by Dan Baum
I crept alongside a rack of Civil War muskets and a Spencer repeating carbine, all falling over onto each other, looking as though they hadn’t been touched in years. In my hands, the Spencer revealed itself to be no Hollywood reproduction but the real thing, worth tens of thousands of dollars, seemingly forgotten. I set it down carefully.
High above my head, steel shelves bulged with rifles from the Spanish-American War and the Second World War, priceless pieces piled up like cordwood. Only their muzzles and buttstocks were visible, coated in dust. Strips of dried masking tape curled from the shelves, hand-lettered .30-40 KRAG and 98 MAUSER.
The buzz of machinery grew louder as I tiptoed deeper into the dim vastness of the barn. In a lighted alcove at the far back, a man in a work shirt operated something that looked like a drill press. I forged ahead and extended my hand. He switched off the machine, wiped his hand on a rag, and gave mine a strong squeeze. He was in his fifties, balding, with a leathery face; he looked like a character from The Grapes of Wrath. I took him for a maintenance man.
“Syd Stembridge,” he said.
“Related to James Sydney Stembridge?”
“My great uncle.”
I noticed now that the machine he’d been operating wasn’t a drill press but some sort of ammunition loader. A row of brass cartridges stood in ranks on a conveyor belt, like soldiers.
“I’m making blanks,” he said. “That was the bulk of the family business for years: blanks.”
“They hard to make?”
“Tricky. A gun ain’t made to fire blanks. And when you’re shootin’ bullets, it don’t matter what the flash looks like, but in the movies, that’s everything.”
“You make all the blanks for Hollywood on that little machine?”
He laughed. “No, we’ve been out of the Hollywood business for four years. These are for Disneyland, for the jungle boat cruise.”
“Where they shoot the hippo? I loved that as a kid!”
“They don’t shoot the hippo anymore. Too many people complained. Can’t be shooting a hippo. Oh, no. Now they shoot in the air. For a while, they stopped shooting altogether, but they got too many complaints about that. It didn’t have the same drama. People expected the shooting on the jungle boat cruise. They just didn’t want the gun pointed at the hippo.”
“At the mechanical hippo.”
He shrugged. “You know, it’s funny about the jungle boat cruise. People love guns and people hate guns. Usually at the same time. When you work with actors and actresses, a lot don’t like the guns at first, but then they get into it. God, I remember working on shows, and you go out with a gun and the actor don’t want to touch it. Marthe Keller in Black Sunday: Did you see that one? She plays a terrorist. She was completely afraid of the guns. Came into the gun room when we were at Paramount, and I could see she was uncomfortable. Didn’t want to touch it. But watch her at the end, shooting from the helicopter with a Madsen or a Smith & Wesson 76—I can’t remember. But watch her face. She’s really into it.”
I looked around at the ramshackle warehouse. “I’ve got to say, I’m a little surprised to find Syd Stembridge in the back of a shop making blanks with his own hands,” I said. “I mean, aren’t you Hollywood royalty? This is the great Stembridge arsenal!”
“No, we auctioned that off in 2007. Oh, we kept a few things. But most of this belongs to Mike Papac.” Papac was legendary, the armorer on such gun-heavy movies as Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Con Air, and We Were Soldiers. “We let him keep his things here,” Stembridge said.
As we made our way back to the office, he told stories from the set—of stripping the huge magazine from a twenty-millimeter cannon so that the audience could see Richard Crenna’s face in Rambo III, of failing to talk Sylvester Stallone out of twirling his .45 automatic in Cobra, of the day in 1982 when a helicopter blade killed Vic Morrow (who’d been Sergeant Saunders on Combat!) on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
He kept telling stories, but my eye had fallen on the hand-lettered cards in one of the glass cases, and I crossed the room to look closer. Under a nickel-plated Colt Detective Special: EFREM ZIMBALIST JR., 77 SUNSET STRIP. Under a Colt Official Police: ROBERT STACK, THE UNTOUCHABLES. Under a P38: FRANK SINATRA, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE.
“Good God,” I whispered.
“Yup,” Syd said proudly. “Those are Papac’s now, from our collection.”
