Why Two Top Hollywood Showrunners Moonlight As McGuffin Hunters

In Hollywood screenwriting parlance, a McGuffin is a mysterious object of desire that drives the plot and motivations of the characters who relentlessly try to track it down: think the Maltese Falcon or the Lost Ark. But it turns out, hunting McGuffins is not just the preoccupation of fictional protagonists. People in the real world are spending countless hours and tens of millions of dollars pursuing everything from Dorothy’s ruby slippers to Thanos’s Infinity Gauntlet to the actual Maltese Falcon statue from the movie, and two of TV’s most popular showrunners are leading the charge.

Ryan Condal, executive producer of HBO’s House of the Dragon, and David Mandel, whose credits include Seinfeld, Veep and the current HBO hit White House Plumbers, are both longtime members of the tight knit community of prop collectors, and co-hosts of the hobby’s most popular podcast, The Stuff That Dream Are Made Of (whose title is based on a line from The Maltese Falcon).

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This month, they are strategizing about an upcoming auction of film and TV memorabilia taking place June 28-30 from Propstore, expected to fetch over $12 million for such magnificent McGuffins as Carrie Fisher’s ceremonial Princess Leia dress from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Peter Quill’s (Chris Pratt) light-up Star-Lord helmet from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and Kevin Costners’ autographed baseball glove from the 1989 classic Field of Dreams.

Those kinds of high profile auctions are starting to draw attention to an area of collectibles that has remained mostly in the shadows, but has lately seen a huge increase in dollars and activity as collectors shell out anything from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars for an opportunity to own a piece of film history and their own childhood.

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“When I was a kid, I loved movies. I just obsessed over them,” said Condal in a phone interview. “And I was also a collector of things like comics and baseball cards. Once I became a grown adult with a little disposable income, it became an obsession with owning these physical objects, artifacts from movies that I loved.”

Mandel, who also has a collection of museum-quality comic book artwork and Star Wars memorabilia, related a similar origin story. “When I first got to Hollywood and started working steadily [on Seinfeld], I was also living very cheaply, so I started to re-buy all the toys and comics and fun stuff from my childhood. Eventually, toy collecting led to wanting to own the real items. I won a phone auction for an authentic Star Wars stormtrooper helmet that, at the time I bought it, was surprisingly affordable, and from there I was hooked.”

While ordinary people might consider owning an actual prop, costume or artifact from a favorite movie to be a way to capture some of the glamor and mystery of Hollywood in their own home, even industry professionals who know how the sausage gets made are not immune from the alure. Condal, who produces a big budget sword-and-sorcery epic and coordinates the efforts of armies of propmakers and production artisans, says his most treasured possession is an actual sword used by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian.

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“A big part of collecting is how it holds a mirror up to your childhood. That helps me separate the reality of what I do day-to-day for a living, which I love, and the innocent, more magical, childlike memories of the movies that inspired me,” he said.

“I will simply point out that’s a lovely thing to say, especially when you’re working on a show with really cool swords and armor,” said Mandel. “I unfortunately travel in the [fictional] worlds of New York apartments and White Houses and homes in the 70s, where the props kind of suck. I mean, they’re well done. But I’ve got a living room full of like, Lincoln busts from Selina’s White House. I’m not really sure any of them shout out ‘this is a memory.’”

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Mandel says that knowing how creative, resourceful and hardworking the prop artisans can be when they’re on set only heightens his appreciation of the objects they create, and gives him insight into the flaws and imperfections typical of these kind of collectibles. Unlike other types of collectors who fetishize mint condition and “new-in-box” items, prop fans love how the knicks, dents and stains on their collectibles speak to the unique situation of being part of a real production, intimately evocative of those magical on-screen moments.

Both Condal and Mandel are evangelists for the hobby, but also wary that escalating auction prices are attracting speculators. “The pandemic drove up prices for all kinds of collectibles because people had all this money and nothing to spend it on,” said Mandel. “Bigger auction houses like Heritage, Sotheby’s and Bonhams are starting to get in on it, trying to move collectors into this new field. There’s a world of trophy hunters who are just going to be intrigued by owning this thing that no one else has. For example, I think something like Costner’s Field of Dreams glove is something you could easily see in the office of some Wall Street guy.”

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One thing standing in the way of the kind of massive financialization seen recently in the comics and collectible cards markets is the lack of a third party certification company and the absence of a condition grading scale. Instead, because film props are almost always bespoke and hard to assign an objective value, the market is dictated by the whims of individual enthusiasts and the competitive juices of bidders in auctions.

“It’s always gong to be fairly niche because the barriers to entry are so high,” said Condal. “Not the costs of the items, because collectors can find cool stuff in almost any price range, but just the knowledge and amount of investigation and research you need to understand a piece and what goes into its value.”

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He says one of the reasons they started the podcast, besides the opportunity to schmooze with each other and flex their own collections, is to increase access to that arcane knowledge so more people can feel comfortable. “When my manager came to me during the pandemic and told me I should do a podcast because podcasts were this big new thing, I don’t think this is what he had in mind,” said Condal. “He probably wanted me to do one that made money.”