Photo: Jake Michaels.
Pam Elyea and her husband, Jim, have run the theatrical properties business History for Hire for almost 40 years, but now rent is going up and business is down.
When I was in the Junior Antrim Players production of Alice in Wonderland (age 10), my mother volunteered to do props. [Scroll way down here for fun information on the Junior Antrim Players and famous actors who got their start there.] You know, finding all those odds and ends that a script says are needed onstage to carry the story — a gavel for the Knave of Hearts trial, paintbrushes for painting the roses red, the caterpillar’s hookah. For opening night, she provided real tarts from a local bakery, but found out she’d have to do that for the dress rehearsal, too. Props are a big deal.
Matt Stevens wrote recently at the New York Times about prop mavens calling themselves History for Hire.
“When the Netflix series Wednesday needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. …
“The company’s 33,000-square-foot 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 Timothée Chalamet used in A Complete Unknown, luggage from Titanic, a black baby carriage from The Addams Family.
“Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s.
History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning. …
“ ‘People just don’t realize how valuable a business like that is to help support the look of a film,’ said Nancy Haigh, a set decorator who found everything from a retro can of pork and beans to a one-ton studio crane there for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which she won an Oscar for. ‘But it’s because people like them exist that your moviegoing experience has such life to it.’ …
“When the director, George Clooney, really wanted an old Moviola editing machine, [Good Night, and Good Luck set decorator Jan 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. …
“ ‘I don’t know what we would do without them,’ said Pascale, who has won an Oscar for Mank. …
“But with fewer movies and television shows being shot in Los Angeles these days, and History for Hire getting less business, the Elyeas fear they may not be able to afford to renew their lease. …
“[Jim’s] parents owned an antique store, and Jim had always been a collector. So when a friend who was a production designer asked Jim to come work on sets, he was sold. …
“The couple opened their prop-rental business out of their apartment. Their first big break came when they got the gig to rent flak vests, field radios and medic equipment to Oliver Stone’s 1986 film Platoon. (They now admit that they may have exaggerated their size and expertise.) …
“On a recent afternoon inside the warehouse, Dave McCullough, a prop maker, was hunkered over a work station fitting a microphone stand to a base it was not designed for. He would later use a 3-D printer to make a new tally light — the light which tells performers which camera is on at any moment — for an original RCA TK60 television camera from the 1960s and consider whether to use a heat gun to make it a slightly richer shade of red.
“ ‘What is great about being in a building like this is I’ve got the last century of objects as a reference,’ said McCullough, who has worked at History for Hire for nine years. ‘A lot of the things here had multiple lives before they got to us.’ …
“A Broadway-bound musical centered around Soul Train recently needed to rent some TV cameras, Pam said. While researching the cameras, the History for Hire team discovered that the show was one of the first to employ female camera operators. So they sent over a camera — and a photo. And now, audience members will see a female camera operator in the show, a spokesman for the musical, Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical, confirmed. …
“The Elyeas would have to rent many drum sets and many, many, many drum sticks to cover the $500,000 they pay annually to rent the building where they store them all. Pam said that she is fine with some work going other places. … But Pam said that she would need more local production in Los Angeles to keep her doors open. …
“ ‘Neither Jim or I are really ready to throw in the towel yet,’ she said. Maybe, she said, they will sign a two-year lease, rather than a five-year lease. And then they’ll see how it goes.”
More at the Times, here.
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