It went on and on, from case to case. Steve McQueen’s .45 from The Getaway. Kevin Costner’s Star automatic (standing in for a .45 Colt) from the 1987 version of The Untouchables. William Holden’s pistol from The Wild Bunch. Holy relics.
“We sold off a lot of the good stuff,” Syd said. “Mel Gibson’s guns from Payback and Lethal Weapon, that shiny .45 from Titanic, Harrison Ford’s ray gun from Star Wars and his revolver from Raiders of the Lost Ark …”
“I remember the sounds those guns made in Raiders as well as I remember anything about it,” I said. “It was the first time I noticed that gun sounds had gotten good in the movies.”
Syd brightened. “I worked on that! I flew up to Skywalker Ranch with Ben Burtt, who did all the sound for that show. I had a Thompson up there, and we fired it next to a cement wall. Not at the wall, but next to it, so you’d get the noise off the wall. That’s how we got that big sound. And the scene in the bar, the big shoot-out? What they wanted was to re-create a Warner Bros. 1930 ricochet. Ben always said that Warner had the best ricochet sound. He didn’t know how they did it. So we’re out there trying to re-create it. We get out on a dirt road, a straight road. We put up hay bales with a slot down the middle, an alley, and we set up microphones all along the way. I’m inside the slot with a Smith & Wesson 76 submachine gun, firing single-shot at the road, trying to glance bullets off the ground at the right angle to get that whine.”
We were back in the front office by now, standing next to a framed black-and-white photo of a professorial gent of about sixty in a three-piece suit and horn-rimmed glasses, smiling at a pretty young woman holding two enormous single-action Colts. Behind them, the walls were covered with revolvers—the old Stembridge warehouse. J. S. STEMBRIDGE WITH PATRICIA FARLEY, said a yellowed strip of paper typed on a manual Royal, and, taped to the frame, PICKING GUNS FOR “SUNSET PASS,” A ZANE GREY FILM WITH RANDOLPH SCOTT. Patricia Farley, plump, laughing, and lavishly dressed in a plumed hat, had no idea that her career would last only two more years. I pointed to the picture of Humphrey Bogart holding the Thompson.
“A Stembridge gun?”
“Of course. That may be one of the ones referenced here.” He tapped his fingernail on the glass of a framed letter, and I bent close. It was from the Harbor Defenses of Los Angeles, dated September 3, 1944, signed by Colonel W. W. Hicks of the Coast Artillery Corps.
“Our appreciation is extended to you for your generous cooperation without compensation in loaning automatic weapons to the Harbor Defenses of Los Angeles at the beginning of the war,” it read. “Due to the critical shortage of such weapons on 7 December 1941, those provided from your stock were a most welcome addition to our defenses.”
“They didn’t have any guns!” Syd said. “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, and for all anybody knew, they were coming here next. Stembridge had more guns than anybody. They called up here from Fort MacArthur, and Fritz Dickie drove down there with five Thompsons.”
“Weren’t yours all set up to fire blanks?”
“I think we’d just gotten a load that hadn’t been converted yet. So that put us in good with the Army. During the war, they’d do these war shows at the L.A. Coliseum. You know, stage a mock battle in the stadium, with planes flying over and all that, to sell war bonds. We helped them with that, and after the war we got the guns. Speaking of Thompsons, I was cleaning up and found this.” He handed me a piece of yellow paper—a telegram:
Bell twx 710 82209247
Mr Gerald Benedict
Request permission to transfer the following to joe lombardi, special effects unlimited, 752 n. Cahu
enga blvd., Hollywood, calif., Class 3 permit #94191, calif permit 318r
2 Thompson submachine guns for blank ammunition
Cal 45 model 1921
#4090 5035
Title will not be transferred. Guns are to be used in new york city on paramount productions “godfather” and will be returned upon completion of episode.
“These were the guns they used to kill Sonny at the tollbooth,” Syd said reverently, smiling at the paper. After all the stars he’d worked with, all the magic he’d undertaken, even Syd recognized the telegram as a sacred artifact—the Hollywood equivalent of a scrap of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“So Syd,” I asked, “if Stembridge had all the guns that Hollywood used for eighty years and sold them all off, where are they now? Who’s got Hollywood’s guns?”
