Stembridge Gun Rentals

• 1. Introduction

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  Stembridge Gun Rentals supplied nearly every American movie or television production with firearms and blank ammunition from approximately 1920 through 2007. That is more than eight decades during which almost no Hollywood gun fired on screen without passing through the hands of one company. The story of how a former drill sergeant from Georgia built the largest private arsenal in the country begins on a film set where he watched soldiers who had no idea how to act like soldiers.

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• 2. A Sergeant Steps Forward

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  James Sidney Stembridge was born in Georgia after the Civil War and later served as a drill sergeant in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War. He made his way to Hollywood after that service, working as an actor and appearing in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1923. Before that, working as an extra on Cecil B. DeMille's The Squaw Man in 1913, Stembridge watched DeMille grow frustrated that most of the extras couldn't convincingly portray soldiers. Stembridge offered to coach them himself. That moment of initiative earned him a friendship with DeMille that would shape both their careers. During World War I, with war films in high demand and film sets struggling to obtain weapons, Stembridge proposed a solution: he would set up an arsenal. Paramount subsidized the purchase of the guns. Stembridge maintained and housed the collection and rented the weapons back to the studio, with the firm's first offices opening at 5451 Marathon Street on a Paramount backlot.

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• 3. The Gun Room

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  The film industry came to know the business simply as the "Gun Room." By 1940 the collection had grown to 7,000 rifles, 1,200 revolvers, and 200 machine guns, which included Thompson M1921s and M1928s. That scale placed it among the largest private arsenals anywhere in the country. Fritz Dickie ran day-to-day operations from 1927 through 1974, and in 1933 Stembridge's nephew Ed joined the firm. On the 7th of December 1941, hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US Coast Guard contacted Dickie to requisition the entire arsenal in case of a Japanese invasion. Stembridge also loaned weapons to the California State Guard and the California National Guard. When the guns were eventually returned, the company received a letter of thanks from the Harbor Defenses command, signed by Colonel W. W. Hicks of the Coast Artillery Corps. With its arsenal gone in those early war years, the company improvised weapons to keep war movie sets running.

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• 4. What Filled the Vaults

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  James Stembridge died in 1942 at the age of 72, and Dickie and Ed Stembridge, who had served as an ordnance officer during World War II, took control. The company rebuilt its collection using weapons captured during the war and demobilized military equipment, supplying firearms for training films along the way. By 1969 the 7,000-gun collection held two functional Gatling guns, a 17th-century German matchlock, a 17th-century German wheellock, and an 1850 palm pistol. Displayed among them were guns with direct ties to American cultural mythology: Matt Dillon's Colt single-action, Wyatt Earp's Colt Buntline, Bat Masterson's Colt Storekeeper, and Paladin's double-barrel derringer. Nearly all were fireable. At that point the company was manufacturing 430,000 blank rounds per year, and it supplied virtually every US production that showed a gun actually firing. By the 1980s the vault had crossed 10,000 weapons, though a family estate settlement forced the sale of most of them, with many going to collector Robert Petersen.

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• 5. Famous Frames, Famous Guns

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  Stembridge supplied the Thompson submachine guns used to kill Sonny Corleone in The Godfather in 1972. For the 1990 film Dick Tracy, the company furnished 25 Thompsons and rebarrelled, reblued, and reblanked every one of them. A single Thompson went to the set of Michael Jackson's music video for "Smooth Criminal," in which Jackson performed a 360-degree spin while firing all fifty rounds. Then there is the Chaplin case. When producers of the 1992 biopic Chaplin needed a rifle resembling the one Charlie Chaplin had used in the 1918 film Shoulder Arms, they asked Stembridge whether they could find something close. Stembridge had the actual gun Chaplin had used and supplied it directly.

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• 6. The Final Years

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  Most of the remaining arsenal went to auction in 2007. As of 2008, the company still held 22 Thompsons. By 2013, nearly every Hollywood film ever made had been supplied at some point by Stembridge, and what remained of the operation had relocated to Glendale, where it was being run by Syd Stembridge, great-nephew of the founder. The bulk of what was left eventually passed to Independent Studio Services.

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