WORKING IN L.A. / THE PROP MASTER : Junk Is the Star of His Show

Bradley Blasdel collects things.

He has a bag full of silicone umbilical cords, some bazookas that shoot tomatoes, a hydraulic buffalo, five 1947-vintage American Flyer bikes, 22 stuffed cats and the personal exercise equipment Madonna used while filming “A League of Their Own.”

Not to mention about 300,000 other items he has stashed in a warehouse beside Ballona Creek in Playa del Rey.

Blasdel, 39, is what’s known in the movie trade as a prop master.

For a guy who got started in high school with a modest collection of Hawaiian shirts, it’s a job made in heaven.

“It’s great,” he said. “They just keep bringing me stuff.”

Blasdel works for the entertainment division of the Sony Corp., which used to be Columbia Pictures, Tri-Star Studios and several other businesses in the motion picture and television industries.

When the folks who made “A League of Their Own,” “Bugsy,” “Radio Flyer,” “Hook,” “Prince of Tides” and a lot of other movies complete their filming, they leave behind piles of junk--some of it very valuable.

That’s where Blasdel comes in.

All those props that help make a movie seem real--the furniture, the kitchen appliances, the dining room china, the ashtrays, the pictures on the walls--are trucked to the 70,000-square-foot warehouse on Alla Road, where Blasdel catalogues each item in his computer and puts it on a shelf, ready for the next time someone from Sony needs something.

Most of the items he gets are pretty mundane, the sort of stuff that turns up at garage sales. The difference is that Blasdel has it all catalogued as to when, where and how each item was typically used in real life.

You need four gasoline pumps for a 1950s gas station? Blasdel has them. You need the sort of dining room chairs Benjamin (Bugsy) Siegel would have sat on in the 1940s? Blasdel has dozens to chose from. You need a wood-burning kitchen stove from the turn of the century? Blasdel can offer you several models.

There also are the sorts of things that seldom turn up at garage sales.

Take the wondrously Rube-Goldbergian prototypes for the home-built flying time machine in “Radio Flyer.”

Since that film was, in Blasdel’s words, “a major flop,” there’s not much likelihood of a sequel, so the prototypes are being scavenged.

“They’ve been using some of the parts to build ‘Mad-Max’-type vehicles that don’t run on gasoline,” Blasdel said. “The movie’s about some virus that eats up everything made out of petroleum.”

There’s a collection of caskets for every taste--”fancy ones, simple ones, even a plain pine box, if that’s what you want,” Blasdel said.

There are jukeboxes, cannons from pirate ships, pinball machines and blacksmiths’ forges. There’s a complete array of medical supplies, including some ugly tissue samples (genuine) in formaldehyde and a handsome flexible cast (fake) with Velcro fasteners in the back that can instantly be adjusted to fit any leg.

There are breakaway chairs, dinner plates, ashtrays, teacups and beer bottles that can be used to bash someone convincingly over the head while inflicting minimal damage.

And there’s a collection of fake corpses and body parts.

Some of them, fabricated in foam rubber from castings made of real people, are spectacularly gruesome, depicting the mangled remains of those who fall victim to the title character in the upcoming movie “Dracula.”

Others, such as the ones used in the Civil War movie “Glory,” are less vivid, more closely resembling department store mannequins.

“They were scattered about among the actors who were playing the wounded on the battlefield,” Blasdel said. “Great production values! You don’t have the high costs of using real people--meals, things like that--and unlike actors, they don’t sometimes move when they’re not supposed to.”

The allure of show business had a lot to do with Blasdel’s becoming a prop man, but his love of collecting things got him started.

He started in high school with Hawaiian shirts--”most of them pure polyester”--for which he paid about 75 cents apiece. The collection paid off a couple years later when he sold the shirts for 20 times that much to help pay his tuition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

When a local stage production was looking for a prop man, Blasdel left school for good.

“We did things like moving furniture, hauling it onto the stage, then taking it back where it came from,” he said. “I got three herniated disks, but I loved it.”

The stage jobs led to film work.

“A prop man on the set provides the actors with what they use in telling their story--it could be a cigar, a gun, a fountain pen, a pinky ring or a shot of whiskey,” Blasdel said.

“Sometimes you have to show the actor the proper way to do something, like tying a fishing fly, so when he does it, it’ll look natural. If you’re going to teach him how, you’ve first got to learn how yourself.”

And sometimes the prop man has to do a little acting.

Blasdel recalled a scene from the “Mike Hammer” television series, in which actor Stacy Keach was supposed to roll over the hood of a car, land in the middle of the street, load a magazine into a .45-caliber pistol and start shooting at another car that was speeding toward him.

“The shot was being filmed from where the car was coming from,” Blasdel said. “They didn’t want to use a real car because of the danger but Stacy needed something to aim at, so they used me.

“Well, I had to run about a city block, and he’s following me with that .45. Each time I did it, he’d mess up--drop the clip or something--and we’d have to do it all over again. It was hot, and I was really puffing. . . . “After I did it the fifth time, he patted me on the back and he said, ‘If you run just a little bit faster, I think I can get it right the next time.’

“Then I saw he was laughing, and I realized he’d messed up just to watch me sweat,” Blasdel said. “I’d been had.”

But Blasdel said he didn’t mind a bit.

“You know, Stacy’s a great guy,” he said. “And getting to work with the actors, the glamour . . . this job is a lot of fun.”