Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?

New York Times

04-05-2025

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 business offers pillories too, but the show wasn't in the market for any.)
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, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.
'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 'Good Night, and Good Luck' was being filmed in town on a tight $7-million budget, its set decorator, Jan Pascale, persuaded the Elyeas to rent them vintage cameras, microphones and monitors at a discount. When the director, George Clooney, really 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.
'I don't know what we would do without them,' said Pascale, who has won an Oscar for 'Mank.'
No one likes entertaining that idea. 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 for five more years. If they close, Los Angeles will lose another piece of the vibrant ecosystem that has kept it attractive to filmmakers, even as states like Georgia and New Mexico lure productions with lucrative tax credits. Some Angelenos fear a vicious cycle: If the city continues to lose local talent and resources, even more productions will flee.
The Elyeas were making enough before the pandemic to employ 25 people. Now they employ 11, and have been drawing down savings to stay open. The rent is expected to go up by 25 percent in July, when their lease is up. Now they face a difficult choice.
'What do we do?' Pam, 71, asked. 'Do we say yes — we think there's going to be a going business here? Or do we say, 'You know, we had a good run?''
The Elyeas met at design school. Jim, 74, became a courtroom artist, but a sex-abuse trial he worked on in the 1980s soured him on that career. His 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.
'He loved it,' Pam said. It was what he wanted to do.
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.) They soon opened a 4,000-square-foot store, a fraction of their current size.
Using his eye for antiques, Jim bought many items over the years. Artisans reproduced others. The work called for creativity and flexibility. An 8,000-pound camera crane from the 1930s — shown in movies like 'Hail, Caesar!' and 'Babylon' — had to be modified to comply with modern federal safety laws.
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.'
No detail is too small, said Richard Adkins, the business's graphics director, who recreated eye-catching vintage cereal boxes of Cheerios, Froot Loops and bygone brands like Sugar Jets for the prop house. Does a scene call for a pack of Luckies? Depending on the year, or even the month the film is set in, he can help find one with the right Lucky Strike logo.
He squinted at a ruler as he measured the height of a glass bottle. A film set in the 1980s was seeking a Budweiser bottle in a size that is no longer made, so Adkins pulled two candidates from his vintage stock.
'There's a lot of research that one can do on the internet, but there's also a natural advantage of being a person my age who remembers,' said Adkins, 76, who has been doing this work for 51 years and has worked at History for Hire for 27.
Perhaps the most fulfilling part of the job, Pam said, is diving into the history itself. There is an entire library in the warehouse devoted to that work, filled with books and reference guides that could be props themselves.
'Sears catalogs from way back,' Jim said, gesturing at a crammed shelf. A Montgomery Ward Catalog from 1922. A Marshall Field's volume on 'Jewelry and European Fashions' from 1896.
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.
Pam said she was once told that 'people learn their history from the movies.' She has not forgotten.
Scan a bar code, and History for Hire's inventory system will reveal a prop's past lives. One much-loved vintage camera — used in the 1992 film 'Chaplin' starring Robert Downey Jr. — has been to Antarctica and Mexico. A weather-beaten brown satchel appeared in 'The Patriot,' 'The Alamo' and 'Pirates of the Caribbean.'
For 10 percent of the price of the prop, it can be yours for a week. Want a wooden drum stick from the 1970s? That's $2. Want an actual Vistalite drum set? That's closer to $495.
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, and noted that it made sense to film, say, 'Oppenheimer' in New Mexico. She has shipped her props all over the world for years.
But Pam said that she would need more local production in Los Angeles to keep her doors open. To fill in some of the gaps left by her smaller staff, she has started hiring people like Sadie Spezzano for the odd day of work here or there. Spezzano is a set decorator herself, but her work, too, has been slow. So Spezzano has picked up extra hours at a business she has often visited as a client.
'There are so many talented and amazing people that work in our industry that are just grasping at straws to stay afloat,' she said.
Set decorators say they have already lost several local prop houses, one as recently as this year. Faux Library had specialized in providing lightweight books that designers could use to fill a study. Modern Props, which had been a go-to for futuristic items, shuttered a while back.
'It's getting harder and harder here,' Pascale said. 'Losing History for Hire and what they have — I just don't know what we would do.'
Pam intends to keep the doors open as long as she can for herself, her husband — who has Parkinson's disease — and her staff.
'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.
Pam is still thinking. She and Jim cannot work indefinitely. She had thought, if the business were still viable, of handing it over to the next generation that has learned the trade — perhaps some of her longtime staffers. But at this moment, it is a little unclear whether taking over the business would be a boon or a burden.
She knows this: 'I don't want to be the last prop house in Los Angeles.'