I think even when you were a kid, I remember going into my granddad’s garage or attic and like looking for treasures. You know? I don’t know what I was going to do with them. I guess, just take them to him and tell him, “You have something.” But you would spend hours going through a ton of junk, and then you would find something that was cool enough to go and get the story from your grandparent for. So these guys, I think, you have to have a real love of stuff, a real love of history, and then that just—plus, these guys, specifically Rick, he was just a ferocious reader.
Q: You get this idea. Did you know to whom you were going to pitch it? Did you know you were going to History Channel? How did you decide where to pitch it and what was the elevator pitch?
Montgomery: It was interesting. We didn’t know that we went to History as a practice pitch. You know? We thought it was pretty off-brand for them. We did not have the whole idea about it being so stuff related. We thought it would go on a channel like True or maybe A&E or a couple different places. Everything just sort of lined up. I heard that History was looking for a gun shop show, and there were a lot of weapons in the pawnshop as well: a lot of historical Samurai swords from the 1300s, rifles from the Western times, and all kinds of cool historical weapons. That was something that was most interesting to Rick and the shop. So I know most of these pawnshops can’t carry weapons that are more recent than, I think, 1900. So it’s not like we’re talking about the typical gun shop that would scare a lot of people. So I heard that they were looking for that.
These guys, obviously, knew a lot about history, but we were very fortunate because we walked in right at the right time. The woman who runs the entire conglomerate now, but she was running the History Channel at the time, this woman Nancy Dubuc, she had been down in Florida and—I didn’t know this until she told me a long time later—she had seen a news special or something on a pawnshop, because of the fact that pawnshops were becoming sort of busy places during that time.
Q: Yeah. A little more mainstream because of it.
Montgomery: Yeah, because of the recession. And so they had literally talked about a pawnshop like the day or two before we had gone in. So when we walked in, not really knowing that, there was an immediate reaction by the gentleman, this guy who we were pitching. He said, “Give me a day, and I think I can get you a pilot.” He came back the next day with a pilot. So it was one of the smoother, easier processes. It was really a very organic start to the show. We just went out and shot a couple of scenes. We showed the network sort of how the guys could deliver information that was pithy. We kept on using the words “pithy” and “insightful” around what the guys were doing because we all thought back to college. When you go to college the focus rarely is on education first, but the stuff that most college kids remember are those professors who sort of went against the grain and told you stories. That’s the reason why it’s called history: his story. So we really liked what we were getting based on the fact that these guys were telling little pithy stories about stuff, and everybody could relate to stuff. Then to your point, sort of the game changer was the value. There’s this great show, Antiques Roadshow, that’s been on forever. It delves into stuff in a really fun [way], but it’s pretty dry in comparison to Pawn Stars because it sort of stops right at the point where you put value on it and Pawn Stars has this nice, fun game show element to where you can really haggle back and forth, and I think a lot of people like to haggle. I think sometimes places just price stuff more for a higher price knowing that they’re going to have to haggle, and the person would rather go away thinking they got a deal even though they paid the same amount that the shop wanted. They felt satisfied about getting a deal. It’s very American. So yeah, that was the process. We typically would have kept shopping it around and would have tried to go with the highest bidder, but History had such a great reaction with that. We really believed in them, and they believed in us, and it worked out for both parties.
Q: When you were in the piloting process and you’re looking at it, what worked, what didn’t, how did you end up with the current configuration?
Montgomery: Well, we needed historical stuff. In the beginning, they had said that stuff would walk through the door every day. I think it did. It just didn’t do it as much as we had hoped. So in the beginning, we had to just shoot a lot more in order to get the historical stuff. They had decades to accumulate what we were looking at in the shop. The first season you’re shooting a show, nobody knows you’re shooting a show. Nobody has heard of these guys outside of that community. After the show started airing, we had people from Michigan, Texas, driving in.
Q: Just showing up?
Montgomery: Just driving, showing up with their stuff, to get it first priced by the guys and then hoping that they could sell it or trade it on the show. And so it became more of an embarrassment of riches of the cool stuff that was coming through.
Q: Who comes to pawnshops? What have you learned about pawnshops from this?
Montgomery: It’s a real cross section. The very interesting thing about pawnshops is they were banks before there were banks. I mean pawnshops go back to Babylonian times. I meant they go all the way back to Roman times. They are now banks for people who have trouble having credit. So you could be there. One sort of portion of the customers who go into pawnshops are guys who don’t have credit. When I was there shooting the pilot, there was a guy who walked in and Rick was like—I can’t remember the guy’s name—but he said, “Our business is built off of guys like this.” I said, “What’s this guy?” He said, “He has his Xbox,” and he’s a grown man. “He has his Xbox and his rent check and some of his bills are due seven days ahead of when his paychecks hit his bank account. So he essentially pawns his Xbox once a month for a week and that money floats his lifestyle. He pays an amount of interest, but he can’t go get a loan from the bank. He doesn’t want to go to a loan shark or anything like that. He’s probably borrowed from all of his friends, and he knows damn well he’s coming back if he gives his Xbox because it’s his most valuable possession,” Rick said. “It’s the same thing with construction guys who loan their tools. If a man loans his tools, he’s coming back because that’s how he makes his money.”
