Actor and producer Alec Baldwin goes to trial in New Mexico this week for involuntary manslaughter. In October 2021, while he was rehearsing a scene for the western film Rust, the gun he was holding went off, fatally shooting cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and wounding director Joel Souza.

The 66-year-old actor faces up to 18 months in prison if he’s convicted, but has pleaded not guilty. Since the shooting, he’s maintained his innocence, saying he was not responsible for the live bullet that was loaded into what was supposed to be a blank prop gun.

A photograph of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on display during a vigil in her honor in Albuquerque, N.M., in October 2021.

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After the accident, Baldwin went on national television to walk through the events on set at Bonanza Creek Ranch. He told ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that he was handed the revolver and someone yelled “cold gun,” meaning the gun did not have live rounds.

“I take the gun and I start to cock the gun,” Baldwin explained on TV. “I let go of the hammer of the gun and the gun goes off…I didn’t pull the trigger.”

That interview and other statements he made to the press and to police may be part of the evidence presented during his trial. Jury selection begins Tuesday and opening arguments begin the following day. New Mexico special prosecutor Kari Morrissey says she intends to prove his criminal culpability.

Alec Baldwin gestures while talking with investigators following the fatal on-set shooting that killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in October 2021. Video of the conversation was released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office in 2022.

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“Mr. Baldwin knew he had a real gun in his hand. Mr. Baldwin specifically asked for the biggest gun that was available. Mr. Baldwin knew and understood that dummy rounds look identical to live ammunition,” Morrissey told the judge in a pretrial hearing two weeks ago. Morrissey said Baldwin didn’t pay attention during a safety training on set. “Halyna Hutchins is dead,” she said, “because he didn’t participate in the safety check.”

Rust armorer is already behind bars

The film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was responsible for guns and ammunition on the set. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter earlier this year and is serving an 18-month prison sentence. Prosecutors argued that her negligence on set led to Halyna Hutchins’ death.

“I am saddened by the way the media sensationalized our traumatic tragedy and portrayed me as a complete monster, which has actually been the total opposite of what’s been in my heart,” Gutierrez-Reed read aloud in a statement during her trial. “When I took on Rust, I was young and I was being naive, but I took my job as seriously as I knew how to. Despite not having proper time, resources and staffing when things got tough, I just did my best to handle it.”

State prosecutors indicated they may call Gutierrez-Reed to testify as a witness in Baldwin’s trial, but it’s not clear if she will end up taking the stand. Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer, who presided over her trial and will preside over Baldwin’s, said in a recent hearing that the armorer would likely not cooperate.

Possible testimony at Baldwin’s trial

Also on the witness list prosecutors submitted for the trial: director Souza, script supervisor Mamie Mitchell and prop master Sarah Zachry, who were all on the set the day of the shooting. Film armorers Seth Kenney and Bryan W. Carpenter and firearms expert Lucien Haag may also be called on as experts.

Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who worked as armorer on the set of Rust in New Mexico, arrives at her sentencing hearing in April. She was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in March and is serving an 18-month sentence.

Eddie Moore/AFP via Getty Images

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Among those Baldwin’s attorneys may call to the witness stand is Rust assistant director David Halls. Last year, he was convicted of unsafe handling of a firearm during the production; at the time, he agreed to testify truthfully at any upcoming hearings or trials related to the Rust shooting.

Baldwin’s attempts to dismiss the charges against him

Baldwin’s attorneys also tried several last-ditch efforts to get the case against their client thrown out. Most recently, they blamed prosecutors for deliberately allowing the gun to be damaged during testing after the shooting. During a pretrial hearing two weeks ago, an FBI agent said he tested the gun to see if it would fire accidentally without pulling the trigger, even if it was jolted violently. He testified that he hammered the gun from different angles with a rawhide mallet. As a result, the gun was broken into pieces.

“It’s kind of ironic in a case conceivably about an accident, the state somehow gets away with intentionally destroying the key evidence and depriving the defense of that evidence,” Baldwin’s attorney Alex Spiro told Judge Sommer. She ruled, however, that prosecutors did not act in bad faith when ordering the test and moved to proceed with the trial.