A lot of them, it turned out, were sixteen miles away, in the farthest reaches of the San Fernando Valley, at Independent Studio Services, “the largest movie armory in the world.”
A lot of Hollywood’s guns had been converted to fire blanks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t real guns or couldn’t be converted back. Given the lethality of what lay inside ISS, I expected a fenced compound, German shepherds, and an armed gatehouse guard scanning a clipboard for my name. Instead, ISS looked like a suburban medical practice—a three-story brick-and-glass box just off the Foothill Freeway, landscaped with oleander. Inside, no metal detector, no ID check, just a slinky receptionist who offered me coffee and sent me unaccompanied down a hall decorated with framed movie posters and mannequins dressed as everything from Civil War soldiers to jet pilots. For a movie buff, it was like visiting Santa’s workshop.
Finally, I came to something locked—a steel-mesh door—and through it spied what looked like a counter in an auto-parts store. A man in a greasy baseball cap stood behind the counter, writing up paperwork, while a couple of customers leaned on the counter, chatting. The counter was piled with all kinds of junk—tools, boxes, coffee cups, stacks of paper. Advertising posters covered its front and climbed the walls behind it, where inventory poked from high shelves or hung on display.
The difference, of course, between what lay behind the mesh door and an auto-parts store was that all the merchandise was firearms, from flintlock muskets to AK-47s. The advertisements weren’t for FRAM air filters and Duralast brake pads, but for Glocks, H&Ks, and Springfields. Yet nobody could mistake the place for a gun store. Behind the counter, on massive tripods, stood an M19 grenade launcher capable of firing five forty-millimeter shells a second and a Hughes M230 Chain Gun designed to tear up tanks. In the parlance, heavy shit—post-1986 hardware that not even the richest and most ardent collector could obtain. I pressed the doorbell and was buzzed in. Larry Zanoff bustled out to greet me.
He was a baby-faced man in his forties, somewhere between buff and roly-poly, with a buzz cut and glasses, jeans and a black T-shirt. I’d gotten his name from the credits of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds—he was listed with the enticing title of “armorer”—and he’d handled the guns for many other films, including Collateral, Iron Man 2, and Thor.
“You have one cool job,” I said.
“You have no idea.” He gave a little laugh, as though discovering anew what a fun gig he’d blundered into.
Strictly defined, an armorer is a gunsmith for a military unit or police department. “Here, it means you’re the guy on the set responsible for the guns,” he said, ushering me into a spare, windowless office on whose single shelf stood a Hanukkah menorah, a row of blank cartridges, and two life-size pistols made of glass—awards of some sort. On the walls were articles—from the Los Angeles Times, Guns magazine, and others—about the ISS armory, and Zanoff spoke with the practiced ease of a guy used to explaining his world to reporters. The armorer’s job starts, he said, with the script. Sometimes a screenwriter specifies a character’s gun, but usually not; usually the script just says something like “Murray pulls a gun,” and it’s up to the director to decide what kind of gun Murray pulls. Some, like John Milius and Michael Mann, really knew guns and would come to Larry already wanting a Sig Sauer P232 or a Walther P5. Sometimes an actor had an idea of what he wanted. Most actors and directors, though, had in mind only an image and a mood they wanted to re-create on-screen. Then it was up to the armorer to find the gun that fit the bill.
Zanoff clapped his hands together and leapt from his chair like a fullback coming off the bench. He led me down a series of narrow hallways to a room dominated by a wooden table long enough to seat thirty people. On the table lay sheets of computer paper printed with characters’ names—The Ranger, Old Pete, Jesus—and atop each paper lay two or three Old West revolvers. “This is what we call a show-and-tell for a Western we have coming up,” Larry said. “The director’s coming in today. We’ve read the script and thought about each character, and we’ll suggest these.” Larry and his colleagues were offering a plain-Jane Colt Peacemaker for the Ranger—a subtle way to signal that the Ranger was not a man of violence. He’d carry a gun, but he wouldn’t fetishize it. But from what was laid out for Jesus, I had a bad feeling about him. Atop his name lay a shiny nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Schofield with an eight-inch barrel—the kind of flamboyant gun that tells the audience, without the audience even being conscious of it, that this character is an egomaniac who loves killing people.
