Imaginary Worlds - Hero Props vs. Fake Props

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Imagine walking into your living room, and alongside your couch is a prop from one of your favorite childhood movies. Sure, it was costly but this is a piece of pop culture history, and it's right here in your home. Now imagine you found out that prop was a fake. I talk with prop collectors Tiana Armstrong, Wesley Cannon, prop appraiser Laura Woolley, prop maker Ross MacDonald, and museum curator Jacob MacMurray about the dark web of swindlers and forgers who prey on sci-fi fantasy fans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. Tiana Armstrong co-runs a company called Hero Prop. They buy and sell props to collectors so that she can afford the props that she wants for herself. Her personal collection includes props from Alien, Gremlins, Jaws, and a lot of Star Wars stuff. I've got an Obii-wan uh lightsaber um i think one of my fave pieces is my jaw i've got a jaw from episode two and then i have tauntaun from

empire strikes back and tauntaun is just absolutely amazing and when you think about it i can walk up and i can touch him and when i think about both han solo and luke being right here with that tauntaun it gives me chills okay you can't see me but the minute you said tauntaun my mouth dropped open and opened it from that point on yeah so where where is the tauntaun exactly? Like what else is, is it like, what's the room that these, that these dishes are in?

It's pretty much, the props are everywhere. I keep them out of the guest rooms. They're not in the bedrooms, but in the living room area and in the dining room. Wait, so where's the tauntaun in your, what room is it in?

The living room. Wow. See, I where's the tauntaun in here? What room is it in? The living room. Wow. See, I was imagining this sort of extra garage or something. Oh, so it's in the living room. That is wild. And the alien. It's, you know, the pool table is in between them. In case you can't tell,

I love hearing about movie prop collections. I talked with another collector, Wesley Cannon. His company is called Hollywood History, and he started collecting props when he was serving in Iraq, and he was deployed there for seven years. You know, I started learning that, you know, in the midst of the war and trying to get your, you know, your mind out of that for a little while, you know, movies could kind of wish you away to a different land or whatever, you know, and kind of get your mind out of what you've gotten it on or what it's been in,

kind of helps de-escalate, you know. And at that point is when props became more of purely a passion. Now, he may have been buying props in a war zone, but he wasn't having the props shipped there. He had a business partner back home in North Carolina. And now he has two rooms in his house full of props, from Edward Scissorhands to Nightmare on Elm Street to The Dark Crystal. And he recently bought the book from The NeverEnding Story, which is one of his favorite movies.

What is the secret of this enchanted book? What wonders are hidden within its pages? And that's probably one of my most sentimental items because the guy who played the part, Trey, you is Noah Hathaway. And he is a very close friend of mine and has become a very close friend of mine, almost like family ever since that I got that prop. Wait, so you met Noah Hathaway because you bought that prop? Like that's how you got in contact with him? Actually, it is. He had a friend of his. His friend actually had the book and he was in the process of trying to sell it. And one of the stipulations he said was, you know, as whoever buys this book, Noah wants to stay in contact with him. He wants to know where this book went. I would say probably about four months after that,

somewhere in that time range, we always have like a really, really big Christmas party here. So Noah and I spoke a few times over the phone and we ended up just deciding that he would fly in and visit me and have a really good Christmas with my family. So he stayed here for a week and actually hand delivered the book to me. When you're in the business of movie props, you're in the business of stories. In fact, it's like a Russian doll of stories. There's the story of who made the prop. There's the story of how that prop was used in the movie or TV show. There's the story of what seeing that prop meant to you, whether you were a kid

or if you're an adult just needing a moment of escapism. And now you're making a new story about how you got that prop and where it sits in your house. Now imagine you discover that one of those stories is a lie. The business of prop collecting is booming, but so is the shady underbelly of scammers who create fake props to fool people into giving them tens of thousands of dollars. Collectors are getting better at spotting the fakes, but the forgers are also getting better at making them. And what really bothers me is that these con men are exploiting people who are usually sci-fi fantasy fans, who want to own props because it made them believe in another world. And that yearning to suspend their disbelief also means that they're sometimes willing to suspend suspicion, skepticism, or cynicism. So how do you outsmart the scammers? That's just in a moment.

That's just in a moment. Before we get to the dark side of prop collecting, let's stay in the light for a little bit longer. Now, in my last episode, I talked about how geek culture is transforming the art of burlesque. Movie prop collecting is obviously a very different entity, but it is going through a similar transition. Collecting movie props used to be a rarefied hobby. The internet has changed a lot of that.