Meanwhile, Baldwin has been busy in Hollywood

Baldwin has been busy working in Hollywood for the past few years. He’s starring as a logger in the action thriller Clear Cut, which comes out in theaters and on demand July 19, the same day Judge Sommer has said she wants the trial to end.

Baldwin, his wife Hilaria and their seven children recently announced they’ll star in an upcoming reality series on TLC, “The Baldwins.”

Meanwhile, production of the indie film Rust finished last year in Montana, with Halyna Hutchins’ widower Matthew as executive producer — a position he negotiated as part of the wrongful death settlement he made with the production company.

It’s still unclear exactly when or where that film will be shown; Rust still doesn’t have distribution deals.

In 1984, a determined back-to-earther named Jules Dervaes Jr. brought his wife and children from a 10-acre farm in rural Florida to study theology in Pasadena but ultimately decided on a different ministry: creating a self-sufficient urban farm on a rundown residential property less than a block from the 210 freeway.

His wife left not long after — homesteading was not the life she signed up for — but his four children, now in their 40s, remained and today three of the four still work the farm known as the Urban Homestead, providing produce and flowers to more than 100 subscribing families every week, along with multiple restaurants and caterers.

“At first we were just gardening to grow food for our family, but then Dad took on organic gardening as a business,” said Anäis Dervaes, the eldest daughter. “In 1989, we took out our front yard — even the concrete — to grow more food, and our neighbors thought we were crazy, but the business took off, so you can make a living by removing your lawn.”

And, as all farmers know, working very hard.

Dervaes died in 2016 from a pulmonary embolism, but his children Anäis, 49, Justin, 46, and Jordanne, 41, keep building on his vision. Through the nonprofit Urban Homestead Institute established in 2001, they provide food boxes for needy families, offer internship positions to volunteers who want to help at the farm and welcome scores of schoolchildren to see how real food is grown — a program that started after Dervaes encouraged Anäis to try a new thing called blogging in 2000.

It was a time of big protests against genetically modified food, and Anäis wanted to join the demonstrators, “but Dad said, ‘What if we just write about what we’re doing here on a daily basis, living a simple life?’ And I think I said something like, ‘So I’ll write, ‘Today I harvested corn?’ Nobody is going to care about that.’”

But as it turned out, people did. The family got a following, and teachers from Compton High School wrote, asking if they could bring some students to tour their urban farm, “and we’ve been doing outreach with students ever since,” Anäis said.

Not as much as they’d like to, because space is at such a premium they can only accommodate small groups. The garage is now a small store and distribution center for food boxes. The covered patio is a place for classes, demonstrations and their homemade pizza oven. The driveway is lined with trays of plant and flower seedlings. Chickens and ducks live in a rustic L-shaped structure in the back and fruit trees line the property’s perimeter. The rest of the yard is filled with raised beds planted thickly with vegetables, herbs and flowers, accessible by narrow walking paths.

Volunteer and customer Tristan Lahoz, left, and Jordanne Dervaes tend to the densely planted beds at Urban Homestead.

Chef Onil Chibas, left, picks up his order of edible flowers and salad greens from farmer Justin Dervaes.

But you don’t have to do much walking to see plenty at the Urban Homestead. Almost every bed has dense plantings of something — lettuces, spinach, arugula and red-stemmed dandelions (a zesty salad green) — embellished with sunflowers. There’s a big bin of compost-enriched soil where a handheld seed block contraption gets regular use, pressing out four uniform cubes of soil in one squeeze that can easily fill a tray and just as easily be planted once the seeds sprout and grow — a critical tool when you’re constantly harvesting and replanting.

The garden is busy with butterflies, bees and other beneficial insects, especially out front, where flowers are the predominant crop, a jungle of red Flanders poppies and fragrant sweet peas (for bouquets) and sunny nasturtiums, calendulas and roses (for eating).

