Top Props: Get to know the unsung heroes behind the most memorable things in your favorite movies | film

TIt is red and blue grains in the matrix. Bud sled in Citizen Kane. The contents of Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase in Pulp Fiction are unknown. The (real) severed horse head in The Godfather. Every sword, gun, wand, and lightsaber brandished by an actor on screen or stage. What do these elements have in common? Nothing, except that it’s a small sample of the dizzying array of objects, from the iconic to the instantly forgotten, known as props — or, to use their official name, “props.”

Props, properly defined, are anything used in a performance that is not part of the set or costume. Sourcing or manufacturing them is the job of a team supervised by a prop master; The term is gender neutral, although sometimes hearing the phrase “prop mistress” sounds primitive. It’s a huge task, but it doesn’t get a lot of attention. “It’s a good idea to ask about props, because they’re not really recognized,” says Goodman, a TV props expert in Los Angeles.

When Mann worked on the children’s comedy show Pee-wee’s Playhouse in the 1980s, she received a call from the show’s star, Paul Reubens, who said he would nominate her for an Emmy. Only after Mann told her mother — and promised to thank her if she won — did Robbins call to say he couldn’t nominate her “because there’s no category for you.” None yet. And while the Academy Awards in recent years have sought to celebrate behind-the-scenes efforts with new awards for actors and stunts, the mastery of props remains unrewarded.

Perhaps the reason is a feeling that the job is overly logistical, or unspecialized. There is a lot of overlap with the fashion and fashion design departments. But the work of a prop master is deeply creative: it is necessary to create an imaginary world. The real world, after all, is full of things that we constantly interact with (or ignore); Props are what turn the staged set into a living environment. By nature, successful supporting work often blends into the background, but when something goes wrong — the infamous fake plastic baby in the 2014 war drama American Sniper, for example — viewers take notice. The suspension of disbelief is broken. “If you watch a movie about baseball, you wouldn’t have anything without the bats, balls and gloves,” Mann says. “What should I do? I’m carrying life.”

Helps to have a good imagination. Not everything can be bought or rented from a house, and this is especially true for genres like science fiction and fantasy. That’s what appeals to Jamie Wilkinson, a props master whose credits include Wicked and the final installments of Star Wars. “I prefer to create new, crazy, global things,” he says.

For each job, Wilkinson assembles a crew of prop makers – up to 100 – as well as specialists, depending on the needs of the story (he called in a chocolatier for Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka film). His films often rely heavily on special effects, although he has found that directors like to use a real prop: “If the actors can physically see the magic happening in front of them, you get a different response.”

Special attention is paid to “hero props”: key pieces that get a lot of camera time, such as the broomstick carried by Elphaba, Wicked’s green-faced hero. “We probably created 30 different designs,” Wilkinson says. The process took about 20 weeks, starting with Wilkinson’s drawings, a selection of which were then sculpted in clay; Early ideas included a simple “brutalist” piece of raw wood. The final design, with its gnarled column of twisted roots, was chosen in close consultation with Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba; Wilkinson told me that actors often have a good instinct about what props are appropriate for their characters.

Just as a lot of creative work goes into small screen projects. Katherine Miller was the support director for Severance, a dystopian series about a cultural corporation called Lumon Industries. All of Lumon’s office equipment was custom-made to fit the gallery’s retro-futuristic aesthetic. “We wanted to go back to a time when offices were seen as a place of pride,” Miller explains, but adding a “cold, hard edge.”

For the computers, Miller’s team relied on the design of the Data General Dasher, a line of terminals dating back to the 1970s. The keyboards are missing the escape key – the “symbol” of the predicament of the Lomon workers. Miller was happy when fans on Reddit discovered these details. “Any time I can give a metaphor to something, it just helps enhance the story we’re telling,” she says. Cleverly designed props can do more than simply embellish the narrative; They can drive it. The hardest part of the job? Making manufactured devices appear to function normally on screen, which is sometimes done using remote controls – is one of the many tasks the props team will oversee during filming.

Stories set in the real world present their own difficulties – authenticity is not as easy to achieve as it seems. Miller told me that productions set in the recent past are the most difficult: things aren’t old enough to be collectible, and aren’t recent enough to buy off the shelf. Critical audiences are also more likely to notice outdated errors, such as a phone or computer model released years after the events depicted. For the 2019 thriller Uncut Gems, set in 2012, she struggled to source period-appropriate iPhones and laptops: “Sometimes we have to literally recreate phones or retrofit a new laptop with an old, old case.” The film’s most eye-catching prop of all was made entirely from scratch: a gold Furby diamond-encrusted necklace created with the help of a jewelry artist.