But also the boom of sci-fi fantasy movies has created all these unique, otherworldly props that are hot commodities. And the obsessional nature of fan culture is transforming the way we look at props. Jacob McMurray is actually happy about that. He is the director of curatorial affairs at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, and he's always felt that movie props should be celebrated as works of material art or commercial art. At his museum, they have props and costumes from Star Trek, Ghostbusters, The Terminator, all of it behind glass cases given the full museum treatment. There's a lot of resonance and mojo to these pieces.

You know, I mean, these stories are part and parcel of people's lives. You know, they're part of your own personal narrative. I mean, I see every day when we go to the museum, visitors will find that thing that is their passion. And, you know, I've seen people cry in front of artifacts before. I mean, we have Luke's severed hand on display in our Hall of Fame exhibit. And I've seen people have, you know, verklempt emotional moments. These pieces mean a whole lot to people. How did you acquire Luke's severed hand? Was it floating beneath Cloud City?

Yeah, it was. We just happened to have a museum ship flying by underneath and caught it. But that piece is from a lender of ours. And I remember opening up that box for the first time. And you're like, oh, my God, that's Luke's severed hand. And to some people, it's sort of like a severed hand. It's kind of gruesome. But it's like, no, that's Luke's severed hand. And to some people, it's sort of like a severed hand. It's kind of gruesome, but it's like, no, it's Luke's severed hand. And the studios are getting in on the act. Going back 10, 15 years ago, none of the studios really cared about, you know, what happened to the

props afterwards because there really wasn't, you know, as much of an aftermarket for that stuff. But I think the studios have gotten really savvy now where they're either keeping all of that stuff for their own kind of exhibitions and things like that, or they have their own auctions where they can make money off of that. And that is changing what ends up in auction catalogs. Laura Woolley is an appraiser. You may have seen her on the PBS series Antique Roadshow. She specializes in appraising pop cultural artifacts. What makes people sit up and take it very seriously are all of the seven-figure sales that we've had in the last five years. Legitimacy is fantastic. Coming from a time

when I remember standing on an elevator with one of the higher level executives at Sotheby's and them looking over and saying, we could hire monkeys to do what you do. That's how they looked at our world of pop culture stuff. So that's kind of how they've always looked at us at the major brick and mortar houses. And now that you have people spending multiple millions of dollars on key props, I don't think they're laughing at the business anymore. Not after Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet was auctioned off for $5 million. And there's been a trickle down effect to online sales where Wesley Cannon gets most of his props. sales, where Wesley Cannon gets most of his props. I remember I was offered a Ewok mask from The Return of the Jedi. And I remember at the time I was offered it, it was like 18 or 20 grand. And, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I was like, oh, my God, you know, there's no way

in the world. Now I'm like kicking myself, you know, every day because that's like an $80,000, $100,000 item. The sci-fi fantasy boom has even raised the prices of set decorations, which used to be the bottom of the barrel for collectors. That's not true necessarily with sci-fi because in sci-fi you're always creating new worlds, most often futuristic. And so you can't decorate a room in a house like you would on a sitcom and it's not

just normal everyday objects. And like the set deck actually takes on a bit more character. And I feel like it's more identifiable. For instance, a woman came into Antiques Roadshow in New Orleans and had a painting that was hanging on the wall of Rick Decker's apartment Blade Runner. And you can see it when he's actually kissing her. In the scene, you see this painting right behind their head. And pretty much anything from Decker's apartment sells for a ton of money. You know on Antique Roadshow, when someone like Laura tells you if your item is authentic,

the word they often use is provenance. In other words, what is the backstory behind this thing? Auction houses are well-versed in the provenance of fine art. But Tiana says they don't always have the same expertise when it comes to evaluating movie props. Recently, the auction house Bonhams had made headlines because they acquired a rare, fully intact Darth Vader costume that was supposedly screen used on The Empire Strikes Back. It was stated as used and then, you know, then the description changed to, well, possibly it was a touring version, okay? And ultimately they removed the Darth Vader costume completely, you know, from the auction. And this was a piece, the first estimates were one to two million

dollars. And when they changed the estimate, when they changed the description, then suddenly And this was a piece, the first estimates were $1 to $2 million. And when they changed the estimate, when they changed the description, then suddenly the estimate was going to be $500,000 to $1 million. Now, can you imagine if someone spent over $2 million on a costume that wasn't what it was described to be. And at the level of online collectors, fraudulent props are rampant. It should be no surprise given how much demand there is for these items and how much people are willing to pay for them. Tiana Armstrong once bought a gremlin from somebody that she trusted. And she is pretty savvy when it comes to buying props. And when the items arrived, I immediately knew.

