Gun Guys (19 page)

Strictly defined, an armorer is a gunsmith for a military unit or police department. “Here, it means you’re the guy on the set responsible for the guns,” he said, ushering me into a spare, windowless office on whose single shelf stood a Hanukkah menorah, a row of blank cartridges, and two life-size pistols made of glass—awards of some sort. On the walls were articles—from the
Los Angeles Times, Guns
magazine, and others—about the ISS armory, and Zanoff spoke with the practiced ease of a guy used to explaining his world to reporters. The armorer’s job starts, he said, with the script. Sometimes a screenwriter specifies a character’s gun, but usually not; usually the script just says something like “Murray pulls a gun,” and it’s up to the director to decide what kind of gun Murray pulls. Some, like John Milius and Michael Mann, really knew guns and would come to Larry already wanting a Sig Sauer P232 or a Walther P5. Sometimes an actor had an idea of what he wanted. Most actors and directors,
though, had in mind only an image and a mood they wanted to re-create on-screen. Then it was up to the armorer to find the gun that fit the bill.

Zanoff clapped his hands together and leapt from his chair like a fullback coming off the bench. He led me down a series of narrow hallways to a room dominated by a wooden table long enough to seat thirty people. On the table lay sheets of computer paper printed with characters’ names—The Ranger, Old Pete, Jesus—and atop each paper lay two or three Old West revolvers. “This is what we call a show-and-tell for a Western we have coming up,” Larry said. “The director’s coming in today. We’ve read the script and thought about each character, and we’ll suggest these.” Larry and his colleagues were offering a plain-Jane Colt Peacemaker for the Ranger—a subtle way to signal that the Ranger was not a man of violence. He’d carry a gun, but he wouldn’t fetishize it. But from what was laid out for Jesus, I had a bad feeling about him. Atop his name lay a shiny nickel-plated Smith & Wesson Schofield with an eight-inch barrel—the kind of flamboyant gun that tells the audience, without the audience even being conscious of it, that this character is an egomaniac who loves killing people.

“What if the director wants something anachronistic?”

“You bring it up. If he overrides you, that’s okay. He wants to tell a story, and sometimes that overcomes reality. It’s like, you’d never bring a real gun near your face in a gunfight. Sometimes, though, the director wants both the gun and the actor’s pretty face in the frame. That’s fine. The thing is, if you don’t bring it up, and he reads on the blog that he made a mistake, it’ll be, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ ”

“So how much of what we see is realistic?”

“A lot more than used to be. With the blogs and the Internet, everybody’s an expert, everybody’s commenting. Back in the Tom Mix movies, they’re shooting double-action revolvers. Totally anachronistic. You’d never get away with that now. One thing’s still totally fake, though: People don’t fly backwards when hit with bullets. We call it the river of damage. You crumple up around the wound. Even with a shotgun blast. People flying backwards looks good in the movies, but it’s not realistic.”

I was a little sorry I’d asked, and was starting to wonder if all this looking behind the curtain was going to spoil the movies for me.

Larry apologized for returning me to his office by a roundabout route. Two LAPD detectives were in the house, on a spot inspection of ISS’s inventory—something that happened two or three times a year. “We had the ATF here last week,” he said. “We told the LAPD guys, ‘Hey, we just
had ATF here,’ but no, they have to do their own thing. The guns we have here, they’re real guns. Some of them have been modified to fire blanks and will never fire live ammunition again. But they’re still real guns.” We threaded our way past the enormous modern tripod-mounted military guns I’d seen through the steel-mesh door.

“How do you get stuff like this?” I asked, being careful not to touch them, lest I inadvertently kill everybody in the room.

“We are firearms dealers. Really, you have to be, to be an armorer, because you have to be able to go out and buy what you need for a show, and you have to be able to transfer it legally to the people who will use it.”

Back in Larry’s office, he handed me a blank; it looked like a cartridge, except instead of a bullet it had a crimped-down tip. “A revolver, you can take and just put in the blanks. But a semi-automatic or a machine gun? To make one fire blanks can take twelve hours of work, because they rely on the explosion of the powder and the resistance of the bullet to cycle the gun. With a blank, you have no bullet, so you have to use more powder, and you also have to alter the gun to make it work.”

“You just plug the barrel, right?”

