Los Angeles’s big prop shops can supply a thousand films and TV shows a year, outfitting crime procedurals to Bible epics with satchels, spears, and pogo sticks. This spring, a manager at such a shop got a request for help with a different kind of production.
“One of our salespeople picked up a cold call,” a firm manager said recently. The unknown dialer wanted to equip sixteen hundred soldiers in the style of every major U.S. war. “The Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars One and Two, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf. The helmets, the weapons, everything they’re carrying,” the manager said. The caller wanted it in three weeks, in Washington, D.C. “We were sort of treating it as a believe-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing,” the manager went on. Nevertheless, four of his staffers were soon in the nation’s capital, acting as weapons specialists and prop masters at Donald Trump’s June 14th birthday parade. “At first, we were just told it was the Army’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary,” the manager said. “Which, objectively, it was.” Then the staff realized that they were outfitting the Presidential birthday spectacle.
Some of the props parading past the President, who rose to fame as a star of reality TV, had their own television pasts. For instance, cartridge boxes had previously supplied Paul Giamatti when he played a mossy-toothed John Adams in a 2008 miniseries. Canteens had been carried by Mel Gibson and his castmates in Roland Emmerich’s 2000 action flick, “The Patriot.” Other bits and bobs had been seen on the History Channel, furnishing the Continental Army and, on the CW, a vampire who deployed with First World War infantry in France.
The President might have recognized the khaki-colored field gear filing by, which had appeared in the 2020 HBO reboot of “Perry Mason,” starring Matthew Rhys. Flashback scenes show Mason as an officer in the First World War. “They rented, I think, probably eighty-five belt equipment sets from us,” another prop manager said. “They did a trench-warfare scene where they charged the German trench.” (Trump is likely a fan of the old Raymond Burr classic; in 2023, he angrily posted on Truth Social that court testimony against him by his former fixer Michael Cohen was like a “Petty [sic] Mason episode.”)
None of those productions, however, had a thousand soldiers in one place at the same time. The shop manager who first received the call set up a two-thousand-square-foot staging area in a warehouse, sorting the requested items by era. “You need to know when a rifle should be an M1 Garand and when it should be a carbine,” he said. He and his staff forged buckles for Revolutionary War shoulder slings—he has an in-house fabrication shop—and painted helmets in a period-correct shade of green. “Eventually, we treated it the same as if it was a movie,” he said.
Just before the parade, the manager dispatched a platoon of weapons specialists and prop masters to D.C. to receive and prepare the gear, which was shipped by bonded carrier. The number of soldiers had been downsized. (The war on terror was nixed close to showtime.) Every soldier had a personal fitting. “You want to make sure that, you know, no one was putting a harness on backward,” the manager continued. “Fitting a thousand people took less time than you might think. It was the Army, you know? There wasn’t a lot of horsing around.”
At least four prop or wardrobe companies participated in the extravaganza. (The managers requested not to be identified.) One manager regularly provides free prop service flags to a local Memorial Day celebration. “I’m sure parade-goers are sitting there, like, ‘Oh, these are the sacred flags that belong to the regiments of the state of California!’ ” she said. “What they don’t realize is that one was in ‘Dick,’ ” the 1999 comedy, in which Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams find themselves accidentally mixed up in Watergate. “And those other ones were on ‘The West Wing.’ ”
One prop-house manager who worked on the Trump parade mentioned a favorite job of his: outfitting a 2010 TV commercial for the Dodge Challenger. “Go to YouTube and type in ‘Dodge commercial George Washington,’ ” he said. In the ad, over elegiac fiddle music, a fleet of Dodge Challengers speeds through a bucolic landscape and scatters a regiment of musket-bearing redcoats. Cut to a grim-faced George Washington behind the wheel of the lead Challenger, which has a big American flag sticking out of the window. “The belt, the equipment, the flag—all that stuff’s ours!” the manager said. “You see the canteen? The haversack and the bayonet belt? That’s the same stuff that we sent to the parade.”
The commercial ends with a voice-over. “Here’s a couple of things America got right: cars and freedom.” The manager gave a short laugh. ♦