Number one, I have Gremlins in my collection, and this didn't look anything like any Gremlin that I'd ever seen. It certainly wasn't anything that came out of Rick Baker's workshop. And then the dress, the dress was wrong. It didn't match anything on screen. The buttons were wrong. The collar, you know, was wrong. Didn't match anything on screen. The buttons were wrong. The collar, you know, was off. And when I contacted the seller, that's when I realized that the company had sold. So this was an entirely different person that I thought that I didn't realize

that I was dealing with. I was really worried because, you know, I had spent thousands of dollars. I mean, thousands. And he said to return the items. And if he was happy with the condition they were in, he would do a refund. Well, luckily, I realized that I'd put it on my Amex. So I immediately contacted Amex. I mean, immediately got my refund and sent him his items back. And it was really a gut-wrenching experience. You know, you worry because it's a lot of money. And I hate to think, you know, there's a lot of people that this happens to. There are a lot of ways that forgers can fool people.

They can show you a picture of a prop that's inaccurate. That's what happened with Tiana and her gremlin. Another thing they often do is get a hold of a stunt prop and claim it was a hero prop. Now, the term hero prop refers to any prop that was used in a close-up. For instance, the hero prop of Thor's original hammer is made of high-carbon steel alloy. It has all these intricate carvings, and it was auctioned off for about $50,000. The stunt prop that he threw around was less detailed. It was made of foam rubber and goes for about $5,000.

Now, most collectors would prefer the hero prop if they can afford it. And usually they can afford the smaller ones if it's like a batarang or a machete. But Tiana feels the opposite. I would rather have a stunt than a hero beauty piece because, you know, for all I know, the actor never even held the hero piece. They, you know, they just zoomed in on it on a close-up. Yeah, I want the stunt.

I want what he was running around the set with. If an actor held a prop on screen, it takes on a magical quality that raises the price enormously. Laura says the same thing is true for costumes, but costumes can be manipulated. Anytime you have uniforms, and many sci-fi films do, because you have people who are part of a unified group wearing uniforms, you know, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, they're all in similar clothing. And so, you know, if there's 300 background costumes made, you know, the V costumes that are still floating around,

you might suddenly upgrade the ranking patches on it and add a name for an actor that maybe isn't the hero. You're not going to gun for the biggest guy. Like you could buy an old red shirt from Star Trek, sew on a few extra stripes and say, this was worn by Scotty. In fact, props from the original Star Trek are the easiest to fake because they had such a low budget back then, so everything had to be made cheaply. So how does all this affect the people that make props? A few of them have turned to the dark side. I read in The Hollywood Reporter that some prop designers are secretly making extra props from the original molds, claiming that they were screen used.

And unless you've got the inventory list from that movie, who's going to know? But for the majority of honest prop makers, dealing with this black market can be a total drain. Ross McDonald makes props out of his house in Connecticut. As an indie prop designer, he owns the designs of his props and then sells them to the studio. For instance, he designed the Book of Secrets for National Treasure 2. Disney owns the prop that Nicolas Cage held in the movie. But during the production, Ross made some extra copies as backups. He later sold them at a discount.

He can also make an exact replica, which he sells to collectors at an even lower price. In the Book of Secrets, I have samples of almost every president's writing, just because we did not know how this thing was going to be used. The Book of Secrets became a hot commodity because it's so intricate. It's leather-bound and packed with all these authentic looking documents from the Kennedy assassination to alien autopsies. I don't do blank pages ever in prop books. And I do as many pages as I can because there's also something that a prop master friend of mine calls the actor factor. You just really don't know in advance, no matter what

it says in the script, you don't know in advance exactly what's going to happen on set. And if you give an actor, and I've actually seen this happen, if you give an actor a prop book that has blank pages, they're disappointed too. They'll sort of pick it up and flip through it and go, oh, they want stuff to be real as possible. And they will often complain that if something has blank pages or, you know, is missing something. Look at that. Missing plank from the White House. Wow. Here's the final entry by President Coolidge.

