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Some TV and movie props come with a focused set of concerns (beyond the actors swiping to remember important things). Telephone numbers, for example, were often prefixed with “555” in the movies to prevent accidentally giving out someone’s real number. Newspapers present similar problems, especially if the producer just wants a simple prop.
Enter Earl Hays Press, a newspaper prop maker that started more than 100 years ago. The company creates all kinds of printed materials for film and TV production, including books and magazines. But its newspapers are the best. Well, most of the screen characters have been learning what amounts to the same page for the last fifty years.
Real Newspapers Can Cause Problems in TV and Movies
Newspapers are protected by IP and copyright laws, just like any other product. If a TV show or movie you want to use The New York Times somewhere, they have to pay for the rights. Sometimes that’s necessary, like when a show wants to make a reference to a certain historical event. Sometimes, a given page can actually pay to be on a given product as a way to boost their brand. But in many cases, using real paper can create a host of behind-the-scenes licensing issues and can end up costing the product a significant amount of money.
That’s important because the page itself is often automated. It gives characters a simple distraction – say, an annoyed parent looking up at a mischievous child – and can be used to set a mood, such as a character reading a paper over morning coffee. The page itself or its topics are not particularly important. It just has to be a newspaper.
Earl Hays Press has offered the same Paper for 50 years
According to its website, Earl Hays Press sells more than 25,000 printed stock items as a way around licensing issues. That includes fake labels for food products, credit cards and driver’s licenses, DVD covers, record albums and comic books. But their newspaper is still a staple: bought from the stack cheaply and used in TV productions and films since it was first printed in the 1960s.
The props are very convincing, at least at first glance. They include headers above the banner in different fonts and formats – to separate, say, the top financial page from the full color site – and you can create structured headers for products that need a plot hook. The articles themselves are complete argle-bargle, and the non-traditional headlines show headlines like “Million Dollar Highway Repair Underway” and “New Government Tower Planned.” Pages even include fake sections like Sports and Classifieds to give a completely convincing prop.
The result is a subtle thread of familiarity across fifty years worth of TV and film. Earl Hays Press appears in everything from it That 70s Show to go No Country for Old Men to go Back to the Future. In fact, actor Ed O’Neill can be seen reading the same newspaper in both Married… With a Childn together The modern family. Sharp-eyed viewers can see similar titles and images, especially if the page is opened beyond the front page. (Similar points are often arranged in the same order.) It’s the subtle but unmistakable element of one of Hollywood’s classic make-believe purveyors.
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