Gun Guys (18 page)

By the time I got to L.A., Stembridge Gun Rentals had decamped to Glendale, far from the Paramount lot. The scrubby brown San Gabriel Mountains jumped up, stunningly clear in the cool California sunlight,
as I threaded from the 405 to the 118 to the 210. I turned onto Magnolia Avenue and immediately figured I’d misread the directions: a dead-end street of mechanics, welders, and, at the end, what looked like a feed-and-seed store with a bunch of old cars parked out front. This couldn’t possibly be the throne of the Hollywood firearm. But the address was right, so I parked, snaked my way among the dilapidated cars, and pushed open a screen door. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom. Yes, it was a feed-and-seed store, with sagging boxes heaped on top of each other and a lot of old farm implements stacked up higgledy-piggledy. But wait: Those weren’t farm implements. They were guns.

“Hello?” I called. In the back, some kind of machinery clanked. I moved slowly inside, through a messy wood-paneled office that might have come from a 1943 movie set: wooden desk, overflowing wooden in- and out-trays, yellowish papers strewn over pocked, coffee-ringed surfaces. Tacked to the wall, a black-and-white poster showed Humphrey Bogart in
Sahara
, clutching a 1921 Thompson submachine gun with a gangster foregrip and a round ammo drum. “Hello?” I called again. No response. I started gingerly back through the mess, a little uneasy, worried that someone would mistake me for a burglar in this firearms trove and shoot me to pieces.

Beyond the office, I stepped into a drafty barn of a room. The underside of a corrugated steel roof soared high above exposed rafters. I moved among stacks of old files, bundles of what looked like Victorian costumes, and glass display cases heaped high with ragged cardboard boxes. I peered into a couple: a single-action Colt, a nine-millimeter Beretta—valuable guns, just lying around. More cardboard boxes littered the floor—pistols and revolvers had been tossed into them. Gaudy but cheap glass-fronted gun cabinets of the type you’d find in rural double-wides stood at random around the room, overstuffed with rifles and shotguns. A minigun—a modern, six-barreled machine gun that looked like the weapon Arnold Schwarzenegger had wielded so effectively in
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
—hung from nails high on a wall.

I crept alongside a rack of Civil War muskets and a Spencer repeating carbine, all falling over onto each other, looking as though they hadn’t been touched in years. In my hands, the Spencer revealed itself to be no Hollywood reproduction but the real thing, worth tens of thousands of dollars, seemingly forgotten. I set it down carefully.

High above my head, steel shelves bulged with rifles from the Spanish-American War and the Second World War, priceless pieces piled up like
cordwood. Only their muzzles and buttstocks were visible, coated in dust. Strips of dried masking tape curled from the shelves, hand-lettered .30-40
KRAG
and 98
MAUSER
.

The buzz of machinery grew louder as I tiptoed deeper into the dim vastness of the barn. In a lighted alcove at the far back, a man in a work shirt operated something that looked like a drill press. I forged ahead and extended my hand. He switched off the machine, wiped his hand on a rag, and gave mine a strong squeeze. He was in his fifties, balding, with a leathery face; he looked like a character from
The Grapes of Wrath
. I took him for a maintenance man.

“Syd Stembridge,” he said.

“Related to James Sydney Stembridge?”

“My great uncle.”

I noticed now that the machine he’d been operating wasn’t a drill press but some sort of ammunition loader. A row of brass cartridges stood in ranks on a conveyor belt, like soldiers.

“I’m making blanks,” he said. “That was the bulk of the family business for years: blanks.”

“They hard to make?”

“Tricky. A gun ain’t made to fire blanks. And when you’re shootin’ bullets, it don’t matter what the flash looks like, but in the movies, that’s everything.”

“You make all the blanks for Hollywood on that little machine?”

He laughed. “No, we’ve been out of the Hollywood business for four years. These are for Disneyland, for the jungle boat cruise.”

“Where they shoot the hippo? I loved that as a kid!”

“They don’t shoot the hippo anymore. Too many people complained. Can’t be shooting a
hippo
. Oh, no. Now they shoot in the air. For a while, they stopped shooting altogether, but they got too many complaints about
that
. It didn’t have the same drama. People expected the shooting on the jungle boat cruise. They just didn’t want the gun pointed at the hippo.”

