Who Puts Guns In The Movies?

As the gun debate divides America, we’re unified in our love for movie heroes who pack heat. We look at how firearms end up on-screen and find out whose finger is on the trigger.

- Adam Skolnick

“So, are you ready to fire a machine gun?”

In reply, I smile. 

My anticipation has been building for more than an hour—ever since the tour began in the revolver room, a place that would feel familiar to any policeman from the 1970s (like, say, Dirty Harry Callahan). Larry Zanoff, a former soldier in the Israeli military and one of Hollywood’s most sought-after armorers, guides me from the revolver room to the Western room, where I gawk at Gatling guns, lever-action rifles and double-barreled shotguns, brand-new and gleaming, racked floor to ceiling in perfect order by year and manufacturer.

“There’s a misconception that the guns people see in movies are fake,” Zanoff says. “Most of these are reproductions, but they’re real.”

Soon I’m fingering a German Luger from World War I, cradling a Japanese matchlock rifle from the 1500s and, later, shamelessly posing with a vintage 18th century dueling pistol. But the highlight of my tour through Hollywood’s biggest armory, where some 16,000 weapons are stored in six rooms, is the NFA room—named for the 1934 National Firearms Act, which placed strict regulations on machine guns in the Al Capone heyday of bootleggers, bank robbers and public gangland hits. On display here are grenade launchers, mortar tubes, .50-caliber machine guns, sniper rifles and racks of assault weapons, including— ironically—dozens of semiautomatic AR-15s.