Small Firms Prop Up Hollywood

Mike Hoffman is waiting for Hollywood to call. Along with a pair of skeletons, a knot of quaintly dressed manikins and a corral of life-size plastic farm animals, who all share a warehouse in Monrovia packed with everyday objects of generations gone by: tiny-screened TV sets, early iceboxes and streamline-moderne cigarette machines.

A longtime antiques dealer and owner of a party supply business, Hoffman spun off a portion of assets last year to launch Mike Hoffman Props, becoming one of Hollywood’s newest independent prop suppliers. He’s joining a segment of resourceful, scrappy entrepreneurs who rent out the fabled stuff of dreams by the week. Despite a slow start-up, he remains upbeat about being a part of one of Hollywood’s cottage industries.

“We have what you’d call interesting, odd period pieces,” he said.

An antiques dealer for 23 years, Hoffman has long been aware that his customers buy photogenic knickknacks from him and rent them right out to Hollywood set decorators. With that in mind, he built his own collection of mostly early-century store and household furnishings that he found in New England and New Mexico. He used them to decorate themed events staged by his Arcadia Party Rentals Inc.--a family firm with 15 employees that last year did $950,000 in sales. Last June, with the relics filling the 7,000-square-foot warehouse, he opened Mike Hoffman Props.

“He has a little treasure of Americana,” said Debbie Hemela, the publisher of Pasadena-based Debbies Book, an industry directory of prop and wardrobe suppliers. Her latest edition lists 52 prop houses.

Hoffman and other prop houses are indispensable but little-known outside of Hollywood. Independent prop suppliers can provide roomfuls of home or office furnishings by the month or the year--or they can roll out a 4-foot-tall telephone at a moment’s notice, said TV commercial producer Eric Liekefet.

“Here in L.A., you can get almost anything you want within a day,” Liekefet said, recalling a beer commercial he shot recently that included a cryogenic chamber--actually a glass water tank--that he rented from a prop-material supplier in Wilmington.

Prop houses sprang up in the early days of Hollywood. By 1919 a company called Cinema Mercantile was renting props to Keystone Studio of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops fame, said Allan Songer, assistant manager of Omega Cinema Props, which now occupies the old Cinema Mercantile site.

The major studios over the years built up huge prop departments, said Dominick Bruno, head of production support services at Warner Bros. Buyers trekked to Europe in the 1930s to empty castles of their furnishings--even textiles, hardware, oil paintings--that were shipped off to serve as backdrops for period dramas.

In the 1970s, executives at 20th Century Fox, Paramount and MGM made way for office expansion by auctioning off large chunks of their prop inventories--a trend reversed in the past decade as the studios built up their collections again. Now, Warner, Sony, Universal, Paramount and Disney studios all rent out props, but the independents still thrive by offering specialized collections and personalized service, Hemela said.

At House of Props, near Paramount Studios, owner Phil Torf sometimes opens late at night for set decorators with early calls who want to look over his antiques. On the other end of the timeline, Modern Props in West Los Angeles carries futuristic interiors like the egg-shaped office chairs from “Men in Black” that go out for $120 a week.

The market is fragmented by niche suppliers. Alpha Medical in Sun Valley dresses hospital and laboratory sets. History for Hire has vintage campaign memorabilia. Hollywood Studio Gallery stocks pricey paintings to dress classy interiors, while Alley Cats Studio Rentals provides dumpsters and trash cans. Cinema Secrets in Burbank has crowds of skeletons at $30 to $50 a week.

The industry’s customary weekly rental rate equals 10% to 25% of an item’s replacement cost, but flexible pricing is the norm, said Keith Marvin, general manager of Lennie Marvin Enterprises Inc. of Burbank, one of the largest independents.

The firm was founded by Keith’s father, Lennie Marvin, a studio musician who enjoyed relaxing between takes by prowling through prop departments and cajoling property masters to sell him period Americana: old dolls, mechanical toys, hand-cranked movie cameras, old beer signs and the like. He started like Hoffman, storing props in his garage, then started a side business that grew with his collection and eventually took over his career.

The Marvins occupy a cheerfully chaotic 35,000-square-foot warehouse arranged into jarringly contrasting environments. Visitors make their way through a forest of street lamps in the parking lot into a 1950s kitchen inside the front door. Beyond that, a creepy clutch of crystal balls, skulls and coffins is a few steps from a spacious casino, and a bobby-soxer’s malt shop is around the corner from a frond-flocked bamboo tiki bar and, yes, there’s that 4-foot-tall telephone.

The younger Marvin said they buy antiques on European and cross-country buying trips and scoop up castoffs at neighborhood yard sales, making an inventory of rare items that requires insurance premium costs that run into five digits annually, the elder Marvin said.

Rental activity has been brisk lately, the Marvins said, and should accelerate as TV pilot production hits full stride.

Industrywide revenue data are not compiled from independent prop suppliers. The percentage of budget spent on props varies from production to production, said Beverly Hadley, head of the property department at Universal Studios. Set decoration costs reflect the demands of the individual script and the production designer’s concepts.

Set decorator Peg Cummings, for example, said she had a $1.2-million budget to dress the sets of last year’s DreamWorks/Paramount production “Deep Impact.”

“We had sets all over,” Cummings said. “We did space ships, the White House, several residences, mission control, military stuff, publishers’ houses, restaurants, a whole gamut of things.”

Tensions in the prop business are understandable. Set decorators grumble that prop houses place conspicuous identification labels on their goods and then charge extra when the labels are removed so they won’t show up on camera. Prop house owners grump that set decorators want to set aside roomfuls of props for weeks at a time and don’t pick them up.

And then there are those newcomers--Hoffman among them. For his part, Hoffman chose an area he judged would generate sufficient demand. Indeed, city officials in Monrovia reported 111 days of film, TV and commercial production last year, and among nearby cities there were 148 production days in Arcadia and 47 in Sierra Madre.

Hoffman fills a steady stream of small orders, but he had to wait five months for his first major deal, dressing a workshop and hardware store for a General Motors Corp. commercial.

Meanwhile, he presses on. Recently he went looking for a dozen authentic wagon wheels and found them in short supply, so he’s thinking of buying reproductions from the Philippines--echoing a trend that Hemela, of Debbies Book, has picked up on lately. She thinks there is a strong need for one-stop manufacturers’ representatives who can take orders for custom-made props.

Hoffman has plans to expand, too--into Hawaiian and jungle dressings.

“People who want to get into this need a lot of patience,” said his sister and business partner, Patty Juett. “It’s a hard business to get into.”