The 50 Greatest Props In Movie History And The Stories Behind Them

Heckerling stated, "Each day, they go through outfits, and they see what goes with what. It seemed like there'd be a lot of repetition and a big waste of time. Now I used to play with cutout solids when I was a little kid, and I thought, 'What if I had cutouts of all my clothes, little pictures, and I could figure it out that way?' Then when computers came along, I thought you could computerize every garment you have; you could go through every day quickly. It was always something I thought would be a time-saver. I thought that before there were computers."

He wanted just a single figure, a woman standing with a cat over her shoulder, and he wanted her to be holding a long cigarette holder. The director, Blake Edwards, stated that the producers thought it was perfect, and they all agreed to move forward.

Staplers weren't made red at that time, so they had to paint them red. After people saw the film, they called the company trying to order red staplers, but they couldn't order them, so people started making red staplers and selling them on eBay, making a lot of money.

Jay Scarfone and William Stillman wrote, "The Wicked Witch's hourglass was re-created as a wood and papier-mache prop for the scene in which the Witch shatters at an angle, allowing the prop to glide the length of a wire in order to consistently hit its mark. The hourglass measures 20 inches in height and 11 ½ inches in width. The glass is handblown; its frame is decorated with six-winged gryphons."

Demi was taking pottery lessons, and a real working studio was created on set. There was a huge mess, with clay everywhere, but the final result was magical and unforgettable.

They designed the Talkboy with the grip where Culkin could slide his hand into it and the extending microphone, so it looked more lifelike. After the movie came out, the Talkboy were selling out everywhere and sometimes had people fighting over them in stores.

Russian stated, "Prince wasn't much for small talk. He could certainly express himself if he felt it was necessary, but in this case, he didn't all that much. He had this bass with him in the store that day, I'd actually worked on it before, and his main requirements were just that the guitar should be in that shape, it had to be white, and it had to have gold hardware."

William Sapp was the special effects property master, and he said in an interview, "God, of course, is an animated pillar of light.But after the animated lightning bolt strikes the granite of Sinai, I'm back behind the rock during the scene, lighting the gunpowder that makes the words and the shape of the tablets. Heston's tablets were those real granite tablets. Mr. Heston's stand-in worked with a lightweight plaster pair I made for camera rehearsals and lighting set-ups."

He stated that the shape was sort of born out of the Space Race and alien technology and that they didn't want it to be too big and bulky, so it starts small, but once the button is pushed, it pops up to roughly twice its length.

In the scene where Leatherface falls and cuts his own leg with the saw, he had a piece of metal with meat and fake blood between it and the saw. However, the saw heated the metal up and burned the actor, so his reaction to the pain was very real.

Owen Paterson was the production designer, and he said, “Lana and Lilly are true geniuses. I would have specific conversations with them about the scene. It takes place in a hotel that is essentially closed down. It’s derelict. They had this beautiful expression for it, which was ‘putrid decay.’ I can’t remember what was in the pills, but there were discussions with doctors, so if anyone had swallowed them by mistake, then it would be safe. It was just something that had to be blue and something that had to be red. I believe we used gelatin caps. It was quite simple the way that was set up. The other really interesting thing was there were certain shots that were physically impossible to do.”

When it is heated, it reveals a phrase in Black Speech: ‘One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.’ Jens Hanson, from New Zealand, was chosen to make the ring props, and after one was chosen, he made about forty copies for filming.

Hitchcock said, “It took us seven days to shoot Marion’s stabbing, and there were seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage. We had a torso specially made up for that scene, with the blood that was supposed to spurt out from the knife, but I didn’t use it. I used a live girl instead, a naked model who stood in for Janet Leigh. We only showed Miss Leigh’s hands, shoulders, and head. All the rest was the stand-in. Naturally, the knife never touched the body; it was all done in the montage. I shot some of it in slow motion so as to cover the breasts. The slow shots were not accelerated later on because they were inserted in the montage so as to give an impression of normal speed. This is the most violent scene in the picture. As the film unfolds, there is less violence because the harrowing memory of this initial killing carries over to the suspenseful passages that come later.”

They wanted it to look like a yearbook, and it had to be pink. The prop man also suggested that it look like those kidnapping videos, with the cutout letters.