“At the
mechanical
hippo.”

He shrugged. “You know, it’s funny about the jungle boat cruise. People love guns and people hate guns. Usually at the same time. When you work with actors and actresses, a lot don’t like the guns at first, but then they get into it. God, I remember working on shows, and you go out with a gun and the actor don’t want to touch it. Marthe Keller in
Black Sunday
: Did you see that one? She plays a terrorist. She was completely afraid of the guns. Came into the gun room when we were at Paramount,
and I could see she was uncomfortable. Didn’t want to touch it. But watch her at the end, shooting from the helicopter with a Madsen or a Smith & Wesson 76—I can’t remember. But watch her face. She’s really into it.”

I looked around at the ramshackle warehouse. “I’ve got to say, I’m a little surprised to find Syd Stembridge in the back of a shop making blanks with his own hands,” I said. “I mean, aren’t you Hollywood royalty? This is the great Stembridge arsenal!”

“No, we auctioned that off in 2007. Oh, we kept a few things. But most of this belongs to Mike Papac.” Papac was legendary, the armorer on such gun-heavy movies as
Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Con Air
, and
We Were Soldiers
. “We let him keep his things here,” Stembridge said.

As we made our way back to the office, he told stories from the set—of stripping the huge magazine from a twenty-millimeter cannon so that the audience could see Richard Crenna’s face in
Rambo III
, of failing to talk Sylvester Stallone out of twirling his .45 automatic in
Cobra
, of the day in 1982 when a helicopter blade killed Vic Morrow (who’d been Sergeant Saunders on
Combat!
) on the set of
Twilight Zone: The Movie
.

He kept telling stories, but my eye had fallen on the hand-lettered cards in one of the glass cases, and I crossed the room to look closer. Under a nickel-plated Colt Detective Special:
EFREM ZIMBALIST JR
.,
77 SUNSET STRIP
. Under a Colt Official Police:
ROBERT STACK, THE UNTOUCHABLES
. Under a P38:
FRANK SINATRA, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
.

“Good God,” I whispered.

“Yup,” Syd said proudly. “Those are Papac’s now, from our collection.”

It went on and on, from case to case. Steve McQueen’s .45 from
The Getaway
. Kevin Costner’s Star automatic (standing in for a .45 Colt) from the 1987 version of
The Untouchables
. William Holden’s pistol from
The Wild Bunch
. Holy relics.

“We sold off a lot of the good stuff,” Syd said. “Mel Gibson’s guns from
Payback
and
Lethal Weapon
, that shiny .45 from
Titanic
, Harrison Ford’s ray gun from
Star Wars
and his revolver from
Raiders of the Lost Ark
 …”

“I remember the
sounds
those guns made in
Raiders
as well as I remember anything about it,” I said. “It was the first time I noticed that gun sounds had gotten good in the movies.”

Syd brightened. “I worked on that! I flew up to Skywalker Ranch with Ben Burtt, who did all the sound for that show. I had a Thompson up there, and we fired it next to a cement wall. Not
at
the wall, but next to it, so you’d get the noise off the wall. That’s how we got that big sound. And
the scene in the bar, the big shoot-out? What they wanted was to re-create a Warner Bros. 1930 ricochet. Ben always said that Warner had the best ricochet sound. He didn’t know how they did it. So we’re out there trying to re-create it. We get out on a dirt road, a straight road. We put up hay bales with a slot down the middle, an alley, and we set up microphones all along the way. I’m inside the slot with a Smith & Wesson 76 submachine gun, firing single-shot at the road, trying to glance bullets off the ground at the right angle to get that whine.”

We were back in the front office by now, standing next to a framed black-and-white photo of a professorial gent of about sixty in a three-piece suit and horn-rimmed glasses, smiling at a pretty young woman holding two enormous single-action Colts. Behind them, the walls were covered with revolvers—the old Stembridge warehouse.
J. S. STEMBRIDGE WITH PATRICIA FARLEY
, said a yellowed strip of paper typed on a manual Royal, and, taped to the frame,
PICKING GUNS FOR
“
SUNSET PASS
,”
A ZANE GREY FILM WITH RANDOLPH SCOTT
. Patricia Farley, plump, laughing, and lavishly dressed in a plumed hat, had no idea that her career would last only two more years. I pointed to the picture of Humphrey Bogart holding the Thompson.

