For those in the Milwaukee or Chicagoland areas, I highly recommend checking out American Science and Surplus (https://sciplus.com/). Not props or movie industry related, but similarly fascinating. This store has catered to makers of all stripes since long before "makers" meant what it does today.
How is this usually used? Do productions rent the parts to build more complete props, like a full plane interior, then tear it down and return the individual parts? Inventory control would seem very complicated!
For a full cockpit, the production would just buy one and trash it afterwards. Movies are one-shot corporations. Buy a bunch of shit, write it off. Prop rental is insanely expensive on the whole. Sometimes productions make all these fancy props and then sell them afterwards to rental houses to try and recoup some money.
You won't find it so much any longer, but there was a time in the early 2000s when some major Hollywood props were still available for rental at prop houses. You know how art masterpieces go missing and you wonder who has them hung on their walls to show guests? Well, there are a bunch of people who are now highly respected in Hollywood who took advantage of the rental deposits to "borrow" very famous props and then "lose" them during film productions and they can now only be seen if you know the right people ;)
Full disclosure I'm not a production designer, but have worked in the art department on some smaller film productions.
These individual parts are likely used to build larger props that a production can't otherwise acquire. For example, assembling a cyberpunk plane interior, or the control panel in a time machine.
They can also be scattered around a set where those individual parts would belong (like a mechanic's studio) to make the space feel real and lived-in.
Lastly, they can be used for close-up shots (with just a little bit of production design built up around them). This is a lot cheaper than renting an entire interior.
For a plane interior, there's Air Hollywood.[1] They provide aviation props for many major productions that need an aircraft interior or cockpit. Their airline terminal props show up, far too often, in TV shows.
Amusingly, their video showing their aircraft interiors displays "This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated."[1] They probably have full authorization to show clips from some movie, but YouTube doesn't recognize that.
Stuff like specific terminals and parts can be used for insert shots and close ups (which are often shot by a 2nd Unit crew without the actual stars/main crew). So then you can build a simpler set and just shoot close ups for the fancy electronics.
But for anything larger, what generally happens is some sort of overall deal is worked out, which covers a large swath of props. Like “airplane set pieces” for $X and then the prop house just tracks what from that category is actually used. That also covers replacements or trades on the day of shooting. Much simpler for all involved, and it “feels” like a discount.
I remember flying back from LA one time with a suitcase filled with bomb-looking parts from Apex and setting off some sort of explosives detector at LAX, probably from the toxic dust covering all the parts. First Wife ran off laughing while I got surrounded by security :D
I love how some of the photos in their site are sideways. When you've been providing stuff to the film industry for sixty-something years, you don't need a good site, just word of mouth.
Never been to Apex. But I sure remember C&H Surplus in Pasadena, which was a smaller facility of similar kind of salvage, and more focused on the Caltech/JPL crowd. Sometimes we would spend a whole Saturday afternoon there just looking at everything and scoring things we could carry on our bicycles.
All I can say is, if you like gear, you gotta visit a place like this.
Are they connected to Apex Jr? A lot of overlap between them, have sort of suspected Jr runs off of the trash of surplus but have never known for certain. Apex Jr helped make my electronics habbit possible back when I was young and poor.
The guy that runs Apex has a brother on the other side of town that I don't think he gets along with. Is that place called Apex Jr? I seem to remember it being an industrial rental unit. I can't remember completely. I know that place does more big piece rentals of cool 60s computer panel blinkenlights etc.
Apex Jr is more a traditional electronics surplus with components and the the like but also various bits of electronic equipment as well as random weird stuff all surplus stores collect and some prop rental. I could see them operating off of the stuff Apex Surplus gets in bulk lots but is not really suited to their primary trade in props and part of the same business. Unlike Apex Surplus I don't think Apex Jr has ever updated their web design, looks pretty much the same as it was 20 odd years ago.
Or you just have an idiosyncratic inventory and serve largely institutional clients arriving with all sorts of different and complex needs, and therefore recognize that the most price- and time- efficient approach is to personally review their needs and prepare a custom bid.
Have a friend in the props business. He sees AI scene generation software replacing almost all of the physical props business. Props use huge 3D space, racks and shelves 20+ feet high and data bases of lists and photos to show the renter.
He has already been impacted, but he is sunsetting his full props business and amassing photo archives, along with the rest. He expects a shift to one time fees for photos
Most prop warehouses have gone out of business lately. It's a shitty business. The prices are sky high because it's so costly to keep all that inventory and you have to keep adding more all the time to keep up with trends, at the same time repairing all the broken and missing shit.
I used to visit https://skycraftsurplus.com/ Skycraft in Orlando that was very similar. Not only for props [1] but most of it was functional. If you needed it, they probably had it. And a rad space ship out front.
The first thing I saw was "proton packs from the original movie" and even in the thumbnail I could tell they didn't look anything like the proton packs from any of the movies. It's three tanks. Pretty clearly a surplus flamethrower.
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