversation. Edmund had learnt French only when he moved to Paris in his 40s, and mastering it, I think, appealed to his passion for self-reinvention. His news was always new: a new boyfriend, a new book, a new obsession with a hitherto overlooked literary figure from the past. He was a person always in the process of becoming, and his fascination with this process, with how his own plot might thicken, was endless. People often compare him to Henry James, because of his interest in the theme of Americans in Paris, or to Proust because of his meticulous observation of the gay underworld and its codes. He and I talked about the characters in Proust as though they were friends we had in common. But in my view, the writer whose sensibility was the most formative for Edmund was Balzac. Like the French novelists, Edmund had a horror of emptiness (the title The Beautiful Room is Empty , taken from Kafka, registered, I always thought, one of his fundamental fears). Humour, as for Balzac, was always immediately available to Edmund, no matter the circumstance. When recounting tales of his lovers, friends or literary activities, he spoke as though we were living in 19th-century Paris. His world was populated with faded 'famous beauties', dastardly but irresistible schemers, conniving dowagers, young men from the provinces with literary ambitions being corrupted by the city, respectable ladies with unspeakable sexual secrets. In Edmund's conception, the social world had a limited repertoire of fixed roles, but one could get to play many of them in one's lifetime. He was capable of translating everything he did himself into these slightly cartoonish Balzacian categories. It gave him a distance and colour that he needed, and it imbued his life with both irony and dignity. This Balzacian world he pretended we all lived in was one of the tools in Edmund's kit of survival smarts. He knew very well that the idea of a literary society where 'everyone' might know your book was a fiction, but he also understood the necessity of acting as though it existed. He saw many things collapse around him over the course of his life, including the old New York publishing world he had made his own career in. But as a survivor himself he expected survival as well as decline. He never broke faith with the truth and resilience of literature, with the nobility of a literary life, and with the solemn, enduring reality of writing as a vocation. These things too, as much as anything else, he made sure to pass on. Barry McCrea is author of The First Verse (2005) ; In the Company of Strangers: Family and Narrative in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce and Proust (2011) ; and Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in 20th-Century Ireland and Europe (2015)
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
You might think it's Your Friends & Neighbors, but And Just Like That... is the only true aspirational show on TV
Sometime in April a new fantasy dropped: a walk-in wardrobe swish enough for Jon Hamm to want to break into it. Hamm's role as Andrew 'Coop' Cooper, a sacked hedge-fund manager turned neighbourhood burglar, in Your Friends & Neighbors has been a rare source of unalloyed television pleasure this year, with each Friday episode notification from Apple TV+ becoming the starting pistol for the weekend. Still, forget what I said about wardrobes. This dark comedy with a dash of Dynasty might be set in a fictional 'exclusive hamlet' in New York state, but no one in their right mind would actually want to be one of the neighbours in Your Friends & Neighbors. They are, as Coop's conspiratorial voiceover tells us, 'assholes'. It makes for a fun blend of soap, satire and farce, but it's not aspirational, not unless you genuinely fancy being in the market for torn jeans that cost more than monthly rent. READ MORE The now completed, already renewed nine-parter, created by Jonathan Tropper, instead fits into the recent vogue for depicting the ultrawealthy as venal, ludicrous and unhappy, prompting chicken-and-egg questions about which came first, the money or the grasping personality. [ Your Friends & Neighbors: Jon Hamm is hilarious in this riotous, satirical romp Opens in new window ] To be clear, I loved it. Rich people have very funny problems sometimes. Perhaps their greatest flaw is their desire to hang around only with other rich people, which in Your Friends & Neighbors means going to parties organised by your ex-wife's new boyfriend. Westmont Village has those eye-popping American proportions going on but is as oppressive as elite enclaves come. Even the 'keeping up with the Joneses' theme-tune refrain is all pressure, no joy. Yes, how nice to have the time to laze about sharing local arrest gossip in a sauna with four