He snorted. Was there no end to ignorance about the art of Hollywood gunsmithing? “I could take ten Beretta 92Fs straight from the factory, and each one might require something slightly different to make it work right firing blanks.… Barrel plugs, changing the recoil spring—if I told you exactly what we do to guns to make them fire blanks, I’d have to kill you, because we have our own proprietary system. It’s protected technology.”

But the first thing he wanted me to remember about the guns I saw in movies was that most of them are rubber. “Unless you see it fire, of course.” He thought a moment. “And even then.”

Once again, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this.

“Cops standing around a squad room with guns in their holsters? Rubber. Cowboys on horseback? Rubber. Soldiers marching, or the ones in the background? Those guns will be rubber.” A rubber gun didn’t require having an armorer on the set, he said, so it could be rented from a prop house without paperwork. Even a protagonist’s “gun” was really, on the set, five or six different versions, depending on the scene. “In the scenes where you’re just seeing it in his holster, it’s probably rubber. If he’s just loading it, it might be a nonfiring replica.” If the logistics of sets and costumes allow it, a director will often shoot all the scenes in which the guns are visible but don’t fire, and then bring in an armorer with the real guns for a couple of days of shooting nothing but the firing scenes. “If
you see the actor firing the gun, it might be one set up to fire quarter-flash blanks. But another scene might require full-flash blanks, so that might be a completely different gun. The audience thinks it’s always the same gun.… When the actor’s going to hold the gun close to the guy he’s shooting, they might use a rubber gun and CGI the flash in later”—CGI being computer-generated imagery—“or they might use a non-gun.”

“A non-gun?”

He opened a desk drawer and took out what looked like a Glock pistol. Upon closer inspection, it was solid metal, like a paperweight, with a button where the trigger should have been. With a screwdriver, Larry removed the front half, showing me the electrical mechanism that created a big, harmless spark at the muzzle when an actor pushed the button. The gun looked incredibly blocky and fake. “Later, you enhance the flash, you add the bang and the tinkle of the casing hitting the floor, and it looks very real, believe me,” Larry said. “You’ve seen it a million times and didn’t know it.”

I groaned. Now he’d done it; I would never enjoy a gun movie the same way again.

The door opened, two young men walked in, and Larry leapt to his feet and, to my great surprise, began speaking fluid Hebrew. One of the men was slight, with glasses, the other a matinee idol, with shiny hair swept straight back. They chatted awhile in Hebrew, which, to my secular-Jewish ears, sounded like praying. I’m pretty sure they weren’t praying, though, because they kept laughing and dropping in such English words as “muzzle flash” and “ejection port.” Finally, the slight one extended me his hand. “Lior Chefetz,” he said, in that peculiar Israeli accent that manages to be both whiny and aggressive at the same time. “I directed
The Godmother
. Perhaps you saw it?” I hadn’t. The matinee idol introduced himself only as Nitsan—he was not an actor after all but a needlessly handsome handgun instructor for the Israel Defense Forces. I looked at Larry. “I was born in Philadelphia,” he said, “but I grew up in Israel.” He hooked a hand at us. “Come.”

Larry led us through a warren of narrow hallways to a chamber about the size of—but hardly decorated as—a child’s bedroom. Hundreds of revolvers encrusted the walls, their barrels slipped over dowels that stuck straight out, their grips pointed outward. The six-guns seemed to be loosely grouped by age, with those from the early twentieth century mounted low on the wall, the newest far above our heads. “This,” Larry said, “is the revolver room.”

Unlike semi-automatics, revolvers don’t depend on the blast of a cartridge to function, so everything in the room could fire live ammunition. “Some of these, though, have been to Mexico on shoots, so they have their barrels pinned,” Larry explained. “Mexico requires any gun coming into the country to have a pin driven through the barrel so it can’t fire live ammo.”
Except
, I thought,
the ones going to the drug cartels
.

Larry led us to the Western room—single-action revolvers protruding from one wall, lever-action rifles and Spencer carbines stacked against another, and, in the middle, a gigantic brass Gatling gun. The Colt that Russell Crowe used in
3:10 to Yuma
hung on a peg at nose level—I recognized it by the silver cross on the handle—and leaning in a corner was the gigantic eight-gauge shotgun lugged around by Viggo Mortensen in
Appaloosa
.