“A Stembridge gun?”

“Of course. That may be one of the ones referenced here.” He tapped his fingernail on the glass of a framed letter, and I bent close. It was from the Harbor Defenses of Los Angeles, dated September 3, 1944, signed by Colonel W. W. Hicks of the Coast Artillery Corps.

“Our appreciation is extended to you for your generous cooperation without compensation in loaning automatic weapons to the Harbor Defenses of Los Angeles at the beginning of the war,” it read. “Due to the critical shortage of such weapons on 7 December 1941, those provided from your stock were a most welcome addition to our defenses.”

“They didn’t have any guns!” Syd said. “The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, and for all anybody knew, they were coming here next. Stembridge had more guns than anybody. They called up here from Fort MacArthur, and Fritz Dickie drove down there with five Thompsons.”

“Weren’t yours all set up to fire blanks?”

“I think we’d just gotten a load that hadn’t been converted yet. So that put us in good with the Army. During the war, they’d do these war shows at the L.A. Coliseum. You know, stage a mock battle in the stadium, with planes flying over and all that, to sell war bonds. We helped them with that, and after the war we got the guns. Speaking of Thompsons, I was
cleaning up and found this.” He handed me a piece of yellow paper—a telegram:

“These were the guns they used to kill Sonny at the tollbooth,” Syd said reverently, smiling at the paper. After all the stars he’d worked with, all the magic he’d undertaken, even Syd recognized the telegram as a sacred artifact—the Hollywood equivalent of a scrap of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“So Syd,” I asked, “if Stembridge had all the guns that Hollywood used for eighty years and sold them all off, where are they now? Who’s got Hollywood’s guns?”

A lot of them, it turned out, were sixteen miles away, in the farthest reaches of the San Fernando Valley, at Independent Studio Services, “the largest movie armory in the world.”

A lot of Hollywood’s guns had been converted to fire blanks, but that didn’t mean they weren’t real guns or couldn’t be converted back. Given the lethality of what lay inside ISS, I expected a fenced compound, German shepherds, and an armed gatehouse guard scanning a clipboard for my name. Instead, ISS looked like a suburban medical practice—a three-story brick-and-glass box just off the Foothill Freeway, landscaped with oleander. Inside, no metal detector, no ID check, just a slinky receptionist who offered me coffee and sent me unaccompanied down a hall decorated with framed movie posters and mannequins dressed as everything from Civil War soldiers to jet pilots. For a movie buff, it was like visiting Santa’s workshop.

Finally, I came to something locked—a steel-mesh door—and through it spied what looked like a counter in an auto-parts store. A man in a greasy baseball cap stood behind the counter, writing up paperwork, while a couple of customers leaned on the counter, chatting. The counter was piled with all kinds of junk—tools, boxes, coffee cups, stacks of paper. Advertising posters covered its front and climbed the walls behind it, where inventory poked from high shelves or hung on display.

The difference, of course, between what lay behind the mesh door and an auto-parts store was that all the merchandise was firearms, from flintlock muskets to AK-47s. The advertisements weren’t for FRAM air filters and Duralast brake pads, but for Glocks, H&Ks, and Springfields. Yet nobody could mistake the place for a gun store. Behind the counter, on massive tripods, stood an M19 grenade launcher capable of firing five forty-millimeter shells a second and a Hughes M230 Chain Gun designed to tear up tanks. In the parlance, heavy shit—post-1986 hardware that not even the richest and most ardent collector could obtain. I pressed the doorbell and was buzzed in. Larry Zanoff bustled out to greet me.

He was a baby-faced man in his forties, somewhere between buff and roly-poly, with a buzz cut and glasses, jeans and a black T-shirt. I’d gotten his name from the credits of Steven Spielberg’s
War of the Worlds
—he was listed with the enticing title of “armorer”—and he’d handled the guns for many other films, including
Collateral, Iron Man 2
, and
Thor
.

“You have one cool job,” I said.

“You have no idea.” He gave a little laugh, as though discovering anew what a fun gig he’d blundered into.