Document Actions
Ellis Props & Graphics NFA gun list
After many years as a resource for movie gun rental prop houses, LMOLLC was asked to perform some appraisals and brokered sales of excess inventory. This involved several thousand NFA firearms, many with very interesting movie histories. We’ve been selling firearms and accessories to the movie industry since the mid 1980s, and have been a resource for expertise on use and period appearance of military weapons since then. LMOLLC has never been an on-set rental group, however; we only work with the prop houses that contract to do on-set work. After the initial Stembridge Gun Rentals appraisal and sale of over 10,000 firearms that LMOLLC handled in conjunction with J.R. LaRue (J.R. handled the Title I work other than assault rifles), many of the movie industry groups asked us to appraise and broker the sale of excess inventory to harvest some cash from the escalating values in the machine gun market.
During 1999 and 2000, LMO handled the appraisal and sale of the Ellis Props & Graphics (Ellis Mercantile) NFA registered weapons. Ellis P&G did in fact have an auction later on that included firearms, but not NFA items; these were all sold by LMO. Ellis P&G did sell many welded-up firearms among the thousands of movie memorabilia items that were sold on Ebay. Of the NFA items, there were 25 belt-feds, with a grand total of 386 NFA items. The listing of “E” number weapons has six that were duplicates in the original tagging and appraisal, a mistake made during data entry. This was corrected on final evaluation, but the numbers remained the same, thus the six blank entries in the Short Barreled Rifle section. The Short Barreled Rifles were “Pirate guns”, made for the ease of a gun handler loading blanks during filming, and they were made from original Trapdoor Springfield rifles. Today, a gun collector would cry if he saw what was done to these fine old rifles, but that work was done back in the 1950s when the rifles were a dime a dozen.
In looking through this listing for your firearm, please remember that the new Ellis owners who were liquidating this inventory did not want to take the time to research the film history on all of the NFA firearms. This was because most of the NFA firearms had a very high value already, due to the transferable status they held, and they decided that it wasn’t worth the time to increase values any more by adding “Hero” status. The records were physical pink cards, and they weren’t too specific about the movie or theatrical use, simply listing the dates in and out and to whom. Those records were picked up during the auction by a movie gun historian, who still has them, but is very busy and generally doesn’t have time to do research for people.
If model, manufacturer, or serial number has xxxx / yyyy, it means that this was an NFA item with a host gun; examples would be an HK94 with a LaFrance registered sear, an Uzi with a registered bolt, etc. These are listed in the serial number as the host gun first, the NFA item second.
I have left in the original descriptions so that owners can tell what their firearms looked like when they left the movie prop house. You should not assume that this was the only way that the firearm was used; it may have had all kinds of voodoo done to it to change appearances for different movies. If you want to investigate the guns further, cross-check IMDB.com and look up the armorer for the movie in question.
Also, remember that every gun used by a star had to have at least one backup gun. If the gun breaks or malfunctions during filming, the movie company will lose tens of thousands of dollars while the gun is non-functional. Thus, there are always at least two guns, and frequently more that qualify as the gun from the movie. Usually, the actor has used both of these during filming, so both qualify for certification. Sometimes a gun handler marks a gun in a certain way so he can remember which one was in which scene, but this is usually only done when it has been used by a major star in a big-budget film.
E382, E383, and E384 are M16s that are out of order due to having been out on rental during the initial appraisal.
There may be typos, as this is simply a reduced file of the original and I have not done any editing other than removing the names of buyers and other internal proprietary information. The file is in .xls format, and requires Microsoft Excel to view.
LMOLLC is providing this list for informational purposes only; we do NOT have these guns in stock, and therefore are not for sale.
CLICK TO DOWNLOAD ELLIS NFA GUN LIST