Mad Props – On the Valorization of Commodified Nostalgia
Directed by Juan Paublo Reinoso and starring Oklahoma-based banker-collector Tom Biolcini as lead interviewer, Mad Props examines the hobby of movie prop collecting, the crafts of movie prop creation, and the medium of film to answer the question “are props art?” The answer seems obvious to me and is unanimous among the interviewees, but the film is nonetheless an interesting and reverent work. That reverence is an artistic weaknesses as the film lacks any measure of critique or special introspection and has a slight and occasional air of defensiveness – as if the intent to persuade turns to desperation. Nonetheless, Mad Props is a film which celebrates film by shining a light on the people that make movies beyond the actors and directors, and I’m inclined to celebrate that.
I’m less inclined to celebrate the nostalgia with which our society is currently resplendent and am feeling out the tension of mass culture as a door into all culture. People alive in the 1980s who can’t let go of Ghostbusters aren’t necessarily laudable for that (especially as it leads to terrible sequel after terrible sequel), but I tend to approve of teaching youngsters in Gen Z and Gen Alpha about the pop culture classics of yesteryear. Regardless, it’s interesting to see how film buffs acquire these collections, even if the investigation lacks some rigor.
The documentary begins by introducing us to Tom Biolcini, a banker who’s loved movies his whole life, crafting his own props and homemade horror flicks as a child. While his dream of working in Hollywood as a prop artist fell to the wayside, his love for the artistry of the tableaux never died. As an adult, he has a huge prop collection paid for by his evidently successful career as a financier and shares his collection hobby with his son Rocco. After showing us the Biolcini family home and collection (and soliciting fun anecdotes from Tom’s mom, wife, and daughter), Tom and Juan take us around the U.S. and to England and France to see individual collections, museums, a tattoo parlor that is also a prop museum, the Outsiders House in Tulsa, and a prop design facility in California. In all these spaces, we hear stories of what first inspired the collectors and how they think of props and movies, usually wrapped in nostalgia for childhood fixated around the blockbuster boom era centered on the 1980s.
On the one hand, I often find myself thinking these collectors have too much money. Like many experiences I have with entertainment or otherwise witnessing luxury and largesse amid signs of societal collapse, I can’t help but think that it feels like viewing the last people dancing on the Titanic. There are great sums of money at play – hundreds, thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent at auction on what one curator says were formerly considered mere byproducts of the filmmaking process. There are certainly more altruistic uses this money could be put to than permanent revival of childhood.
At the same time, there are perhaps more sinister uses – in a society of consumption and disposal, collecting art you find meaningful rather than consigning it to a landfill is not the greatest sin. Part of Mad Props’s early reflections focus on a loose community across the U.S. and Europe that collect art to be displayed. They start museums, they share their collections and cross-reference each other’s authenticity, and – while they fit the definition of “nerd” that encompasses most audiences now that 1980s nerd culture dominates American pop culture through a media whirlpool – most of them have significant others and social lives. A museum curating duo in France always looks for Dark Crystal merchandise at auction because the wife of one is a huge fan of the film. Biolcini shares his hobby of prop collecting with his son and of movie watching with his whole family. Several of the collectors (including House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan J. Condal) make jokes about their wives’ begrudging acceptance of their collections.
As such, there exists a tension throughout the film for the socially critical as we see a bunch of people spending money to acquire the on-screen tools of filmmaking – costumes, prosthetics, animatronics, set dressing – in a manner that depends deeply on nostalgia for middle brow mass culture art. It is a worship of uncritical populism that I feel a need to push back against even as a big fan of moves like Star Wars and Back to the Future Part II, if only because I feel the closing monologue over-fixates on minimizing high art – abstract paintings and the like. To be clear, the reason I think that minimization is misplaced is because I think an appeal to ticket sales and brand recognition undermines the investment of value into the art on its own merits. E.g., the animatronic skinned rattlesnake from Prey is still impressive even though the film wasn’t given a theatrical release for selfish corporate reasons. Conversely, seeing the B camera from The Ten Commandments was as meaningful to me as any of the costumes because it is a culturally important movie and a sort of historical epic seldom made anymore with a longevity that precedes the era of blockbuster mass marketing of toys and lunchboxes that this prop fixation arises out of.
The tools which produce pop art have value imbued in them by the artist at least as much as the audience, and it is in transitioning from discussing the fixations of nostalgic collectors to the memories of the craftsmen and actors that the film is at its most moving. This really comes across in prop master Alec Gillis and famed actors Robert Englund and Lance Henrickson sharing stories from their movies. Gillis’s collection is especially noteworthy – he and Henrickson tell stories about working on Aliens with James Cameron, but he also has animatronics from The Santa Clause 2, Prey, Mortal Kombat, and other films, and puts a tremendous value on the creation of connection with people in the audience through the craftwork of developing the pieces.
One thing I wish the film got more into was the extent to which the market around prop collection facilitates a secondary or tertiary speculative market. Everyone interviewed in the film – including very notably Stephen Lane of the Prop Store in London which facilitates so many auction transactions to private collectors and museums – seem in it for the love of the art. Granted, Lane is one of the pioneers of the market, so – while he talks about the cultural and historical importance of the artifacts – he clearly has entrepreneurial spirit and profit motive in turning moviemaking trash into treasures. Nonetheless, the extent to which these commodities are sold purely to accrue value is obscured. It’s hard to imagine there’s none of that going on (it’s a longtime large component of collecting traditional art and low art), but I suppose it’s not impossible.
I was impressed by the level of access Juan and Tom were able to achieve – there are prominent actors and skilled craftworkers I haven’t mentioned – as well as the breadth of movie clips cleared that strike me as an expensive undertaking all their own. For whatever my misgivings of the arrested development of American culture in recursive tailspin, it’s not as if I’m immune to it. I like movies, including many of the ones discussed and whose props are collected here. I like when people like movies and when they collect the things that resonated with them and share them with the world. The difference between a collector and a hoarder is in display – at least one of these collectors builds art to display the props atop and within, the exponential exemplification of reverence. And for what little we learn about the collectors and their lives, Reinoso and Biolcini depict them in such a fashion that, separate as we are in geography and money (I won’t be bidding six digits for an Indiana Jones prop at any point in the future), they feel like my spiritual cousins if not siblings.
In that way, Mad Props is an effective showcase. I feel like I should hate these people and their enthusiasm, but I cannot because I share some of it. Even if all the collectors were antisocial neurotic sociopaths, we would still have Englund, Henrickson, Gillis, and his team. But the collectors are nice on screen however they are off it, they mostly even let Biolcini touch stuff (and it’s not like you can hold it against them when they don’t), and he is a confident presenter even if he could have asked more incisive questions. There is some reuse of auction clips, probably too much time with the Biolcini family, and one interview toward the end which really flirted with being pandering or exploitative in valorizing the hobby as an equalizing playing field. There is a version of Mad Props that is more polished or more incisive, and that version would be better, but the version that exists here is mostly charming in its enthusiasm and may prompt further research. This movie fulfills the remit and maintains the vibe of the era of film which it celebrates; when more slips through, it’s a pleasure. And regardless of its critical shortcomings, it at least doesn’t feel as market tested and flavorless as the successors to the era its fixations were born out of.
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