Dervaes’ children aren’t getting rich, but they’re making a living, thanks to long hours, few expenses and the courage to experiment. The family installed solar panels back in 2003 and a greywater system that keeps their water bill under $1,000 a year. For a time they even recycled cooking oil from local restaurants to make their own biodiesel for their diesel truck, and in 2009, they made a short film called “Homegrown Revolution” that won awards at multiple film festivals.

A few years ago, they used a rent-to-buy plan to acquire a neighbor’s home two doors down and expanded their farm to its front yard. Jordanne, and Anäis live there now, while Justin lives in the main house, oversees the main farm operation and rents out a couple of the bedrooms.

Anäis calls herself the “cook and educator,” making products like jams and teaching workshops in knitting and other home skills. Jordanne, the youngest, oversees their bee hives (kept at another location) and their flock of chickens and ducks, a job she’s had since she was a child. All three do outside consulting on various aspects of gardening, homesteading and raising chickens, which led to Occidental College recruiting Jordanne to teach a popular class in regenerative gardening and sustainable animal care, with occasional input from her siblings. And just recently, Jordanne got her real estate license to pursue her interest in preserving old homes.

The Urban Homestead’s poultry eat much of the farm’s garden waste and provide plenty of nutrient-rich poop to feed the soil. Their eggs are an added bonus for the family.

Anäis Dervaes tidies up the kitchen at her family’s house, built in 1917.

But the family farm is still their main focus, and it keeps them so busy that it interferes with their dating lives, said Anäis. All three are single and would like long-term relationships someday, but it’s hard to find people who share their priorities.

“The dating life is just something we haven’t mastered yet,” said Jordanne, laughing. “I can take on any challenge, but this one baffles me.”

Partly it’s time and partly it’s priorities, Anäis said, like when she gets frost warnings on her phone and has to cut a date short so she can run home to cover crops to protect them from damage.

“We live a farming lifestyle in the city, so we look at things different than most city dwellers, and they don’t always understand,” Anäis said. “But this is our livelihood; this is our life.”

It wasn’t always wonderful, she said. They became a vegetarian household when they were all very young, and as teenagers they all had moments of rebellion. They were homeschooled, but neighborhood kids taunted them about what they were missing — Nikes and hamburgers and sodas in a can.

“We were just granola kids, running around barefoot on the street, and I was feeling like I didn’t fit in,” said Anäis. “I’d say, ‘Dad, why do we have to shop at thrift stores? Why do we only eat out of the garden? Why don’t we eat normal stuff instead of Swiss chard?’”

A plaque memorializes Jules Dervaes Jr.

Handmade jams are available at Urban Homestead.

But once she read the book that inspired her father’s vegetarianism, John Robbins’ ”Diet for a New America,” “It was like a light bulb went off,” she said, “and this lifestyle became mine.”

It wasn’t like their father forced them to do what they didn’t want to do, Jordanne said. “We had a lot of pushback, but he always encouraged us to question everything in our lives,” she said. “And we had responsibilities. There was a sense of pride in growing all these plants, and the business was ours. Dad would always say, ‘If you want to do it, read about it and go do it.’ He challenged us to learn and do our own problem solving.”

There were some limits — Jordanne’s desire to have a horse and a cow just wasn’t possible — but ultimately, it was the freedom to experiment that drew them back whenever they strayed, Anäis said. “There was a sense of identity here, and family survival. It gave us purpose and a passion. I would plant on the moon if I had to.”

The farm is open to visitors the second Sunday of every month, during two-hour “Learning Tours” (tickets are $75). But Justin has a few tips for people who want to remove their lawn and become urban microfarmers — or just landscape with food.

Salad mix seeds planted at Urban Homestead.

Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

Kiran Ridley/Getty Images

It’s summer, so we’re talking all about road trips. Should you blast music that’s familiar or unfamiliar? What makes for a good road trip audiobook? What are some road trip games we hate? Pop Culture Happy Hour talked all about how to entertain and amuse ourselves in the car way back in 2012. Today, in this encore episode, we’re revisiting that conversation.

Liz Metzger produced the encore version of this episode.