1924, I found a plank in secret desk compartment. Plank photographed and then destroyed. It took him three months to make the Book of Secrets. He also made a John Wilkes Booth diary for the film. And so when he makes replicas of these for the fans, it is just as time-consuming as it was to make the originals. He's happy to do it, but then he found out one of his clients was a scammer. There was a case of a guy who claimed to have a screen-used John Wilkes Booth diary from National Treasure 2 that he was offering for sale. And his story was that he and I were friends and that I had sold him a screen-used copy. I had actually sold him a replica copy that I made for him. We were not friends. We'd communicated by email for the transaction, but that was basically it. So he was trying to resell his diary as a screen used diary.

Does that affect your business in terms of people contact you, ask for replicas, and then they turn around and lie and lie? I mean, how do you feel about that? When you find out something like that, like when you have someone buy a prop from you, there is a kind of an introductory process where you get to know the person a little bit. And then to find out later from somebody else that they've turned around and done something really sleazy behind your back, you know, it's kind of like finding out your girlfriend cheated on you or something. It's a bit of a shock. And I've had some really kind of sleazy transactions. I had a guy who called me, or actually, sorry, emailed me and said that he was from the Make-A-Wish Foundation and that he wanted to—that a

child who was dying of cancer, the child's last wish was to have a book of secrets and a John Wilkes Booth diary and would I consider donating one. So I did some research on him, and it didn't seem really 100% above board. some research on him and it didn't seem really 100% above board. So I told him that I would consider giving him a discount if he would send me an official request on the letterhead. Then I got an explanation from him that it wasn't actually the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It was a similar thing. The name kind of changed and it was an unofficial group that was doctors and nurses at this hospital out in Los Angeles who were doing this for children in the cancer ward. He did some digging.

Turns out the guy was not listed on the hospital staff. The address of this unofficial Make-A-Wish Foundation was just an apartment building in Los Angeles. He actually looked it up on Google Earth. Ross eventually tracked this guy down to a prop collecting site called the RPF. And Ross discovered people were complaining about this guy because they had paid him for props, but he never delivered them. At some point, the guy actually responded angrily, saying that he had been unable to respond. He was really enraged at everyone, that they were doubting him, that he had a sick relative who was dying of cancer and that he was taking care of her and that he would, you know, fulfill their orders whenever he had the time.

Ross actually helped get this guy banned from the RPF website. But banning these guys is like whack-a-mole. They always show up somewhere else. So what are some techniques for catching fakes before you click the buy button? Well, for starters, you have to be willing to play detective. Wesley Cannon says, eBay now, I would almost tell everybody, until you have a few years under your belt,

if you don't have enough time under your belt to where you can get on eBay and not have to ask those questions, I wouldn't buy anything on eBay. But even for a guy like him who's been in this business for over 10 years, investigating the provenance of a prop can be tricky. You know, if this person has a contact that they're tight with, and then you reach out to that contact and you say, hey, I'm getting offered this, can you give me your word that it's authentic? You have to be kind of careful and kind of walk on thin ice because if that person has a relationship with this person and you're calling them up,

then you're doing a number of things. One, you're questioning the person that's trying to sell it to you so they get defensive. And then the person that's offering it to you could get mad thinking that you're trying to backdoor. Laura Woolley actually asks people for their ID to prove that they worked on the lot when the production was made. I hate to say it, but you kind of have to be a little bit of an asshole. You have to be a bit of a skeptic and really question people. And it's not because, you know, you're just a cynical person. It's because everyone in this business is guilty until proven innocent. And unless you can prove and show me paperwork to back up everything you're telling me, it's really difficult to believe it. Another technique is called screen matching,

which is to look really, really carefully at the prop from the original TV show or movie to make sure it looks exactly like the thing you're about to buy. But Tiana says that can be misleading too, especially with an older prop. Like if the laser rifle you want to buy looks exactly like it did on Buck Rogers in the 25th century, it really shouldn't. Say a piece that's 40 years old and it's foam latex. Well, if it's a 40-year old piece of foam latex, it should be pretty much crumbling, you know, rotting. I mean, it should just be crispy crumbles. So if you show me a piece that's 40 years old and it's in relatively spongy, nice condition, there's no way. And here is another tip off. Foragers will often use modern materials that were not invented or just not widely used when those props were made.