other women wearing matching towels, but how claustrophobic, too. And who really wants to be a member of the sort of stultifying country club that won't stick by you when you're charged with murder? But at least Westmont Village isn't a five-star hotel so suffocating it would put you off the entire concept of holidays. In The White Lotus the lifestyles of the rich and tedious have their own hypnotic quality. I certainly felt as if I was being hypnotised into watching the third season's slow depiction of wellness hell. Never mind the gunfire. It was the forced phone-detoxing and poolside man-pests that were the true horror. That third run reaffirmed my long-held belief that there's never been a massage that hasn't been enlivened by some kind of security emergency. By the finale I felt sorry for the Thailand tourism authorities, who got such a raw deal compared to Taormina, in Sicily, the HBO show's second-season star. And that's the essence of this recent fashion for wealth porn. It's not aspirational lives we're watching, it's aspirational scenery. Maybe the more the real world falls apart, the more audiences – and producers – gravitate towards glimpses of picture-postcard unreality. In Netflix's Sirens , for instance, we're presented with an unnervingly pristine shoreline as the camera follows a perky personal assistant skipping up endless flights of beach steps to the Cliff House. This island mansion has a perfectly positioned swimming pool and grounds so enormous you need a buggy to drive around them. I don't recommend Sirens – it's not so much escapist as a series to escape – though it should be noted that it also possesses some enviably spacious walk-in wardrobe action. To access it, however, you must put up with Julianne Moore being creepy for the best part of five episodes. Never work for someone who might suddenly demand you procure a harp. [ Sirens review: An anaemic White Lotus cover that hits the right notes but has no tune of its own Opens in new window ] Speaking of work, it remains gloriously incidental to the only true aspirational show on television: the Sex and the City spin-off And Just Like That... Carrie Bradshaw, the never-knowingly-underwardrobed Manhattanite played by Sarah Jessica Parker , has rats in her back garden, but her back garden is in a Gramercy Park townhouse, where her new apartment is otherwise shaping up delightfully. Because real estate is no bother to Carrie, she has once again moved on from the rent-controlled studio apartment that Elle Decor has dubbed her 'emotional support brownstone'. [ And Just Like That... Season 3 review: Nostalgia served up like a gift box of premium cupcakes Opens in new window ] The women of And Just Like That... occasionally have to contend with woes such as malfunctioning alarms and demanding podcast producers, but they are radically content, in the main, with being rich. They know their money allows them to enjoy everything from eccentric headwear to ballet. They're free. This seems a good time to revisit remarks made in 2022 by Candace Bushnell , the columnist who inspired the original series, about how much she used to be paid. [ Candace Bushnell at the Ambassador: A fun, girly night out for Sex and the City fans Opens in new window ] In the 1990s she received $5,000 a month for writing the People Are Talking About column for Vogue. The New York Observer, home of Sex and the City, 'paid less', but she could afford that because of Vogue. Before these columns she would 'get an assignment for 3,000 words, $2 per word', which she described as 'failing'. Ah. Failure has never sounded so aspirational.
Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Irish Times
The Movie Quiz: What is the last Pixar film to win the animated feature Oscar?
Which year did Marty not visit? 1885 1955 2015 2055 What was Clint Eastwood's first film as director? The Outlaw Josey Wales Play Misty for Me Firefox Bird Who is not a sibling? Macaulay Kieran Rory Benji The actor playing the title character of which film was actually born in the US? Klute (1971) The Mask (1994) Dudley Do-Right (1999) Green Lantern (2011) What is the last Pixar film to win the best animated feature Oscar? Soul Onward Coco Inside Out Which is the odd period out? Ms Weld Dan Aykroyd in Dragnet Ms Squibb Christina Ricci in The Addams Family Who was not portrayed by Steph? Ally Lee Patrizia Breathless Which is the odd one out? Harrison Ford's other profession 2024 Palme d'Or winner Todd Haynes's notorious early short Halloween and Escape from New York Who is about to succeed, among many, many others, James Whale, Terence Fisher and Kenneth Branagh? Guillermo del Toro Ari Aster David Lowery Robert Eggers Whose daughter fought the Triffids? Alison Steadman Thora Hird Patricia Routledge Margaret Rutherford