“What if the director wants something anachronistic?”
“You bring it up. If he overrides you, that’s okay. He wants to tell a story, and sometimes that overcomes reality. It’s like, you’d never bring a real gun near your face in a gunfight. Sometimes, though, the director wants both the gun and the actor’s pretty face in the frame. That’s fine. The thing is, if you don’t bring it up, and he reads on the blog that he made a mistake, it’ll be, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ ”
“So how much of what we see is realistic?”
“A lot more than used to be. With the blogs and the Internet, everybody’s an expert, everybody’s commenting. Back in the Tom Mix movies, they’re shooting double-action revolvers. Totally anachronistic. You’d never get away with that now. One thing’s still totally fake, though: People don’t fly backwards when hit with bullets. We call it the river of damage. You crumple up around the wound. Even with a shotgun blast. People flying backwards looks good in the movies, but it’s not realistic.”
I was a little sorry I’d asked, and was starting to wonder if all this looking behind the curtain was going to spoil the movies for me.
Larry apologized for returning me to his office by a roundabout route. Two LAPD detectives were in the house, on a spot inspection of ISS’s inventory—something that happened two or three times a year. “We had the ATF here last week,” he said. “We told the LAPD guys, ‘Hey, we just had ATF here,’ but no, they have to do their own thing. The guns we have here, they’re real guns. Some of them have been modified to fire blanks and will never fire live ammunition again. But they’re still real guns.” We threaded our way past the enormous modern tripod-mounted military guns I’d seen through the steel-mesh door.
“How do you get stuff like this?” I asked, being careful not to touch them, lest I inadvertently kill everybody in the room.
“We are firearms dealers. Really, you have to be, to be an armorer, because you have to be able to go out and buy what you need for a show, and you have to be able to transfer it legally to the people who will use it.”
Back in Larry’s office, he handed me a blank; it looked like a cartridge, except instead of a bullet it had a crimped-down tip. “A revolver, you can take and just put in the blanks. But a semi-automatic or a machine gun? To make one fire blanks can take twelve hours of work, because they rely on the explosion of the powder and the resistance of the bullet to cycle the gun. With a blank, you have no bullet, so you have to use more powder, and you also have to alter the gun to make it work.”
“You just plug the barrel, right?”
He snorted. Was there no end to ignorance about the art of Holly
wood gunsmithing? “I could take ten Beretta 92Fs straight from the factory, and each one might require something slightly different to make it work right firing blanks.… Barrel plugs, changing the recoil spring—if I told you exactly what we do to guns to make them fire blanks, I’d have to kill you, because we have our own proprietary system. It’s protected technology.”
But the first thing he wanted me to remember about the guns I saw in movies was that most of them are rubber. “Unless you see it fire, of course.” He thought a moment. “And even then.”
Once again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.
“Cops standing around a squad room with guns in their holsters? Rubber. Cowboys on horseback? Rubber. Soldiers marching, or the ones in the background? Those guns will be rubber.” A rubber gun didn’t require having an armorer on the set, he said, so it could be rented from a prop house without paperwork. Even a protagonist’s “gun” was really, on the set, five or six different versions, depending on the scene. “In the scenes where you’re just seeing it in his holster, it’s probably rubber. If he’s just loading it, it might be a nonfiring replica.” If the logistics of sets and costumes allow it, a director will often shoot all the scenes in which the guns are visible but don’t fire, and then bring in an armorer with the real guns for a couple of days of shooting nothing but the firing scenes. “If you see the actor firing the gun, it might be one set up to fire quarter-flash blanks. But another scene might require full-flash blanks, so that might be a completely different gun. The audience thinks it’s always the same gun.… When the actor’s going to hold the gun close to the guy he’s shooting, they might use a rubber gun and CGI the flash in later”—CGI being computer-generated imagery—“or they might use a non-gun.”