Well, let’s look at that for an instant. With a single action revolver, for the actor to be the last line of defense, he is going to have to spin the chamber past the loading gate on every cartridge. If he does that, how is the prop man going to line up the correct cylinder as you say? For an actor who is most likely a non gun guy, he is going to get the pistol, inexpertly check it, then probably have to hand it back to the prop guy again to get it right before shooting the scene.
In a normal situation, the first tell on a revolver is seeing the rims at the end of the cylinder. But that wouldn’t work with dummy rounds. So now your back to having the actor spin the cylinder. Maybe he looks at five chambers and not six. Maybe he is tired and missed the one.
The actor could load the gun with the prop man's assistance in lining up the cylinders. That way there'd be 2 sets of eyes on each cartridge too.
The point is that gun handling in movies is inherently unsafe. You’re going to be doing things that an actual gun owner would never do. And the one thing that probably just isn’t accounted for on a professional movie set is an ACTUAL live round. Everything I’ve see on has the movie people referring to a blank as a “live round”. This was apparently a real 44-40 cartridge. How does that even happen? Why was there a live round within a mile of this set? That’s going to be outside of the experience of every actor in Hollywood on a movie set. It isn’t even something most of them would even contemplate. A hot blank, yeah, maybe. But a live round mixed in with some dummies? Yeah, no.
And for everyone who is on here saying that they would never point a real firearm at someone even with blanks, I’m just going to assume and know you are lying if you’ve been in the Army within the last forty years or so.
Amen to all of that!!
I understand it would have taken extra time to set up, but couldn't the camera have been remotely operated? For rehearsal, just take a few stills? Alec could have backed up to an "X" in the dust that was pre-positioned.
