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 polarised 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 behaviour.
Almost three years later, after multiple…
Read More