Hollywood’s newest drama: Fake movie props
“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.
Harrison Ford, as Hans Solo, brandishes the DL-44 on the set of “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.” (Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images)
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 Almost as quickly as this unique opportunity was announced, the blaster was quietly withdrawn from the sale that was to be held in June, with all mentions of it scrubbed from the auction houses’ websites and social media.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.
Dorothy’s ruby slippers once worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” are one of the most iconic movie props of all time. This pair, recovered in an FBI sting operation, was later sold at auction for more than $30 million. (Jeff Baenen / Associated Press)
From movie set scraps to valuable artifacts
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.
Debbie Reynolds had once hoped to open a museum to house her collection of more than 4,000 props and costumes. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
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. “When I look at this X-wing, I see so many things. Going to see ‘Star Wars’ for the first time in New York City, down in Times Square with my father. We sat through it twice,” he said.
In recent years, demand for Hollywood collectibles has soared, fueled by the growth of EBay and other online marketplaces. Major auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s have added movie props to their sales portfolio, while specialty auction houses such as Propstore sell only film and TV artifacts. Along with the surging interest, prices for prized pieces have skyrocketed.
Darth Vader’s lightsaber used during the famous fight scene with Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back” recently sold at auction for $3.6 million. In July, one of the three known surviving “Rosebud” sleds from Orson Welles’ 1941 masterpiece “Citizen Kane” was sold for $14.75 million by Heritage Auctions. Seven months earlier, the auction house sold a pair of Dorothy’s ruby slippers for more than $30 million.
Darth Vader’s “hero” light saber from “The Empire Strikes Back” fetched $3.6 million at auction. (Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
The stratospheric prices for movie props, however, have allowed fakes and dubious objects to propagate the market. “As the prices go up, the supply is going up as well, which doesn’t seem like that’s how it should be,” said Henry. “And it’s not because there’s actually more of the original pieces, there’s actually just more fakes or questionable pieces as we like to call it, that are flying into the market.”
A gray market
Unlike the art world, the prop market has never been formally sanctioned and lacks standardized rules to determine the authenticity of an item. “This was always a hobby that flew a little on the kind of gray market side, because none of these things are officially out there,” said collector Ryan Condal, the showrunner of HBO’s “House of the Dragon” who alongside Mandel co-hosts “The Stuff Dreams are Made Of.” “The trading of this stuff has always felt a little bit cheeky.”
Dan Lanigan has been collecting memorabilia for the last 25 years and has amassed over 6,000 items, including Will Ferrell’s “Elf” costume and the beating heart from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” A Chicago-based TV producer, Lanigan hosted the former Disney+ show “Prop Culture” devoted to discussing the minutiae of the studio’s iconic movie artifacts. This year he launched “Cinema Relics: Investigations,” an online series that examines movie props.
“The purpose of what I do with my show is to bring attention to misleading stuff in this industry,” he said. Lanigan speaks from his own experience. In 2019, about a year after the Marvel movie “Avenger’s: Infinity War” was released, Lanigan said that he was offered the character’s Stormbreaker weapon for $45,000 from a dealer that he had bought legitimate props from in the past.
Lanigan agreed, despite red flags. One was that he was not given photographs of the prop to examine. “I took a chance; I normally don’t do that,” he said. “I wanted to believe it was real.” When the enchanted ax hammer was delivered, “it felt clean, like it hadn’t been handled,” Lanigan said. “The details were off at first glance.”
Lanigan had his archivist do a screen match, a method for comparing props frame-by-frame to the film, looking for identical details like scratches. They also analyzed a photograph of original Stormbreakers taken by Russell Bobbitt, who designed the props for the film. They found several inconsistencies. Lanigan’s team said the prop appeared to have been made with rapid prototyping. Their suspicions were confirmed when they found replica 3D printing blueprints sold online. The blueprint model matched many of the characteristics on the prop Lanigan received. “That was the smoking gun,” he said.
The dealer said he refunded the purchase after Lanigan questioned the prop’s authenticity. Lanigan said that he only received a partial refund. “There’s this whole jungle of misinformation,” he said. “The question is, how do you stop this from happening?”
One of the original red sleds, known as Rosebud, made for the 1941 Orson Welles classic “Citizen Kane,” sold for $14.75 million at auction in July. (Heritage Auctions)
Brad Teplitsky, the founder of Toronto-based Studio Auctions, said he spent six weeks vetting the Han Solo blaster and retained five experts after a consignor approached him with the prop last year, only to later acknowledge that “the item was not authentic.”
