Fake movie props spark major controversy in Hollywood

"Star Wars" fans thought they'd been shot into hyperspace.

- Stacy Perman, Tribune News Service

Debbie Reynolds

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. 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.