Actor Alec Baldwin directed and starred in a 2003 film called Shortcut to Happiness in which he plays a struggling writer who accidentally kills someone, then gets out of his predicament with a favor from the Devil (played by Jennifer Love-Hewitt). Baldwin’s character then sells his soul to The Devil. Baldwin is currently charged with involuntary manslaughter after a prop gun he was holding fired and shot two people, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Baldwin was the producer of the movie Rust, and the now-shuttered production had been rocked by internal safety complaints prior to the fatal incident. Baldwin’s armorer Hannah Gutierrez is currently on trial for involuntary manslaughter in New Mexico.
In Shortcut to Happiness, Baldwin’s character throws his typewriter out the window in rage and hits an old woman outside. The woman lays on the ground, seemingly unconscious, as her husband cries out for help.
“Is she moving? Please tell me she’s moving,” Baldwin’s character says.
“You dropped a typewriter on her head. What do you think?,” Jennfer Love-Hewitt’s Devil replies.
The woman dies on the street.
“Sit down? I’ve just killed somebody and I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison,” Baldwin tells the Devil. Baldwin wavers back and forth between calling the police or calling his “lawyer instead.” Eventually, the Devil makes it so the crime never happened, and Baldwin sells his soul to the dark side in exchange for success. A Faustian-style tale ensues.
The film is available free on Crackle, and it actually has a few pretty funny jokes and an amusing cameo by Carrot Top. Nevertheless, the movie cost at least $30 million to make and it got scorched by critics and absolutely tanked at the box office, grossing less than one million dollars in theaters.
Alec Baldwin hosted a shortlived MSNBC talk show but he failed to catch on as a left-wing pundit. Baldwin’s MSNBC show “Up Late” lasted a grand total of five episodes before the network fired him for allegedly making an anti-gay remark to a photographer. The first episode of “Up Late” was the show’s most-watched episode and it still didn’t come anywhere close to achieving one million viewers in the United States of America.
During his career as an actor, Baldwin stood out on a few occasions: as a cutthroat salesman in Glengarry Glenn Ross, as Tina Fey’s boss on 30 Rock, and, most notably, as the scout leader who harasses Adam Sandler in the “Canteen Boy” sketch on Saturday Night Live. But Baldwin flopped with his long-running Saturday Night Live impression of President Donald Trump, which was so mean-spirited that even the late comedy legend Norm MacDonald condemned Baldwin’s performance. There was no greater authority on comedy than Norm!