I’m pretty sure it’s not just Hollywood, I’ve seen old drawings and paintings of people in battle or duels and they always only use one hand to aim and fire pistols, even after multishot revolvers and pistols are developed.
Why? It’s not like using two hands only became more supportive and stable after 1910.
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One thing that wasn’t mentioned is simply heritage.
People do a lot of things the way they did it previously. Pistol duels were just replacements of sword duels. They kept the ceremony and all the general stand and stuff. They didn’t try all the possible ways of holding guns and selected one on the logical basis. Maybe the earliest pistols didn’t even allow holding them with two hands, but as they evolved, nobody checked each time a new gun came out whether it’s better now to hold differently.
It’s very similar to things like our computer keyboards that is a heritage of mechanical typewriter keyboard that has some relevant reasons for the “qwert” layout. There were alternative mechanic typewriter layouts that didn’t work out and there are alternative layouts today that *would* work but nobody wants to change anymore. Simply because nobody is trying 5 different keyboard layouts when buying a computer and chooses on the logical basis. So nowadays even your phone is “qwert” because of typewriters.
Doing things differently often requires an inventing mind who dares to think out of the box and says why not trying this way.
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