Q: That’s interesting.
Montgomery: So that’s a portion of it. Certainly, there are derelicts that are going in there for money that God knows what they’re going to use it for. But there is a large percentage of the clientele who go in there looking for a deal. I think that’s what we try to highlight on the show. These are people who know the best place in the world to get a great watch or a great piece of jewelry is going to be a pawnshop. You’re getting a diamond ring that should be as good as any other diamond ring out there, but for a discounted amount. That could be the same with tools. That could be the same with just a ton of stuff.
Q: It’s something that sort of occurred to me as I watched a bunch in a row was that value is kind of the star of the show.
Montgomery: Yeah.
Q: It all revolves around the value of something and somebody’s perceived value of it. You know?
Montgomery: I was a big baseball card collector and dealer when I was in like eighth, ninth, or tenth grade, and you’ll see different industries or items having value at certain times. There was a minute where baseball cards were the hottest things. That kind of came and went, but there was nothing really behind it. Coins, there could be some value attributed to a coin just based on what was used to make it. But yeah, there is, I think, supply and demand. In a good time, a pawnshop is buying and selling, and other times it’s pawning as opposed to buying and selling. When the economy hits the floor, people want to sell stuff. But a pawnshop, for instance, can’t just accumulate all that stuff and take up space and not be selling it. So it’s not that a pawnshop is adversely related to the economy, but it does have some spikes up and down when the rest of the economy might not.
Q: Why do you think people assign certain values to things? You sort of alluded to
it in one of your answers about people think something is worth a lot of money when it’s not.
Montgomery: I was there shooting at the pawnshop once when this nice couple came in with a piece of the Berlin Wall. I kind of was like them. I thought, Wow. This is epic. You know? This is history. This is something that so many of us lived through and it was the first big political memories of our lives. I’ll never forget Rick was like, “You know, I’ll give them five dollars just to be a nice guy.” I go, “What do you mean?” He goes, “You know how big that wall was? You know how small that rock is?” He went into detail about how if it had graffiti on it that said something that was from a famous artist or something completely changes the value. But what he said to those people, he said, “You guys, even if I was going to give you $100 or $500 for it, you guys have a piece of the Berlin Wall that you guys got together when you were there that you’re going to be able to pass down to your kids who pass it down to their kids.” He goes, “Even if I was going to give you a lot of money, you wouldn’t sell this. This is worth more as a piece of history.”
That’s not to say other pieces of history wouldn’t have tremendous value, but it really, I think, is based on supply and demand. If there are millions and millions of pieces of the Berlin Wall, then it’s not going to have a great value. If it was the flag that the fireman put up at Ground Zero, that’s going to have a much different value than a piece of rock that was down there on the same wall.
Q: How did the success of the show change the show?
Montgomery: It’s very funny. It’s just hard to shoot the show [now].
Q: I figured that.
Montgomery: Because the guys went from having seventy people a day in the shop, seventy customers a day, to five thousand a day. The Harrisons’ shop is in a top tourism destination, and it has become, I think, the number one or two tourist stop in Las Vegas. Certainly, during the daytime, there are cabs lined up around it. He’s building a shopping center around it. He’s bought a lot of land close by. The reason why it’s hard to shoot the show, and it’s kind of funny, is Rick. The Harrisons can’t be selling and making as much money when we’re shooting the show because we can’t let everybody in. Literally—we tried it. People were getting in between the camera, the talent, distracting, screaming, and making out. So we allow a handful of people in while we’re shooting, so we’re always going against the guys who want to hurry, hurry, hurry so they can let more customers in. We need to take our time so we get the show done right, so we have a fun little back-and-forth.
But it is not the most exciting show to shoot. When you go see it, it’s not like American Idol where there are these grand performances. It’s just this quiet little engine. The tense moments are when the negotiation happens, but the rest is like listening to a little story being told by a fun professor off to the side about a piece of history. So the excitement level isn’t sky-high. That’s why our job in post is to make sure we pull out the most interesting moments and the most historical moments to highlight.
Q: Do you guys have any sort of limits on like, “We’re not showing this kind of this thing”? Like, “I’m not touching that.”
Montgomery: Yeah. People collect all kinds of stuff . . .
Q: Whenever I was in the South and I see the Mammy saltshakers, I just put them [face down]. It’s just my little form of protest.
Montgomery: That’s a good example. Yeah. There is shit like that.
Q: I know somebody is going to buy them, but it just makes me feel better for the moment.
