The Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun wasused for spectacular dramaticeffect in the movie Terminator 2.

GUNS • OCTOBER 1998 93

When movie makers need to send some cin-

ematic lead down range they start by call-

ing Syd Stembridge’s Hollywood based

Stembridge Gun Rentals. The Stembridge family has

been supervising the use of firearms in motion pictures

since 1914, when Syd’s great, great, uncle James

Sydney Stembridge, working as a laborer on Cecil B.

DeMille’s Squaw Man — the first film shot in Southern

California — volunteered his expertise as an armorer.

Clockwise from above, perhaps one of the most recognizable guns to ever appear on the silver screen is this highly modified Mauser pistolused by Han Solo in Star Wars — sorry about the mess. A highly customized Mini Uzi was the weapon of choice for Martian security officersin the movie Total Recall. The Joker’s henchmen wielded this tricked-out Franchi Model 1962 in the original Batman movie.

by John Fasano Photos by Ichiro Nagata

From Harry Callahan To Han Solo, Stembridge Gun Rentals arms the heroes of our generation

GUNS • OCTOBER 199894

Stembridge found himself perform-ing similar duties on more and moresilent pictures, and after World War IStembridge Gun Rentals became thefirst official source of guns to the filmindustry. Today Stembridge rentsworking firearms to all the major filmand television studios, with tens ofthousands of guns available includingmachine guns from every era.

GUNS lens master Ichiro Nagataand I visited the Southern Californiacompany to get the skinny on how theguns we see in movies get there.Nagata and I began our tour under theguidance of Harry Lu, one of the busi-ness’ top armorers.

Lu’s first stop was the pistol room— lined on all four walls with hand-guns of every caliber and action fromflintlocks to Glocks. This room con-tains fantasy handguns like Han Solo’sblaster from Star Wars — a convertedBolo Mauser — and Bing Crosby’sblacksmith shop pistol fromConnecticut Yankee In King Author’sCourt.

I asked where all the guns camefrom. Lu explained that with rareexceptions, Stembridge has kept everygun they have ever rented. Every gun?He gave me an example: When theproducers of the 1994 Robert DowneyJr. film Chaplin came to Stembridgelooking for a rifle like the one CharlieChaplin used in his 1918 film ShoulderArms, Stembridge said they didn’thave one like it — they had the actualone Charlie Chaplin used in that silentclassic. They had rented it to him.

The Classics Of Today’s MoviesOkay, so what about the 1911 guns

that Stembridge supplied to Titanic’sproducers? They’re here, in a place ofhonor, so we had to ask about the datediscrepancy. An unnamed source atthe company revealed the truth: “Itwas a push. It should have been a 1908auto in .38, or something like that, butsometimes we have to make thesedecisions based on availability, andmore importantly, reliability.”

Lu explained that movie guns haveto be completely reliable with blanks(Stembridge makes their own). That’swhy Stembridge would steer the mak-ers of a World War II movies towards

This page, above, these timeless classics were used by a young John Wayne in the unfor-gettable movie Stagecoach. Below, in the hallways of the doomed Titanic, Billy Zane fired thiscustom 1911 at hero Jack Dawson, but is this pistol a movie blunder? Opposite page, top tobottom, this Beretta 92 “carbine” heightened the dramatic tension in the movie BrokenArrow. Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro faced off in the police drama Heat using these Colt 1911and SIG pistols. Look for this sixgun in Mel Gibson’s hand in the new action-thriller Payback.

The pistol room is linedon all four walls withevery kind of handgun

from flintlocks to Glocks.

GUNS • OCTOBER 1998 95

using Walther P-38s over P-08s. TheWalther gun is much more reliablewith blanks. You don’t want a cast andcrew of hundreds of people waiting forthe guns to go off or stopping in themiddle of a complex scene to clear ajam.

Fill Your Hands, PilgrimMoving out of the pistol room we

were faced with a wall of western riflesand gear. Here we saw the guns JohnWayne used in Stagecoach, as well asJames Arness’ sidearms from the tele-vision series Gunsmoke alongsidePaladin’s Derringer from Have GunWill Travel.

The most impressive room housedthe machine gun collection, featuringoperational machine guns from everyera and country. Ignoring the stacks ofHK MP-5s, the real jewels were theclassic machine guns such as theLewis Guns that shot King Kong fromthe top of the Empire State building in1933.