According to Teplitsky, the consignor said he received the blaster from his father who he claimed had obtained it from William Immerman, an executive at 20th Century Fox, the studio that produced “Star Wars.” Immerman died in 2023. The blaster came with several pages of documentation that purported to detail its provenance and explained its history.
Among the experts Teplitsky sought out was Academy Award-winning set designer Roger Christian, who created the gun. Christian, 81, said that when he held it in his hand he thought, “It could be the original blaster” and signed a letter to the auction house suggesting it was authentic. Christian cited the prop’s paperwork, which detailed how the blaster turned up in Los Angeles during the movie’s publicity tour. “There’s never been any single prop that had such defined documents with all of the relevant people, and it was from 1976,” he said.
Teplitsky said that after Goldin Auctions acquired his company in June, he has since exited the auction business. The ‘mold room special’
Before digital effects and 3D printing, props were largely handmade, improvised affairs fashioned from a pastiche of model kits and any available parts. The alien mother ship used during the filming of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” now exhibited at the Smithsonian, was crafted from model train parts, miniature toys, a collage of other bits and rotating colored lights.
The challenge in authenticating modern props is that the techniques used to produce them make it infinitely easier to create knockoffs. This has led to a growing phenomena many call “the mold room special,” whereby those with access to the shops licensed to manufacture the props use the original casting and molds to make additional objects and at times sell them as “screen-used.”
“Most people won’t know the difference,” said Martin Meunier, a prop master who has worked on movies such as “Coraline” and frequently works with collectors to authenticate artifacts. “It’s pretty great for fakes or forgeries because it allows you a lot of leeway. And for somebody that’s really smart they will know what people are going to be looking for, they research the materials and screen match it, and they will try to find out a provenance so they can say, ‘I found this, this way.’ They’ll leave breadcrumbs.”
When veteran collector Ryan Hood saw a Mattel hoverboard offered for sale at Julien’s Auctions in December 2023, it aroused his suspicions. The prop first appeared in “Back to the Future 2” when Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, nabbed a little girl’s pink hoverboard to escape from Griff Tannen and his gang.
A favorite among collectors, an estimated 20 to 30 of the “levitating” boards were made during production, some constructed of Styrofoam and others of wood. At auction, they have sold for as much as $500,000. The Mattel hoverboard (the franchise used several models) was a specialty for Hood, a tech investor based in Germany who runs an online resource, yourprops.com, that has 10,000 registered collectors.
A fastidious stickler for details, he has spent years researching hoverboards (he owns two), even having a lab analyze the chemical structure of the materials used. He found it unusual that this was the third time this particular prop had come up for auction in less than a year. When it was first sold at Heritage in December 2022 for $87,500, Hood examined it. It had some “uncommon details” that were interesting, including a cut-in slot in the back, he said, but he concluded it was authentic.
Initially, he thought it might be the same board sold eight months earlier because it had many of the same characteristics. Then Hood decided to compare high-resolution images of the board up for sale a third time with the original and found several “abnormalities.” “It appeared to be a copy of the board that was sold two times previously,” he said.
Hood believed that the one now being sold was a replica, made using a digital scan of the original board. The decals and design features “had been digitally printed, using technology that didn’t exist in the 1980s when the film was made,” he said. Further, he said it appeared some of the scratches seen in the original had been Photoshopped. “They edited the images; this was like a fingerprint.”
Hood shared his findings publicly on a Facebook collectors forum, which The Times reviewed. He also said that he went to Julien’s with his concerns. The auction house enlisted the aid of a hoverboard expert in Los Angeles. He compared an authentic board he owned with the one up for sale and came to the same conclusion as Hood.
“When we put my board under a microscope, you can see that the colors were solid all the way down to the top,” said the expert, who did not want to be named because of the sensitivity over the topic. “But when you looked at the ‘fake’ one, it was made using a dot matrix printer.” “There was no freaking way it came from that century.”
Ultimately, the auction house pulled the hoverboard from the sale. “We do our due diligence and if there is any doubt, we address any questions immediately and bring in consulting experts, such as we did for the Back to the Future Hovercraft, to ensure authenticity, “ said Catherine Williamson, managing director of entertainment for Julien’s Auctions, in a statement.
Most auctions deploy varying levels of vetting and often rely on the consignor to provide the information to ascertain authenticity, chain of title and an object’s history. In many cases, questionable props and outright fakes slip onto the market. The problem, said Lanigan, is “it’s a lot easier just to replicate something and sell a fake as an original, than to try and find an original.”
প্রকাশিত: 2025-10-13 16:00:00
উৎস: www.latimes.com
