You’d be paying the actor’s negotiated rate either way, I just picked $2M as an example. P&H percentage is around 20%. So if Baldwin’s rate was $2M, you can pay him $2M as an actor and then send $400,000 to the union. Or you can pay him low-budget scale, which is like $700/day, and the balance of the $2M as a producer fee. And you only pay the 20% P&H on the $700/day.
Just to be clear I don’t have specific knowledge that this is how it was arranged for Baldwin on this movie, for all I know this was a passion project that he was intimately involved in setting up. But the above is much more typical when the star is also listed as a producer.
But yes I’d guess there’s info we don’t know, based on the family of the deceased supporting the filing of charges.
Man, this sounds super iffy to me with regard to Baldwin. She does say he’s being charged as a producer in addition to having been the actor who fired the gun, but I ask again why the other producers aren’t charged if that’s the case? She also says something along the lines of “we think we have enough to make it through preliminary hearings” or something to that effect, which sounds weird.
I think she felt like she had to charge him to avoid the appearance of coddling a celebrity. With that said, I understand the argument that if you are handed a gun you had better be damn sure it’s not loaded before you point it at anybody, whether or not you’re on a movie set. But knowing actors as I do, if somebody hands them a gun and says “point it over there”, most of the time they’re going to do just that without asking too many questions.
I agree it would be a weak case if you or I were deciding it. But if I were his lawyer, I would definitely be worried about a jury full of people who will say things like “I’ve known since I was 8 that you treat every gun as if it is loaded.” And the defense of “this is just how it’s done in Hollywood” isn’t going to resonate with them. I wonder if he admitted to the sheriffs that he knew it was a real gun capable of firing live ammo.
I really believe the whole “it was a different time” thing is one of the least explored but largest fallacies
Plenty of people were sure slavery was immoral. The few people with outsized power either weren’t sure or didn’t care (or truly believed it was ok, because our psyches are good at just doing that if it’s something that allows for a comfortable lifestyle), and the majority of people were just trying to get along, and convinced they couldn’t do anything about it either way, the same as people are today
When we say “it was a different time” we are just covering up how power structures can create and enforce systems we believe are incompatible with contemporary morals. It was incompatible then, too. So how did it happen? Worth exploring if you give a shit about stopping and preventing such things
