During my interview a while back with a director of small-budget Westerns, he explained to me that if you keep your costs down low enough and, better still, cast a recognizable character actor or country music star — not a superstar, but someone recognizable — to promote in packaging and advertising, you could turn a profit just on DVD and Blu-ray sales. “You do it right,” he said, “and you make your money back from Redbox and big-box stores. You do it wrong — you get ‘Rust.’”
It’s a theory that might seem dated today — more than likely, that director now relies heavily if not exclusively on sales to streaming platforms — but the industrial-strength pressure to pinch pennies and stretch dollars continues apace for indie genre filmmakers. As director Rachel Mason makes abundantly clear in her exceptional Hulu documentary “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna,” such measures can have fatal consequences.
On Oct. 21, 2021, Ukrainian-born cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, a vivacious woman viewed in the U.S. film industry as a rising talent, was killed on the New Mexico set of “Rust,” an indie Western starring Alec Baldwin as Harlan Rust, an aging outlaw determined to protect his nephew after the boy is charged with murder after an accidental killing. In one of this tragic true-life drama’s most bitter ironies, Baldwin accidentally killed Hutchins, and seriously wounded director Joel Souza, when he discharged a prop gun he thought was loaded with blanks, not live rounds.
Souza and Hutchins would have been literally out of the line of fire had they been viewing the scene on monitors in the safety of a nearby video village. Trouble is, most of Hutchins’ crew had walked off the set, citing well-founded concerns about safety. So the director and the cinematographer were forced to position themselves close to Baldwin when he drew the loaded weapon. “The sad irony,” an interviewee notes, “is that Halyna is the one who told him where to point the gun.”
Mason, a close friend of Hutchins, constructs a propulsive and compelling narrative by skillfully interlacing interviews with people involved in the tragedy — including the OSHA investigator who uncovered a pattern of risky behavior on the “Rust” set — with news footage, police interrogations, and video recorded on cellphones and police minicams.
Time and again, Mason upends assumptions fueled by sensationalized news accounts of the tragedy and its aftermath, and none-too-subtly implies that the three people who eventually stood trial for causing Hutchins’ death — Baldwin, assistant director Dave Halls, and armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed — were far from the only ones who could be deemed at least partly culpable.
“On every indie set I’ve ever been on,” says “Rust” co-star Devon Werkheiser, “we don’t have enough time and we don’t have enough money.” Conditions struck him as especially egregious on the “Rust” location: “The tight schedule sucked. It was tough.” Even so, costume designer Terese Davis says, “It was just fun. Right up until it wasn’t.”
At the risk of sounding disrespectful to both the living and dead, I was stuck by how much Mason’s documentary appears designed like a first-rate episode of “Law & Order” (with more than a touch of “Rashomon” thrown in for good measure). As police investigate, the story unfolds and the questions arise: Who accidentally put the live round in Baldwin’s gun? Or was it really an accident? And if it really wasn’t a deliberate act, how could such gross negligence occur?
“Then I found out she was the armorer. Wow.”
Assistant director Halls says he took Gutierrez-Reed at her word when she claimed she’d ascertained Baldwin’s gun was loaded with blanks, a decision he lived to regret after Hutchins died. (Halls eventually was later charged with unsafe handling of a firearm, and sentenced to six months’ probation in a plea deal.) Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter, despite his repeated insistence that he had no idea the gun was loaded, but his case was dismissed with prejudice (that is, he couldn’t be charged again) because of what his lawyer successfully argued claimed was prosecutorial misconduct.
As for Gutierrez-Reed, she was convicted on the same charge, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. (The documentary pointedly notes the jury took only three hours to reach a verdict.) The most damning evidence against her: Police found other live rounds near her worktable on set.
And yet, for all that, “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna” doesn’t attempt to wrap things up with an altogether satisfying conclusion. To be sure, “Rust” eventually was completed at a Montana location — in part as a “tribute” to Hutchins — and screened last November at Poland’s Camerimage Film Festival. (Audience reception reportedly was “subdued.”) But we’re left with a disconcerting end title card that strongly suggests the complete story still waits to be told. And maybe, just maybe, some other people have yet to be served their own just deserts.
Meanwhile, the documentary intimates, penny-pinching and dollar stretching, along with the corner-cutting and risk taking, continues in the world of indie genre cinema.
“Last Take” is now streaming on Hulu.
