Long see no time!
SO…I’ve been a lurker more than a poster of late, but I experienced something so cool and ghostbuster-prop-y yesterday that I had to share it with you guys.
As a graduate student in LA, I’ve been able to make some money moonlighting in a prop/costume/set piece frabrication shop. The man who owns and runs the place has been in the business for about 30 years, and knows EVERYBODY who worked on EVERYTHING, pretty much. I’ve been able to meet a lot of interesting people in the prop-building world, blah blah blah, circumspect to the story, but you get the point. I’ve been learning a lot, and have been able to help make a lot of really awesome things.
He basically clued me in; many of the cool, high-tech-y props we all know and love - including, you guessed it, the Proton pack and other ghostbusters equipment - were put together from a lot of random pieces. Yes, we know the names of all of the pieces on the proton pack - the clippard valve, the dale resistor, the raethon crank knob, etc. When you hear about these parts, and the random parts used on other props like the Back to the Future Delorean (for example), you - if you’re anything like me - will visualize the propmakers going to some random salvage yard or place or somesuch and picking out interesting bits from piles, and utilizing them.
Friends, I have been to that salvage yard.
It’s called Apex, and according to my boss and confirmed by many of the older fabrication guys I work with - who similarly have been in the business for ages (and know a lot of the good folks who used to work at Boss) - it is THE resource for finding technical-looking stuff with which to build props.
You know all those trips to home depot we’ve taken as prop-builders, scouring the aisles, trying to find pieces that look cool and interesting? Imagine a store that is stocked with NOTHING but pieces that look cool and interesting. The place is enormous, and is stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes and boxes and boxes of amazing things. I was able to find a set of Dale resistors almost immediately, as well as the brass resistor for the ghost trap. I didn’t have long there - only my lunch break - but I’m sure I could have found a clippard valve and a crank knob if I wasn’t so busy being amazed.
I saw more ribbon cable - OLD ribbon cable - in that one place than anywhere ever before in my life. They also had an outdoor yard with mountains of cool stuff, including several airplane fuselages and what looked like SCUD missles (they might have been fuel tanks).
According to my elders, this is the place where pretty much every Souther Californian prop maker went - especially in the '80s - to get parts for props, and it’s almost certainly where the original ghostbusters prop guys went when the originals were being constructed.
