Dwayne Johnson — the action star whose production company has made gun-filled films like the “Fast & Furious” spinoff “Hobbs & Shaw” — told Variety last week that the company would no longer use real guns on set.
But it did: As Mr. Baldwin practiced drawing the gun for a scene, it fired a real bullet, law-enforcement officials said, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding its director, Joel Souza.
But some studio executives say that there are times when visual effects are not sufficient, and that some actors struggle to make fake weapons that cannot even fire blanks appear convincing.
And the film’s first assistant director, Dave Halls, told a detective investigating the case that he should have checked the gun more thoroughly before Mr. Baldwin handled it, according to an affidavit.
Stephen Lighthill, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers and one of the prominent signatories of the statement — first reported by Variety — pledging to avoid operational firearms on sets, said that there had not been a wide-scale conversation around what the industry standard should be before the “Rust” shooting.
In California, a Democratic state senator who represents Silicon Valley, Dave Cortese, has been drafting legislation that would ban operational firearms from sets, which he said would effectively also ban blanks.
Another legislative approach that is being considered, Mr. Cortese said, is a restriction on certain kinds of blanks.
Michael Sabo, who was propmaster on “The Wire” and oversaw the use of operational guns on the set, said he thinks nonfunctional guns would appear fake to viewers.