There is a great article about the use of handguns in films at the Guns & Ammo Magazine website. This is one of the few pieces I’ve seen that discusses the degree to which firearms are modified for use in film, employing blank fire loads, as well as the care and expertise that goes into not only the selection of weapons but how they are modified and used on set.
Hollywood Handguns
Sometimes the biggest stars on the silver screen are the guns.
By Garry JamesAbout a year ago I did an article outlining my list of the 10 best gun movies of all time. Now, I knew when I wrote it that I would be in for the grief any writer gets when he comes up with a “10 best” list, but I wasn’t prepared for the finger shaking I got from many readers and TV viewers who chastised me for not including their favorite films. But the one thing I came away with was how interested people were in the different, creative ways moviemakers employ guns in their craft.
While real guns are used for shooting, rubber casts (bottom) are made of them, which actors can treat more roughly. They are safer to use and do not damage the real article.
Firearms and theater were made for each other. Centuries ago playwrights found the dramatic possibilities in wedding the two, and they have been inseparable ever since. A notable example of this early liaison occurs in William Shakespeare’s Henry V (1599) wherein one of the supporting characters, named “Pistol” no less, in replying to a presumed slight declares, “Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire will follow,” effectively describing the workings of an early flint-and-steel handgun. Never mind that the play was set in 1415 and pistols hadn’t been invented yet–much less flintlocks or snauphances.
Later authors continued to feature handguns in their plays whenever necessary, although some of the early ignition systems could present problems in logistics and safety. The advent of the self-contained cartridge made things much easier, and special pistols and blanks were soon devised for stage work.
Motion pictures made the use of pistols and revolvers even easier, as scenes could be reshot if there was a misfire or bobble, and even if there were problems that weren’t caught on the set, they could oftentimes be fixed in the editing room.Lots of what you see on the screen has to be adjusted for technical and safety reasons. Just sticking some sort of blank in an auto or revolver isn’t necessarily going to get the effect the director wants, and the ultimate results are usually a function of the expertise of the particular gun handler or prop master on the film.
There is more than one kind of blank, depending upon what’s needed for a scene. Quarter, half and full loads produce different bangs. Some blanks are filled with flash powder, as it is possible for the camera to miss the discharge of a normal blank, though with digital photography this is becoming less of a problem. Black-powder blanks throw out lots of smoke.
Blanks are either crimped or have wads, the former being used more often in auto pistols for ease of feeding and to keep the wads from jamming the mechanism. All blanks can present a safety problem for the actors, and guns and ammo must be carefully monitored on the set. Today, most handgun and rifle blanks are crimped, though shotgun shells, because of their nature, still employ wads. There have been enough highly publicized gun mishaps on movie sets in recent years to make proper gun handling a top priority.
Sometimes a director will want to overstep safety considerations to get an effect he wants. A prop master, who is responsible for firearms on the set, has the authority to shut down things and refuse to comply if, in his opinion, a dangerous situation is being created.
As might be expected, shooting blanks in a revolver is no problem. They can be loaded like live rounds and fired easily. Autos present more of a problem, and depending upon the model and type of mechanism, they can require different modifications. All must have some sort of bore restrictor to build up pressures to work the action, while others might require internal changes to permit proper feeding and extraction.
There is also a special alteration that involves plugging the auto’s barrel completely so it can be safely pointed and fired at an actor at close range. Special “solid plug” blanks are used in this situation.
Those bullet hits you see are usually caused by small squib loads or by air guns that can fire blood or dust pellets. If necessary, the sound can be added later. With today’s computer-generated imagery, much of this magic is now being accomplished electronically.
In the formative days of the cinema, many of the big studios had their own armories, but there were also rental houses extant that had huge inventories consisting of a wide range of firearms and accessories. Today, because of legal and logistical considerations, no studio maintains its own firearms; all are rented. Some companies still warehouse huge general inventories, while others specialize in weaponry such as machine guns.
Because of the expense of putting a movie together, it is imperative that at least two of each type of handgun that is going to be used is available in case one malfunctions. On lower-budget projects, or ones where a particularly exotic firearm is needed, this may not always be possible.
A case in point: A number of years ago I supplied guns and was the armorer on the TV production “Roanoake,” about the Roanoake Colony in Virginia in the late 1500s. Admirably, the director wanted to use original-style matchlock muskets and wheellock pistols.
The matchlocks, being very simple, worked beautifully. But we had only one working wheellock, and the complicated mechanism, coupled with the humid weather at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, made keeping the pistol operating a real chore.
On some occasions shooting was held up for a considerable period of time while I disassembled the pistol, cleaned it, dried it out and tried to get it going again. The director and crew were patient with me in general, but I was more than disconcerted and just a little harried having everyone from the caterer to the producer tapping their feet and glaring at me with basilisk stares while I tinkered with the thing. I’ll never go through that again.
Many of the prop houses are adept at modifying existing handguns into different things–as witnessed by the Star Wars blasters (which were based on C.96 Broomhandle Mausers), flintlock pirate pistols that were made out of trapdoor Springfield rifles and some percussion guns modified to shoot cartridges because loading a cap-and-ball revolver on the set takes too much time and the ignition is chancy.
As in “Roanoake,” sometimes a director wants guns to be fired in their original manner for authenticity’s sake and because it is difficult to cheat their operation in a close-up. Again, unless time and budgetary matters prohibit it, more than one gun must be obtained and be ready to fire should a retake be necessary.
It is also common practice for rubber copies of specific weapons to be used in rough-and-tumble sequences so that the originals will not be damaged. Here, molds are made of the actual guns and the clones painted to resemble the originals. It’s amazing the detail that can be maintained.
Early filmmakers, with the exception of a few directors such as Cecil B. Demille and John Huston, were not all that bothered about the authenticity of firearms in their movies. Colt Single Action Army revolvers were used as Civil War guns at least as early as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), though in later years there was some attempt to at least make them look like 1860s-era Remington New Models by adding a phony web beneath the barrel.
Of late there has been more of an effort to get things right, as witnessed by the keen guns used in such films as Unforgiven (1992) and Quigley Down Under (1990.)
I love movies and I love guns. And while I can be somewhat tiresome to someone sitting next to me in the theater or in front of a TV when I spot some anomaly (or even when something is really done right), I still enjoy it all.
Jason De Bord