Alec Baldwin’s role as producer on ‘Rust’ could play a key role in shooting investigation: former filmmaker

Carew Papritz, former filmmaker and best-selling author, weighed in on Alec Baldwin's role as a producer on "Rust" and what it means for the ongoing investigation.

It’s known that Baldwin and Souza, 48, worked together on the 2019 police drama "Crown Vic." And with a budget of a reported $6 million to $7 million, "Rust" was likely a passion project for Baldwin."This is a total low budget," said Papritz, who has worked on film and TV sets with actors like Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando, among others. "That makes me think it was one of those vanity projects. You can make your money back on $6 million without blinking. But that type of script may not have sold to producers. We just don’t know. Yes, he’s got power and all that, but the script and the fact that it was likely a vanity project may not have sold. How do you guarantee a significant return [of money] after it comes out? You can’t when it’s a low-budget project."

"And the other issue when it’s a low budget project is you won’t excite the top people to get involved even with Alec Baldwin being a part of it," Papritz continued. "Someone may go, ‘If I get involved, I’ll have to take my rate down.’ Someone may go, ‘You know, I don’t want to be in the middle of nowhere. I want to stay in a nice hotel.’ If you’ve been around this business long enough, right from the get-go, there’s going to be some penny pinching because the top dogs are just not going to bite… But one of those streaming services can go, ‘If you shoot this by x-amount of days, you’ll get a certain amount of money in return.’"Experts predict a tremendous legal fallout from the tragedy, definitely in civil lawsuits and potentially in criminal charges. In addition to Baldwin, a call sheet for the day of the shooting obtained by The Associated Press lists five producers, four executive producers, a line producer and a co-producer. They, as well as assistant director Dave Halls and armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, could all face some sort of liability even if they weren’t on location.

The payouts – which could be covered in part by insurance held by the production company, Rust Movie Productions – would likely be in the "millions and millions" of dollars, experts predict.