“It’s just an ordinary twelve-gauge,” Larry said. “We built pipes around the barrels to make them look bigger.” I looked close: Sure enough.

Onward we went, to semi-automatic pistols, perhaps eight or nine hundred of them, from 1896 Broomhandle Mausers to 2011 Jordanian Vipers. All had been modified to shoot blanks and would never again fire live ammo. “Oh, baby!” yelled Nitsan, the handgun trainer. A big sign on the wall warned,
DO NOT HANDLE THE GUNS
, but Nitsan couldn’t help himself. He snatched one off the wall, hefting its weight, then tucked it into his armpit so he could grab another, and another. He was like a child in a candy store; Larry finally had to ask him, in singsong Hebrew, to put everything back.

After the rifle room—hundreds of M1 Garands and German Mausers, the backbone of any World War II picture, stacked butt to muzzle to save space—Larry took us to the largest room of all, the grand hall of machine guns. Robert, the midwestern machine-gun collector, had drawn a distinction for me between collectors and accumulators. ISS was an accumulator. Full-auto weaponry covered every inch of every surface.
“Ohhh,”
Nitsan sighed, and muttered something reverent-sounding in Hebrew. Lior rotated on his heels, head back, eyes wide. Gangster guns, Army guns, Nazi guns, police guns. Piles and piles of machine guns. From Robert and my Wikieup, Arizona, buddies, I had a sense of what machine guns cost; the ISS collection had to be worth several tens of millions of dollars.

“This is
not
a collection,” Larry insisted. “This is a
working inventory
.”

On a table in the middle of the room lay three futuristic ray guns. “From
Avatar
,” Larry said, putting one in my hands. It was green, bizarre, but for all that it appeared completely functional. “We built these.”

“Out of what?”

“All it is inside is a Ruger Mini-14,” Larry said—a common sporting rifle. He opened the side of my green vanquisher of Na’vi to reveal the quotidian gun beneath. “We went through a bunch of designs on the outside, and when we got to where James Cameron liked it, we built them out of plastic.” He pointed to fictional manufacturers’ logos on the barrels. “I especially like this touch; our graphics department made those.”

“Why do you even need the real gun inside?” I asked. “Couldn’t you make the plastic one and let the actors use that? The flash and the sound is added later anyway, right?”

“You could do that, but it wouldn’t feel real to the actor. He’s got to feel the thing shoot. He’s got to hear it go bang and see the flash. Otherwise he’s just faking it, and it wouldn’t look right.”

“So this is for the actor’s sake?”

“Absolutely. He’s got to get into it. He’s got to be feeling it.”

I must confess: It hadn’t occurred to me. On the stage of a theater, sustained by a live audience, sure. But in a ten-second take, the movie actor has to be feeling it? So much of what went into the movies was fake—the rubber guns, the digitized effects—that I’d assumed the acting was a delightful sham.

Larry crooked a hand, and we followed him into a room that looked like a vast art studio in a high school. A dozen or more people worked at long benches; on the one in front of me, a big box brimmed with some kind of foamy blue plastic imprinted with the negative image of a submachine gun. “This is studio art and technology,” Larry said. “These are the people who make the rubber guns. I mean, that’s not all they do—they make everything—but with the guns, if I’m using a new one, one that we don’t already have rubber for, I bring it to them and they’ll make it.” He pulled us over to another bench, where a woman was pressing a branch of a tree, about three feet long, into a box of blue plastic. “We have a show coming up in which a character is beaten to death with a tree branch. She’s making the branch.” At another bench, a man flicked an airbrush to make the stock of a rubber M14 rifle look like wood. Even up close, it was hard to tell that the rifle was a fake.

But it was the next room—the rubber-gun room—that most blew my mind. If the real revolvers, semi-automatics, and machine guns had numbered in the hundreds, these hung from the wall by the thousands. A single protruding dowel dangled perhaps two dozen identical pistols by their trigger guards, and there must have been five hundred such dowels
between the floor and the fourteen-foot ceiling. On the floor by my feet sat an M60 machine gun that looked for all the world like the real thing. I picked it up; it was spongy and weighed hardly anything. The shiny surfaces, I saw, had been painted on.

“So you have a scene where soldiers are running through the jungle, they flop down and start shooting,” Larry said. “When they’re running, when they’re flopping down, this will be the gun. Only when they start shooting will we swap in a blank-firing gun.”