Alec Baldwin Set To Star In A Movie About The Kent State Shooting, Which Is Certainly ... A Choice

There are head-scratching creative decisions, and then there's this. According to The Hollywood Reporter, actor Alec Baldwin is set to star in a movie called "Kent State," about the 1970 protest shootings that took the lives of four college students at the hands of the National Guard. While the Kent State shootings are already a touchy topic for any film to focus on, the casting news is especially surprising given that Baldwin just wrapped filming on "Rust," the film that had to be shut down for investigations after an on-set firearms accident injured director Joel Souza and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins. Baldwin was holding the gun when it discharged, and though he has had all criminal charges against him dropped, he is still facing multiple civil cases made against him over the incident. Taking on a movie expressly about gun violence so soon after that fatal experience feels like ... well, it's certainly a choice.

There are some more details available about the film that could make the casting news feel better or worse depending on your stance on Baldwin, but this casting feels ill-advised. By involving himself in a role so tightly tied to gun violence, he's only going to make people think about the "Rust" tragedy more, which will surely invite all kinds of criticism he could have potentially avoided. 

According to Entertainment Tonight, "Kent State" will apparently be an anti-gun film about "the abuse of power and misuse of guns" and the outlet reports that there will be "no actual guns used on set." The latter should be industry standard at this point, but the former only begs more questions. Is Baldwin doing a film about the dangers and misuse of guns out of some sense of personal obligation? Is he doing it because he thought it might be a good public relations move? Is he doing it because he knows some people will hear "Alec Baldwin Kent State movie" and get up in arms enough to give this a hate-watch? Whatever the answer, it looks a bit crass from the outside, like he's not taking the full impact of what happened on the "Rust" set seriously. 

The film is currently in pre-production, with a screenplay by Karen Slade, who will also direct. The film will tell the story of the Kent State tragedy, which took place on May 4, 1970 when four students were shot and killed (and another nine were injured) by the Ohio National Guard during a campus protest against the war in Vietnam. Baldwin will play the president of the university, Robert I. White. White gave many statements and spoke about the tragedy at length, which genuinely feels a bit ghoulish given Baldwin's own nearness to firearm-based tragedy. No matter the movie's quality or Baldwin's reasons for doing it, it seems questionable for Baldwin to be involved at all.