Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1531433
PROP CULTURE: Good morning, Chuck. Such a pleasure to have you as Prop Culture's very first interview. How fitting that we start with someone representing a company like Propstore, that truly understands the value of props! CHUCK COSTAS: Good morning. Well, great! So, this is the inaugural issue of the Property Masters Guild magazine! PC: Yes, it is. The Property Masters Guild has seen some important firsts this year, starting with our first-ever MacGuffin Awards this past September. We celebrated the significant artistic achievements of Property Masters in film and television. We also were very proud to present Emily Ferry with the first PMG Lifetime Achievement Award. So, here we are now with our first issue of Prop Culture! Well, that's who we are. Tell us who you are. Where did Propstore start? CC: Propstore started in 1999 by Stephen Lane. You would call him a treasure hunter. He had an early love of Star Wars and was someone who always questioned what happens to props, costumes, and set decorating pieces after a movie is over. Brandon Alinger, who's our CEO, joined Stephen later and shares that same passion and same vision. But the company started as an online business where they would go out, find items from different movies, some to keep for themselves, but then some to sell to the open public and make them available online to people to purchase back in the early days. And so, for a number of years, it was an online website, and they would have daily updates that would feature a variety of different films. I think Stephen recognized early on that although there were a fair number of productions being made in London, which is where he is based, a lot of the action was in Los Angeles. Brandon Alinger, who was a sort of fellow treasure hunter himself, was one of the early folks that was involved with the RPF (RPF Costume and Prop Maker Community). He made a name for himself going out to Tunisia firsthand to try to find items from the Star Wars franchise. PC: When did Propstore branch out into online auctions? CC: I believe in 2015 was the very first multi-consignor auction that Propstore ran. And since then, we've run auctions both directly with the studios, sort of official auctions for single titles, as well as multi- consignor