As you may know, Hollywierd has certain practices in movie making that determine the way they "cast" props and wardrobe: The movie is often shot non-squentially so that special scenes can be lumped together. As a result, wardrobe and weapons must be readied for all of the scenes right up front. They will often have multiple copies of props and wardrobe to fit the action that the outfit has gone through. See the background documentary from Mel Gibson's We Were Soldiers Once, and Young. Mel had multiple uniforms with varying levels of sweat, dirt, blood, and grime to match the time in the film. Also, if there will be close-ups with a weapon, many producers and directors will go to great lengths to assure the authenticity of that weapon. A good example is Gibson's The Patriot, where the film company actually paid one of the foremost musket makers to hand build a pair of completely authentic, hand-crafted muskets complete with hand tool marks for the close-ups. Most of the rest were contracted from a weapons contractor or manufactured under contract to fill out the background.

Where is all of this leading? Look what this hobby will do to you: I was watching a rather good war film recently (The Great Raid) and started paying close attention to the Garands featured in the flick. In some of the close-up shots, the Garandicon carried by the star had the dark reddish-brown finish we've all become familiar with, a finish that is the result of years of the stock being re-oiled and the surface of the action being re-oiled while in the stock and the oil having run onto the stock. The rifle's action also had generous parkerizing wear as you expect from an older rifle. There were also lots of deep knocks in the wood that almost looked like the knocks from being stored in pallets. Now, when I've seen pictures of the rifles being carried in WWII, most of them have had most of their Park intact and the stocks have had a uniform color, far from that dark red-burst effect from years of maintenance. The Army unit portrayed in this film, the 6th Ranger Battalion, was described as the best-trained, least-proven outfit in the Army. So the questions become:

When the armorer for the film assembled his hero weapons, how did he do it? What level of aging was he striving for? Was the look intentional or haphazard based upon a lack of good research?

There were many sequences with 50 or more Garands running around the frame, many of them apparently shooting blanks. Do you suppose there are stocks of Garands sitting in some studio warehouse? Remember, films like The Longest Day had to have them in numbers, along with a bunch of other 60s films. Are they owned by a Hollywood contract armory?

The Great Raid was shot largely in Australiaicon. Do they ship the weapons over to Australia and back (with BATF rules these days? Harrrumph!) or does a film group or contract armorer in Australia own a bunch of these?

Can you imagine the rifles they needed to produce Band of Brothers? You can see spotless, new issue rifles during training. There are slightly aged ones for the drop into Normandy - though some of the guys went into the jump with fresh weapons. there are muddy ones for the rainy, muddy scenes. With the entire series shot in the U.K., a gun-free zone, how did they pull that off? Manyl of those appeared to at least fire blanks.

Inquiring minds want to know...

Bob
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