They had to be very careful with the tickets because they would tear easily, but they did have plenty of spares. Everyone wanted a golden ticket, and this prop has gone down in prop history. The film even inspired the Wonka Bar, which was sold all over the world.

Reuben Freed was the production designer and stated, “The term ‘leg lamp’ is Jean Shepherd’s invention. Bob told me he wanted The Old Man to be in the window with the lamp and that it needed to be big enough to be seen from across the street. So, it had to be the size of a human limb. I got a mannequin leg and asked costume designer Mary McLeod for input. She brought me a single pump, and I added fishnet stockings because that’s what a bad girl would wear. For the lampshade, I drew on an image from a comic book that had the ‘40s look to it. That was the easy part. The difficulty was creating something that would break on command, that we could have more than one of, that could be electrified and stand by itself.”

James Cameron wanted everything to look as much like Titanic as possible. They said that the necklace wasn’t based on an old design and was heart-shaped, and was very expensive to have made. The stone is semi-precious and deep.

They had psychologists tell them that when people are stranded or in moments of isolation, they often choose an inanimate object to talk to because they can't handle being alone. There were only five Wilson props used in the film, so they were guarded closely.

"Before I was on loan in the department in Los Angeles, I worked with Steve Gawley and Richard Miller in the Highland model shop on the early designs for the hoverboard, which at the time were bigger, more like skimboards or snowboards, bigger, wider, almost like a truncated surfboard. The early boards were super complex, but when you start getting into production, and you realize they have to make multiples of all these things, it just got too cost-prohibitive. The silver lining is that the final version of the hoverboard is so simplistic in its shape, with crazy graphics, that the magic is the power inside of it. You don't understand it, but you enjoy using it. It's like a cell phone." ----- John Bell.

He said that he had a hard time finding exactly what he wanted, but he found them in a photography shop in boxes covered in dust. To make the handle, they painted projection material onto wood, took a wooden dowel, and drilled out a few of the Graflex lightsabers that were made. They turned out perfectly.

Schneider started designing the pin by carving wax by hand, but it ended up being made out of 14-karat gold and featured birds in flight. The arrow was added to stand for fighting back, and having it in the beak really makes it a symbol of courage and strength.

Adam Sandler was very involved and tested the sticks out and decided which one he wanted to film with. On the day of filming the scene, they bet on how many shots it would take for Adam to get the ball in the hole.

Robert Luketic was the director, and he stated, "Amongst the most ludicrous things we talked about in the movie were the color of blonde hair, the breed of dog, and then what this was going to look like. This pen was brought to my attention by my art department. My eye went immediately to the puffy pink ball. I had never seen anything like it. That was the pen you brought to the first day of Harvard Law. She did things on her own terms, in her own way, and in her own world. She wasn't going to conform. That pen said it all. And it's something the writers and I hear about all the time: 'The movie encouraged me to go to law school. Look at me; I can still be who I want to be.' Women say it was empowering and freeing. And the pen slapped me in the face. It was so apparent."

She said that they decided they wanted a digital clock, but they had issues with the lighting of it. As a result, they used a little older fashioned one but only had two for filming. They had someone make duplicates of the clock, but the one problem was the billboards because the clock they showed was not the clock that they used.

Miller stated that the studio was adamant about getting the box of chocolates. The prop didn't stand out, but that is sometimes what makes the best prop.

No one knew it would become one of the most beloved movies of all time, and most of the props were destroyed. Everyone that has seen the movie remembers Zuzu's petals.

He explained the flamethrower, "The flamethrower was a weed burner, and we made it a little more powerful. But I got it out of a catalog and adapted it to make it into a flamethrower. We were very careful with it, and Mel did it while on his knees playing Yogurt, which complicated it somewhat, but we rehearsed for a while before we put the flame to it. He did it!"

Rowlings describes the snitch in her books as the size of a walnut, with a golf ball being used in practice. The snitch had fluttering silver wings that were hidden when not in flight. The prop-making team made the snitch and said it was a really delicate piece of mechanical engineering.

The ghost trap was made out of metal but was very simple because it needed to look like the guys who made it. For the beam, they used an inverted pyramid because it pushed wide but came from a small source on the ground. 