Montgomery: There have been items that have been brought in. [Rick] made a very big point about it being—like, there was an elephant tusk and ivory and how that’s not—sometimes, as you know, stuff is illegal in the States and legal elsewhere. Like there was a good example of some guy came in with a—I forget what you call the Russian police. I can’t remember if it was some government authority, Russian, one of those very typical Russian hats. The guy came in and said to Corey, “I want to sell you this.” He was like, “How did you get it?” He goes, “Oh, I stole it from a Russian cop.” Corey was like, “I can’t buy stolen merchandise. I’m going to actually have to ask you to leave right now.”
There is a misconception that pawnshops want to buy hot stuff. What I’ve learned is it doesn’t behoove them because once they buy something and it’s hot, they not only have to give the money back for it, but they also have to hold the item in storage in perpetuity sometimes. So it becomes very expensive for them. The last thing they want to do is buy something that’s hot. But for the most part, people are walking in with stuff that’s on the up and up. There are those few items.
Q: How long does it take to shoot an average episode?
Montgomery: It’s interesting because we don’t shoot the show in a linear fashion. We might shoot pieces this week that go with an episode months down the road and vice versa. I would say it takes probably four to five days to get a full episode. That would be my guess. Because sometimes we shoot stuff that we think is a cool item and then sometimes it just doesn’t end up being that great of a scene. We try to pick the very best. People get nervous. They come in and they kind of have the deer in the headlights look, and that doesn’t make great TV. But yeah, I would say on average about four or five days.
Q: Are you doing a version for the UK and Australia? Is that right?
Montgomery: Yeah. We have Pawn Stars UK and Pawn Stars Australia, and so we’re on our second season of the UK one and our first season, which hasn’t aired yet, of the Australia one. I was over in London for New Year’s Eve in 2012, and when you’re in London or Paris or anywhere in that part of the world you just see history. In France, these buildings are twelfth, thirteenth century. They’re being used very effectively today. So I thought if we have our own history in the US, being so relatively young and new, we’re going back three hundred years, it would be really cool to see the British version with just historical stuff that goes back so far. It’s been a lot of fun. You know?
Q: How is the stuff different?
Montgomery: Well, the stuff is different.
Q: Or are the people different about it?
Montgomery: The people are different. Brits are very different than Americans. I mean, we came from over there, a lot of us, and others from other places. But Brits don’t say what they think at every moment. So British television hasn’t had this same sort of runaway success with real-life people doing real-life stuff because it’s very British to not go out and act like a fool on television.
Q: They’re sort of more reserved?
Montgomery: Unless you’re a football fan.
Q: Right!
Montgomery: Then it’s par for the course. So we had to find people who would really be themselves, and we found some fun characters who absolutely acted just as transparently with the cameras rolling or not. Then I think the stuff was very cool. We’ve had books on there that were from the fourth century. It’s been really cool to see just different stuff. On Pawn Stars we do have a lot of international items, but it’s just not sort of at the same pace that you would have in the UK. Australia, they’re just as young or younger than we are. So there’s it’s more about crazy, fun personalities and crazy, fun stuff to go with it.
Q: Can we talk about the genre sort of as a whole? The idea that there is American Pickers, Storage Wars, Pawn Stars, Junk Gypsies, Garage Gold, and they’re also spread across all these different networks. I think that’s interesting. Why do you think this is such a popular genre?
Montgomery: We call it trash-to-treasure or the hidden treasure genre. We do believe that it had never really been tapped into, and so when we sold Pawn Stars and then we sold American Restoration and several other shows in the same vein of the same genre, we thought it was more like food. You know? Forever there weren’t that many food shows, and then there were only food shows on the Food Network. Then people realized there were ways to incorporate food, whether it be Anthony Bourdain traveling all over the world to
make it a travel show, Fox to make it a business show like the Gordon Ramsey stuff. So we felt early on that it would be a wide genre because people, A) love stuff, and B) love the value of stuff and making a dollar. There’s nothing more American dream than sort of creating something out of nothing. And so it was interesting after we sold a couple of them, there was sort of this, “Well, OK. That will be that.” But then Hardcore Pawn, Storage Wars, Storage Hunters, Auction Hunters, and there’s probably another thirty or forty of them.
Q: Yeah, just Hoarders. I mean the other extreme of it, yeah.
Montgomery: Yes. So it really tapped into something, I think, that was timely. What I always say about reality television is it exists because it’s cheap, first and foremost, in comparison to scripted programming. But it also exists because it’s very reactive. We can come up with Pawn Stars and shoot a pilot in March and have the show on in July. That was really reactive to the economy. Where scripted would wait until the economy was in the shitter and then say, “Hey, what works well in a bad economy?” It’s comedy. And then it takes a year to find the right script and another year to find the right team to make it. So you’re in a two- or three-year window versus a four- to six-month window. So that was part of why we thought there was a demand for it. Also, just seeing people in different environments. There’s Swamp Pawn. There’s all kinds of derivative stuff from it.
Q: Do you think it could sustain a whole network like HGTV or Food?
Montgomery: Yeah, I think if you were to take the best and put it all on one network, absolutely. That’s a good idea actually.
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