The day Alec Baldwin shot Halyna Hutchins and Joel Souza
SANTA FE, N.M. — “What the f--- just happened?”
Alec Baldwin repeated the words again and again with growing urgency as the sound of the shot reverberated throughout the wooden church.
Mere seconds before, the actor had been preparing to film a scene in which he, as a grizzled 1880s Kansas outlaw, becomes involved in a shootout in a church. He was just going through the motions, giving the camera crew a chance to line up their angles.
“So,” he had said, placing his hand on the Colt .45 revolver in its holster, “I guess I’m gonna take this out, pull it, and go, ‘Bang!’”
No projectile was supposed to be in the firearm. Just a dummy round that contained no gunpowder. Baldwin was simply showing the director and the cinematographer of “Rust,” a low-budget indie western film, what he was going to do when cameras began rolling.
Instead, he shot them.
A lead bullet flew out of the weapon Baldwin had been assured was a “cold gun.” It hit cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, who stumbled back, falling into the arms of the head electrician. As she was laid to the ground, she could see the blood pouring from her chest. Behind her director Joel Souza was also down, clutching his shoulder; the bullet had gone through Hutchins’ body into his.
“What the f--- was that? That burns!” Souza screamed.
Baldwin put the gun down on a church pew. He looked down in horror at his two injured colleagues, repeating his initial question like a mantra.
“Medic!” someone yelled, as various crew members huddled around Hutchins, trying to stanch the bleeding. A boom operator looked into her eyes. “Oh, that was no good,” the sound guy said.
“No,” Hutchins replied. “That was no good. That was no good at all.”
Within hours, she would be pronounced dead.
On Oct. 21, at 1:49 p.m., Santa Fe County emergency crews were summoned to Bonanza Creek Ranch in response to a shooting that would leave the entertainment industry reeling. Hollywood loves nothing more than a good war story, a tale of the difficult conditions that a cast and crew face, the daring chance a director took to get the take, the film made on a shoestring budget that becomes an unexpected hit.
But this was no war story; this was every filmmaker’s worst nightmare. A “one-in-a-trillion episode” is how Baldwin described it to paparazzi who’d tracked him down Saturday, a week later, in a small Vermont town.
“There are incidental accidents on film sets from time to time, but nothing like this,” he told the photographers Saturday. “We were a very, very well-oiled crew shooting a film together and then this horrible event happened.”
The death of Hutchins and wounding of Souza came just a
