This isn't to say he does not face major liability as A PRODUCER, but it is far more complicated than that. If you can get past the paywall, read this piece from LAT:
Alec Baldwin is credited as a producer on ‘Rust.’ What does that really mean?
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-10-26/rust-alec-baldwin-producer-explained
The production of “Rust” was a thicket of numerous production companies and multiple financiers, which isn’t unusual for an independent production of its scale, but it leads to various people sharing the titles of executive producer or producer without much clarity to outside observers regarding just who is responsible for what.
From a copy of the day’s call sheet obtained by The Times, the producers on the project besides Baldwin were Matt DelPiano — who is Baldwin’s manager and a former CAA agent — Ryan Smith, Anjul Nigam, Nathan Klingher and Ryan Winterstern. The film also had four executive producers.
Sometimes the credit is simply a vanity title to boost an actor’s sense of involvement in a project. Sometimes it is a way to defer upfront fees to a performer in favor of back-end payments. And sometimes an actor is so deeply involved with a project that the credit is a way to make official their added influence along the way.
Distinctions between an executive producer and a producer credit also come into play in determining awards eligibility and who among a producing team potentially gets to take home a statue. Only producers are eligible for Oscar nominations, not executive producers. Meanwhile, in television, executive producer is often the more “hands-on” credit, including for showrunners. All of which can dilute the true meaning of the title.
“This ‘Rust’ situation opens up the whole discussion about what a producer is and who the buck stops with really. Who is responsible for Halyna’s death?” said Mynette Louie, Independent Spirit Award-winning producer of films such as “Swallow” and “I Carry You With Me.” “When you have a bunch of executives and managers and actors and people who aren’t really producers in a hands-on way, where you’re seeing to the cast and crew and the safety and the liability of the production, then who does the buck stop with?”
Oct. 26, 2021
On a copy of the “Rust” screenplay obtained by The Times, Baldwin shares a story credit with the film’s director, Joel Souza, which does point to a higher level of involvement in the project’s creative development. He also had a producing credit on Souza’s previous film, 2019’s “Crown Vic,” in which Baldwin did not appear as an actor.
A few days before the accident, Baldwin posted a video online expressing support for IATSE members who were threatening to strike in part over issues of on-set safety. Yet as trouble brewed on the set of “Rust” leading up to Hutchins’ death, it is not clear how aware Baldwin was of the dysfunction on the production or what role he might have played in addressing any problems.
“It’s so malleable,” said a producer who has worked with actor-producers in the past and declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the subject. “He could just step back and say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m acting in this,’ even though, in name, he’s a producer. Or he could feel a lot of responsibility. It just all depends on who the actor is.”
Two people on a film set who both have the title of producer may nevertheless perform different functions on the production, from finding and developing the material to hiring the crew. Tom Nunan, continuing lecturer at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and an executive producer on the Oscar-winning “Crash,” likened the distinction between more creative producing work and that of physical production to the difference between an architect and a contractor working on a building.
= new reply since forum marked as read
?
