HOLLYWOOD'S PROP SECRETS

HISTORY FOR HIRE HAS HELPED FILMMAKERS RECREATE THE PAST, BUT ITS DAYS MAY BE NUMBERED

- STORY: MATT STEVENS / NYT

When the Netflix series Wednesday needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far.

A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing taller than 2.5m with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories, too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)

The company's 3,066m² warehouse is like the film and television industry's treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in A Complete Unknown, luggage from Titanic, a black baby carriage from The Addams Family.

Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the 40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the 50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the 60s, a pay phone from the 70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the 80s.

History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.

“People just don’t realise how valuable a business like that is to help support the look of a film,” said Nancy Haigh, a set decorator who found everything from a retro can of pork-and-beans to a 1 tonne studio crane there for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, for which she won an Oscar. “But it's because people like them exist that your moviegoing experience has such life to it.”

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