08/07/2026
Trapped in a World They Never Made: The Fifty-Dollar Prop
The mid-1980s in San Rafael was a unique time and place to run a business. My friend
Talmadge “Robbie” Roberts and I operated R & M Appliance out of a building at 75 Front Street.
Our days were filled with the heavy, unglamorous rhythm of a used appliance store—loading,
scrubbing, refurbishing, selling, and renting out major household units. It was honest, gritty
work, but our neighborhood possessed a strange, hidden current of Hollywood magic. Just
blocks away on Kerner Boulevard sat Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’s legendary
special effects powerhouse.
We were used to seeing film crew members floating around the neighborhood, but we never
expected them to walk through our front door with a shopping list.
It was late 1985 when a couple of crew members from ILM walked into R & M. They weren’t
looking for a modern, top-of-the-line refrigerator or a pristine matching washer-dryer set. In fact,
they skipped past everything we had meticulously serviced. Instead, they told us they were
hunting for the oldest, most basic appliances we had in stock.
“Do they need to work?” I asked, already thinking about the diagnostic time it would take to get
an old relic running.
“They don’t need to cool and they don’t need to heat,
” one of the crew members replied with a
grin.
“We just need the lights inside to turn on when you open the doors.
”
As it turned out, I had the exact vintage units they were looking for: a perfectly weathered
old-school stove and refrigerator. They were outdated pieces of junk to the average customer,
but to a Hollywood prop master, they were exactly what the set designers wanted. We settled on
a rental price of exactly fifty dollars.
As we were writing up the paperwork and getting ready to load the heavy appliances, curiosity
got the best of me.
“What movie are you guys working on, anyway?”
One of them looked up and said,
“It’s called Howard the Duck. It’s based on a Marvel comic
book.
”
At the time,
“Marvel” didn’t carry the billion-dollar reputation it has today, and the idea of a
wisecracking alien duck starring in a major motion picture sounded unusual, to say the least.
I was pretty proud of our small role in the production. I told family and a few close friends that R
& M Appliance had rented appliances for a Hollywood movie. It wasn’t every day that George
Lucas’s crew came into your store, and I thought it was a fun story.
Then Howard the Duck was released in August 1986. Unfortunately, the movie was a spectacular flop. Critics panned it, audiences stayed away, and
what I thought might become a claim to fame turned into little more than a trivia question. I have
to admit, I was disappointed.
Ironically, forty years later, I’ve still never watched the movie all the way through. I’ve only seen
the opening scene—the one where Howard opens my refrigerator. After that, I usually smile,
knowing my fifty-dollar prop made it onto the big screen, and that’s enough for me.
Looking back, it’s funny how a simple appliance rental became one of my favorite business
stories. To everyone else, they were just old appliances. To Industrial Light & Magic, they were
movie props. And to me, they’ll always be the fifty-dollar refrigerator and stove that briefly
became part of Hollywood history.
