Creating pages for armories/prop houses
 

Multiple times over the years, we have discussed the idea of creating armorer pages for the individuals who handle guns on-set. (For a refresher: see here and here.) As we all seem to have agreed in that topic, this was impractical.

However, I had a thought: Maybe we could do pages for the armories/prop houses in order to familiarize readers with some of their more unusual/notable weapons. The goal would not be to track the company's entire inventory, but simply to identify unique weapons that show up in many productions. This would be in the interest of facilitating open-source identification of the weapons.

Example:

Right now, we are working on pages for "The X-Files". For its first five seasons, that show got its weapons from Tom Felcan/Felcan Enterprises. Felcan has supplied lots of weapons to sci-fi shows and movies, like the "Timecop" Taurus pistols that have also been in all of the "Stargate" series. A page for the company would feature a summary, known employees (with links to IMDB profiles), and mentions of notable work. However, then it would be formatted as a standard IMFDB page, featuring descriptions of notable weapons ("Timecop" Taurus, the "Blade: Trinity" MAC-11s, the Daewoo K3s modified to look like M249s, etc.) and screencaps of well-known appearances for each gun.

Anyone think this idea could work? Would like to do a prototype page for a test run, and Felcan will be my first. I'll develop the template, and add appropriate examples of films/TV shows/games using the company's weapons. After this, I imagine we could do pages for at least the following armories:

Independent Studio Services
Cinema Weaponry
Stembridge
Ellis Props & Graphics
Movie Armaments Group (Ontario, Canada)
Hire Arms (South Africa)

The more info we have available to folks, the better. We want to be the best possible reference for this kind of thing that exists, right?

Unfortunately, there were LOTS more boutique and smaller armories in the 1980s. Just the ads in the local Motion picture resource guide indicated that we had as many as 30 places to rent guns (of course few were as big as ISS or Stembridge at the time). Also, many on set armorers used weapons from their own stock (small amounts) or used weapons from other sources (I recall several films which rare guns were borrowed from their owners or museums and then returned). It would be near impossible to be complete in this endeavor since so many of the smaller players were never listed. And the state and feds have driven so many out of business since then.

Only now we have the phenomenon of lots of licensed on set gun wranglers who have no gun inventory of their own. Harry Lu is a great example. They're in charge of all the weapons, but they have no rental inventory of their own. But back in the day, there were way more players in this industry, especially in the 70s and 80s.

This would only make it appear that only a few companies did ALL of the work in Hollywood. Which would be incorrect.

I don't think that would be the intent at all, nor do I think it would have that effect (and we can add a note of caution on the index for armory pages). And we can always add pages for smaller shops that had unique weapons, should the need arise.

Even on a movie page where we list the armory, the heading can read: "Weapons supplier(s)", implying that the guns came from more than one place.

Obviously, we will never be 100% complete in getting every armory and accounting for every source, but that is not the intent. The intent is to make sure that readers can understand the origins and the back story behind guns that they are seeing repeatedly in motion pictures.

Knowing first hand how many of the minor players worked on films, and also were never credited, perhaps gives me a perspective that this is only going to give any sort of credit to only the BIG BOYS of the industry.

Sorry, That's how I see it.