Torraco does admit that, on the set of Rust, Gutierrez Reed opened the gun and showed it to Halls upon her arrival in the church. “He did examine the gun, but he didn’t even hold it when he was examining it,” she says. He remembers the chambers only being partially full, with three or maybe four rounds, she added. Halls did not remove the rounds or shake them. “He was told that that’s the armorer’s responsibility,” says Torraco. “He wasn’t distracted and he wasn’t under duress and he didn’t overlook anything. He did his job the way he was told and taught to do his job. He relied on other people to do their job because they’re professionals as well.”
Baldwin would later say roughly the same thing about himself.
5: THE GUN GOES OFF
The scene in question was never filmed. Sheriff Mendoza says no cameras were rolling when the shooting occurred. Baldwin was only working with Hutchins to figure out camera angles when the unthinkable occurred. Here is the sequence, from page 87 of Rust’s 101-page screenplay, that was being rehearsed: Alec Baldwin’s wounded gunslinger has taken refuge in a weather-beaten prairie chapel, blood pooling beneath his pew. Two men enter from the back of the church, urging him to surrender.
Rust [is] still, the script reads. Hand moving almost unnoticeably. Slips a Colt from its holster.
“Ain’t no iteration you walk outta this church less’n you stand up slow and toss them guns….” one of the men calls out.
Rust’s Colt COCKED quietly now…
Gunfire from afar causes the men to whirl, giving Rust the distraction he needs to strike.
Colts EXPLODING. SHREDDING the pew in front of him, the script continues. Rust hits the floor. Rolling under pews. Out the other side. Staggering up. Colts BARKING.… Rust moving backwards. Unrelenting FIRE. Makes it out a door…
Should Baldwin himself have checked the gun? George Clooney is among the actors who say he should have. “Every single time I’m handed a gun on the set, every time they hand me a gun, I look at it, I open it, I show it to the person I’m pointing it to, I show it to the crew,” Clooney said on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. “Every single take.”
In a December interview with ABC News, Baldwin reacted testily to the notion that he bore some responsibility. “If your protocol is you checking the gun every time, well, good for you. Good for you,” he said. “My protocol was to trust the person that had the job, and it worked up until this point.” He said he felt haunted by what happened but did not feel guilty: “No. No. I might have killed myself if I thought I was responsible, and I don’t say that lightly.”
Baldwin, who declined to be interviewed for this story, also dismissed the suggestion that he might bear some responsibility for the way the set operated, though he, his production company, and his manager were among Rust’s producers, and he was credited with cocreating the story with Souza. “I’m not a producer that hires the crew,” he said.
Finally, there was this bombshell claim in the interview: “I didn’t pull the trigger.”
That caught the attention of D.A. Carmack-Altwies. “I didn’t know too much about guns, certainly not about 1850s-era revolvers. So when I first heard that, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s crazy,’ ” she says.
D.A. Mary Carmack-Altwies at a press conference in late October.
By Sam Wasson/Getty Images.Baldwin says that he merely pulled back the hammer on the gun. FBI analysis of the weapon will determine functionality, as well as whether mechanical failures might have caused it to go off. But in the meantime, Carmack-Altwies and her investigative team did an unofficial test of their own. “One of the investigators in my office happens to have a very old type revolver, and so he brought it, at my request, so that we could look at it and see if that was at all possible,” she says.
They cleared a room in the office, and two investigators inspected the gun—the one who had supplied it, then a second officer who verified that it was empty. “Then they visually showed me,” says Carmack-Altwies. “You can pull the hammer back without actually pulling the trigger and without actually locking it. So you pull it back partway, it doesn’t lock, and then if you let it go, the firing pin can hit the primer of the bullet.”