Fake movie props spark major controversy in Hollywood

Stacy Perman, Tribune News Service

“Star Wars” fans thought they’d been shot into hyperspace. Goldin and Studios memorabilia auction houses announced in March that an original and the only fully intact Han Solo DL-44 blaster — the very one wielded by the smuggler played by Harrison Ford in “Episode IV — A New Hope” — would be going on the block. Movie prop collectors are an obsessive lot, and for the passionate subset devoted to “Star Wars” memorabilia, the news was a watershed moment. There were possibly three guns made for the 1977 film, adapted from an antique German Mauser C96, with a flash hider, scope and other details added on, that gave it its distinctive space cowboy look.

Two of the prop guns were known to have been disassembled and returned to Bapty’s, the weapons prop rental shop in London. Over the years, stories surfaced that a possible third blaster existed, somewhere in the universe. The movie relic that was said to come with “impeccable documentary provenance” and authenticated by experts was expected to fetch as much as $3 million. Almost immediately, however, the blaster came under fire. Fervid collectors slavishly examined photos of the modified Mauser, sharing their findings of discrepancies between the prop for sale and the blaster seen on film across online forums. Then a sleuth traced the gun’s serial number and discovered the Mauser had been sold online years earlier and it appeared to have been later modified to resemble the prop.

Almost as quickly as this unique opportunity was announced, the blaster was quietly withdrawn from the sale that was to be held in June, with all mentions of it scrubbed from the auction houses’ websites and social media. From Dorothy’s ruby slippers in “The Wizard of Oz” to Harry Potter wands, props from iconic films are earning big dollars at both auction and private sales — in some cases on par with rare wine, Swiss watches and fine art. But as prices for these objects have surged, so have questions about their authenticity.

Many props today are outsourced to shops that have industrialized the craft with 3D printing technology that has made it much easier to produce knockoffs. “The second the money got real, so did the fakes,” said David Mandel, a major prop collector and the former showrunner of “Veep” and a writer and producer on such shows as “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Mandel, who co-hosts a podcast about Hollywood memorabilia called “The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of,” recently devoted an entire episode to bogus props.

In cinema’s early days, props were seen as the byproduct of filmmaking without any intrinsic value that often ended up in dumpsters. The painted backdrop of the Emerald City used in the beloved 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz” was discovered decades later by a salvage crew hired to remove trash stored on a studio backlot. For years, crew members and production staffers often fished such objects out of the trash or storage as keepsakes.

Humphrey Bogart’s trench coat from “Casablanca” and countless other important film artifacts were said to be preserved because makeup artists and electricians took them home as souvenirs. Props went from the scrap heap of history to history, literally, in 1970 when MGM’s then-president, James Aubrey Jr., known as the “Smiling Cobra,” held a fire sale, auctioning off hundreds of thousands of costumes and props — nearly the entire archive — to generate revenue for the struggling studio. On the block went everything from the wedding gown Elizabeth Taylor wore in 1950’s “Father of the Bride,” to the time machine from the 1960 film of the same name. Although the auction only brought in $1.5 million for MGM, it sparked the public’s fascination for film memorabilia while creating a new collectibles market.

Among the most celebrated collectors was actor Debbie Reynolds, who assembled 4,000 items spanning the history of Hollywood that included Charlie Chaplin’s bowler hat. But with her dream of opening a museum dashed, in 2011 she began auctioning off her prized collection, eventually netting more than $30 million. Most collectors are hardcore movie fans, many of whom began buying action figures of the movies they loved as children.

“There’s something so Hollywood about collecting props,” said Jason Henry, a television producer and the chief operating officer of Cinema Relics, which produces an online series on movie memorabilia. “It’s all make-believe and it’s all magic. And what you’re ultimately buying in so many ways is a story.”

Mandel is a prolific collector of movie props, largely from the original “Star Wars” trilogy.

“It’s pure nostalgia,” Mandel says. “We’re collecting the memories, and the best way we can do it is to own the pieces.” Two years ago, Mandel purchased a miniature X-wing, one of four “hero” models from the 1977 “Star Wars” movie used during close-ups, at an auction for $3.1 million.