For historical projects, prop professors need to familiarize themselves with the facts. “I love the challenge of research,” says Vancouver-based Dean Eilertson, who considers himself a “research methods guru.” When he joined the drama series Shogun, set in 17th-century Japan, he worked with a historical consultant to learn about the feudal culture of the period. For high-budget productions, he employs three full-time buyers in Japan. They bought almost everything antique, from polished chests to samurai horse saddles.

Then there were samurai swords, required not only for Cast but for hundreds of background add-ons. “When you get your hands on a real Japanese sword, it’s heavy,” Eilertson explains — not to mention dangerous. When it comes to guns, the stakes can’t be higher, a lesson tragically demonstrated by the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halina Hutchins in 2021, when a live round was fired from a prop gun used by Alec Baldwin on the set of Rust. (The prop master, a 24-year-old with few industry credits, signed a cooperation agreement to avoid prosecution. Charges against Baldwin were dropped, while the assistant director and armorer received felony convictions.) In Shogun, most of the swords we see are bamboo replicas. On screen, you can’t tell the difference.

That’s another thing about props: they forever blur the line between real and fake. There are many reasons for this: budget, health and safety, and availability. More often than not, prop masters resort to tried-and-true solutions: synthetic gemstones, retractable needles, polystyrene-filled cakes, and “chocolate” bars made of resin (the real thing would melt very quickly in the actor’s hands).

Counterfeiting is not necessarily cheap. Retired prop master Barry Wilkinson (Jamie Wilkinson’s father) remembers handling the famous Heart of the Ocean necklace worn by Kate Winslet in Titanic, which was designed by royal jewelers Asprey & Garrard. Her heart-shaped diamonds were actually blue cubic zirconia, but the handcrafted necklace was still expensive. Wilkinson Sr. personally transported the prop from Piccadilly to the film’s location in Canada for director James Cameron’s approval – although “because it cost so much, we couldn’t change it”. Fortunately, Cameron “loved it.”

Other times, prop masters get creative. Mann once went to a pet store to buy a dog bone, wrapped it in fondant and a layer of cheese, to mimic a raw chicken thigh that a zombie had eaten and discovered to taste like human flesh. I recently worked with an actor who was lactose intolerant to a powder commonly used to mimic cocaine. Coconut milk powder turned out to be too oily, so they settled on the sweetener sorbitol ground with a pepper mill.

The results can be very convincing. One of the strangest incidents of Eilertsson’s career occurred while filming the 2014 Godzilla reboot. Two replicas of nuclear missiles were manufactured, He delved into research, even consulting a retired nuclear scientist. In the film, weapons are placed on a train to be used in an attempt to destroy a newly discovered giant parasitic monster.

Even though it is set in the California transportation scene It was actually shot on Vancouver Island, where the train was headed toward a Canadian military base. It so happened that at that time, news stories were circulating about nuclear threats from North Korea and the US response. And then, Eilertson says, “A Russian satellite takes a picture of our group and sends it to North Korea. And all of a sudden, the phones stop working, because now there seems to be evidence that the United States is moving missiles on Canadian soil. And it was like: ‘Oh my God, that’s not what happened.’” “It’s a movie set.”

The on-screen props have a way of turning it off too. Following the release of Titanic, Asprey created an original version of her ruby ​​and diamond necklace, which Celine Dion wore to the Academy Awards. Elphaba brooms can be purchased online, with handmade versions on Etsy. For prop masters, watching their creations take on new life can be fulfilling – a rare moment of appreciation for their work.

But recently they came up with a more specific reward. In September 2024, the US-based Property Masters Guild (which was founded three years earlier to provide training and education, in part to help avert tragedies such as Hutchins’ death) inaugurated its annual MacGuffin Film and Television Awards. The event is named after Hitchcock’s device for something — $40,000 in Psycho, government secrets on microfilm in North By Northwest — with no other purpose than to advance the plot.

That first year, Mann, after decades of Emmy disappointment, was delighted to receive a MacGuffin for her work on the historical drama Chemistry Lessons. “This award has touched a deep part of my heart,” she says, not least because winners are chosen by their peers, who understand better than anyone how important this job is. Perhaps the rest of the industry will take notice now.