AMERICAN PROP HOUSE IN DANGER OF GETTING THE CHOP

When the Netflix series Wednesday (2022 to present) needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far.

- Matt Stevens

LOS ANGELES - A North Hollywood prop house called History For Hire had one available, standing taller than 2.4m with a suitably menacing blade.

The company's 33,000 sq ft 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 American-French actor Timothee Chalamet used in A Complete Unknown (2024) and luggage from Titanic (1997).

Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the 1940s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the 1950s, a hairdryer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the 1960s, a pay phone from the 1970s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the 1980s.

History For Hire, which married couple 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 set decorator Nancy Haigh, who found everything from a retro can of pork-and-beans to a one-tonne studio crane there for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019), for which she won an Oscar. "But it's because people like them exist that your movie-going experience has such life to it."

When Good Night, And Good Luck (2005) was being filmed in town on a tight US$7 million (S$9 million) budget, its set decorator Jan Pascale persuaded the Elyeas to rent the team vintage cameras, microphones and monitors at a discount.

When director George Clooney wanted an old Moviola editing machine, Pascale recalled, the Elyeas found her one at a local school.

And they had not only the telex machines that the production needed, but also workers who knew how to get them to work.