For example, Laura says it's common to see Superman costumes that were allegedly worn by Christopher Reeve in 1978, except they're made of spandex. The spandex craze did not kick off until the 1980s. So they used a material that would kind of spring to form that was custom loomed on a loom that was in Germany. And it creates a very particular stitch pattern when you do a super zoom on the actual fabric itself. And that was the first thing that a lot of the fakes had wrong. Like it wasn't clearly the right pattern of stitching in the fabric itself. And when you sort of look at the inside of a Superman costume and how it was stitched in the bottom,

there's a part of me that thinks, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to see that. I don't want to just see it and think of it as just a piece of clothing that somebody stitched together. Yeah, I hear you. And sadly, that is one of the parts of this business that makes it a business,

is that it's wonderful to just look at it and go, oh, it's shiny and pretty and cool. But when you start tearing these tearing into these things and looking inside and kind of just putting the whole I still believe he can fly on the sidebar over here. But I need to figure out if this was really worn by him. Good evening, Miss Lane. Hi. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you have plans this evening? The S logo on the chest, cover yours if you don't want to hear this because it ruins everything. But that is constructed of, you know, different pieces of fabric, the yellow, the red, and then those are all inset in the blue.

Well, the curve and shape of that S is so hard to get. And when you put something through a sewing machine, it actually, if you very slightly are off, it kind of warps the shape of the S slightly. It's really not easy to do. And I think that's one of the hardest things for them to fake. But when you see the professional ones that were done,

they're so perfect and they're so precise. And it's so obvious that it's someone who's very skilled creating this and only the most highly skilled people make it in this business. They should look like they're very professionally done, not like some guy in his garage. Researching this episode has actually changed

the way that I watch movies and TV shows. Like recently, I was watching Good Omens on Amazon. It's a great show, by the way. And there's a really important book of prophecies that all the characters are trying to get a hold of. And suddenly it occurred to me, that's a really cool prop. Somebody's going to buy that. Someone's going to have that in their house. I mean, I'm sure it's way, way beyond my price range, but theoretically, I could own that book. I mean, that's wild. But then when I often do see a prop in real life, it's kind of a letdown. I mean,

you go through all this effort to make sure it's the real thing, the real thing from a make-believe world, and then you see it up close, and it's made from everyday materials. It clearly was not forged in Middle Earth or some other planet. And some of the old props from my childhood have not aged very well. The foam rubber is crumbling. You can see the wires underneath. And if you see these props in somebody's house or in a museum, they're totally out of context. They're surrounded by all these other mundane things in the real world. It's like you're staring straight into the face of disbelief. But maybe that's the point. That disconnect of seeing something you saw in a fantasy world right there in front of you

makes real life disappear for just a moment. It's like a magic trick you can pull on yourself over and over again. You know, the first time we saw these films, we were so wide-eyed and innocent and happy to go along for the ride into the world of make-believe. And I think as you grow up and, you know, life starts to chip away at you and you become slightly more cynical, it's very difficult to kind of recapture that childlike innocence of seeing these things for the first time. You just wish you could watch some of the films as they're coming out now with the eyes of a child and not the critical eye that we have as adults, where we can't really watch some of the films as they're coming out now with the eyes of a child and not the critical eye that we have as adults where we can't really overlook some of the issues that these films have had. But I feel like these pieces kind of are a little bit like a time travel.

They're a little bit of a transporter that take you back to a time when you first were introduced to these franchises and they meant everything to you. And it was like this wonderful world of make-believe. And for some people, having that feeling is worth any price. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Laura Woolley, Wesley Cannon, Ross McDonald, Jacob McMurray, and Tiana Armstrong, who says don't let all this talk about forgeries turn you off. She runs a Facebook group for people who want to buy props they don't have to mortgage their

house to afford. I actually saw Mulder's tie from the X-Files for sale in her group, and it was not expensive. I mean, people have had real props for sale in our group for $10, $20. So don't think that you can't afford it. And if you're looking for, you know, a special gift for someone, you know, for that person who has everything, well, trust me, they may think they have everything. But, you know, find them something from one of their favorite movies. It's just, it's fun.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman, who, with a little help from Tiana, bought a prop replica from Deep Space Nine that Stephanie gave to her husband on his birthday. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweeted emalinski and imagineworldspod. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. I have a slideshow of movie props, including Ross McDonald's Book of Secrets on the show's Instagram page. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.