Jo Johnston, the director, described the prop, "Cast foam carry boards were used in scenes where the actors had to walk outdoors or move around on the set with the closed Jumanji game. The hero boards that were used for close shots were made of wood and were quite heavy. To reduce the risk of a hero board being dropped and damaged, a mold was made from one of the hero boards, and reduced-weight carry boards were produced."

That was all hidden underneath a cheap kid's suit. They thought they would end up getting a more Hollywood version with animatronics, but because the film was so low budget, the producers told them to use the puppet again.

The phone doesn't have much coverage in the film, but that was the point. It was one of the first props they found for Juno's bedroom.

For this film, he came up with five romantic ideas for a man and a woman and asked the women in his office what they thought. Then he came up with the Bob Dylan signs or Mark's cue cards.

William Arnold, the production designer, stated, "We were initially going to use rubber frogs for most of the effects. Our special effects team created hundreds of them. We even tested a way to drop them into a scene. There was a conveyer belt, and a trampoline suspended high above a parking lot to see how they would fall and what kind of coverage could be achieved. The results were disappointing. This led to a rethinking of the problem and, in my opinion, a brilliant new concept. We would physically create the effects on the environment when hit by frogs. Then add the frogs digitally falling into the effects."

They put a polyurethane mask over his head, then the laser, and finally an inkjet printer. It was made with a sort of military-grade look, making it look used and abused. J.J. Abram was given the finished sketches to hang in his office.

Instead, they created Lemarchand's box out of wood with a wood stain. The etching is very delicate. It took roughly eight hours to make one of the boxes, and they made at least ten to fifteen of them.

Another piano was a silent piano because you can't have a live piano for the camera, and the last piano was a steel-frame piano for when it's thrown off the boat at the end and sank.

Joel Coen, the director, explained, "We had to come up with something that this guy was going to invent that, on the face of it, was ridiculous. Something that would seem, by any sort of rational measure, to be doomed to failure, but something that, on the other hand, the audience already knew was going to be a phenomenal success.What grew out of that was the design element that drives the movie, the tension between vertical lines and circles; you have these tall buildings, and then these circles everywhere, which are echoed in the plot, in the structure of the movie itself. It starts with the end and circles back to the beginning, with a big flashback. The hula-hoop just seemed perfect."

Spielberg is the one that decided they would use Reese's Pieces. The Reese's Pieces were used in the film to lure the creature, E.T., into the house. The film definitely made the candy Reese's Pieces very popular.

Then we both set about trying to find the perfect situation that shows how a man tackles a problem with a missing kitchen object. It was obvious that it was his apartment; you know, he just never cooked. Or he just bought himself a sandwich or something on the way home."

The guitar used in the film was one hundred percent designed and created for the movie. Immortan Joe needed a musician and got a heavy metal guitarist. He needed to make it function as a real guitar and a fully functional flamethrower.

They found a young boy in the community who was very smart, but because of how he looked, the community thought he was mentally disabled. He couldn't play the banjo though, so they had another kid crouch behind him and play the banjo.

That's what we need to do. I want to shake the mirror, and I wasn't to do something with water.' The mirror shaking was really very easy. The water was another story. It was a very difficult thing to do. You couldn't do it. I had everyone working on it. Finally, messing around with a guitar one night, I set a glass and started playing notes on a guitar and got to the right frequency, a right note, and it did exactly what I wanted it to do."

Evans made all of the gadgets, and the Batarang was based on the symbol of Batman. They wanted everything to be Batmobile-looking, and they made about twelve batarangs, some out of fiberglass and some with polished aluminum.

He had four people make one that would work, but he ended up spending about three to four months designing the top case that transported them in and out of their dreams.

The map was very detailed and hand decorated. In addition, the map has a full-color image of the Creator's palace on the back. There were three maps made: one for rehearsal, one to shoot on set, and an extra in case there was a mishap with the other two. 

Ponte stated, "All I remember was just trying to find out what you would put on these cards and how they were meant to look. So there was a lot of talking to bankers and trying to get a hold of cards. In the end, actually, the cards probably are, and this is my fault, more European than American."

He actually built it for the specs of his body and had a screen in front so he could look at Tom to see his actions. The whole machine was handmade, and there were many people involved with it.

The main character was really a Peeping Tom and was often seen taking photos out the window with his camera. The camera prop was an Exakta VX, which is the most versatile camera in the world.