It’s wrong to label Baldwin “the producer.” A producer, certainly. The producers of Rust are Alec Baldwin, Matt DelPiano, Ryan Donnell Smith, Anjul Nigam, Ryan Winterstern, Nathan Klingher, and Grant Hill.
You get to be a producer by providing money, your own participation (in Baldwin’s case), or management. In return, you get partial ownership and a cut of the take. There were producers who made the decisions to cut the budget, fire the AD and hire an AD whose whole schtick is to do things cheaply and in a hurry. That producer and that AD should have been prosecuted, but I speculate the prosecutors were (a) looking for a higher-profile case to polish their own apple and (b) not alienate other production companies from working in their area. Prosecuting Baldwin hit that sweet spot.
And it’s not the actor’s job to perform any checks whatsoever. There’s a whole crew for that. If the crew had done its job, it should have been like holding a water pistol.