To our right were working JapaneseType 99 and 92 machine guns last seenin Farewell To The King starring NickNolte. Tucked in the back corner wasthe .30 Browning machine gun thatplayed a major part in the finale of TheWild Bunch. All of the Stembridgeemployees regard it with special rever-ence.

Space Guns For Space JockeysWhile Stembridge has tens of thou-

sands of firearms for rental to themovies, sometimes they are calledupon to modify existing firearms totake the place of guns that are nolonger available, or haven’t beeninvented yet. Here in the Stembridgemachine shop the gunsmiths whomaintain this huge collection of gunswork their alchemy.

Boxes of revolvers were coveredwith strips of burlap for duty as “futur-istic” sidearms in Kevin Costner’sWaterworld. For last summer’sStarship Troopers Stembridge clampedRuger Mini 14s inside fiberglass hous-ings, transforming them into futuristicpulse rifles — pulse rifles that clearlysprayed copious amounts of .223brass!

There was a Remington 700 .308Sendero squeezed into an Anschutzfully adjustable match stock for theClint Eastwood film Absolute Power.Looks great — but if you tried firing alive round through it the stock wouldcome apart like Monica Lewinsky’stestimony.

Lu even showed us “Lugers” whichwere used in films way back beforeany actual samples of the Germansidearm were available on these

the decade’s biggest action pictures,explained that Stembridge’s job beginswhen they receive a script from thefilm company. One of the armorers willgo through the film and determinehow many, and what kinds of guns arerequired. Then they will meet with thefilm’s producers and director and dis-cuss possibilities.

I was not unfamiliar with thisprocess. When I wrote the 1990 EddieMurphy/Nick Nolte action comedyAnother 48 Hrs., I had the two bad guybikers carry a worn 1911 and a ColtSingle Action. I saw them as throw-backs — spiritual descendants of theWild Bunch.

When the Stembridge representa-tive came to the studio to show thedirector Walter Hill the guns theycould supply for the film, they broughta 1940s era 1911 and a single action —but also a shiny new chrome DesertEagle .44 Mag. and stainless, shortbarreled .454 Casull.

You want to guess which set of gunsthe director chose? Rent the film andcheck it out. I could use the residuals.

This summer, when Lethal Weapon4 hit the theaters, rest assured that theblank-spewing hardware was suppliedby Stembridge Gun Rentals — rentingguns to movies as long asthere have been movies. $

GUNS • OCTOBER 199896

shores. The Stembridge machinistssimply created fake Luger bodies overSmith & Wesson revolvers. The cylin-ders were hidden behind a swingingside plate, and the curved trigger andtrigger guard matched the profile ofthe German auto almost exactly.

Two For The Price Of OneSince the demands of filming are so

rigorous, it’s important that a produc-tion have more than one copy of eachgun being used, especially guns whichwill be used by major characters. Formore strenuous scenes includingfights and stunts, Stembridge can evensupply completely realistic rubberguns.

These “fake guns,” cast from moldsoff the actual guns and painted tomatch, can be thrown, dropped, orwhacked against the head of a co-starwithout doing damage to the actor, ormore importantly, the gun.

Lu recounted how after they modi-fied a minigun to be hand held byArnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator2, they were informed by the produc-ers that the shot required seeing thegun dropped and hitting the floor.They quickly assembled a duplicate ofthe minigun that could be dropped onthe concrete floor, with a cheaper ver-sion of the one-of-a-kind hand heldmount on the “beauty” gun.

A year later Harry was perusingsome Japanese gun magazine and wassurprised to find that Asian replica guncompanies had chosen the stand-inminigun as the one to copy for their AirSoft pellet gun version.

The Hollywood AppealGun manufacturers cooperate with

Stembridge. They know that if theycan get their products into high profileaction films, it will stir public interestin the gun. When John Milius original-ly wrote Dirty Harry, InspectorCallahan’s gun was a 4" nickel Model29, but the film’s producers were onlyable to get 61⁄2" blued guns.

In fact, some of the S&W revolversseen in the first Dirty Harry pictureare Model 57 .41 Magnums, becausethere weren’t enough 29s available forall the various scenes. We all knowwhat happened after that: the Model29 became one of the most soughtafter guns in history.

In the recent Jean Claude VanDamme/Dennis Rodman action festDouble Team, Stembridge convertedstandard 9mm MAC 11s and C-MoreSystem’s Serendipity sights into FN P-90 space guns.

But who decides what gun will be inwhich star’s hands?

Lu, the man on the set of some of