MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT. PROPPING UP POTUS

Los Angeles’s big prop shops can supply a thousand films and TV shows a year, outfitting crime procedurals to Bible epics with satchels, spears, and pogo sticks.

- —Alex Carp

This spring, a manager at such a shop got a request for help with a different kind of production.

“One of our salespeople picked up a cold call,” a firm manager said recently. The unknown dialer wanted to equip sixteen hundred soldiers in the style of every major U.S. war. “The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf. The helmets, the weapons, everything they're carrying,” the manager said. The caller wanted it in three weeks, in Washington, D.C. “We were sort of treating it as a believe-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing,” the manager went on. Nevertheless, four of his staffers were soon in the nation’s capital, acting as weapons specialists and prop masters at Donald Trump's June 14th birthday parade. “At first, we were just told it was the Army’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,” the manager said. “Which, objectively, it was.” Then the staff realized that they were outfitting the Presidential birthday spectacle.