"When Hollywood Wants to Make an Authentic War Movie" Topic

…., This Is the Company They Call

"When the truck pulled up to the compound surrounding a shuttered 16th-century palace in the Himalayan city of Kathmandu in 2003, Christian Cranmer, an antique weapons dealer, knew he had come to the culmination of his 25-year obsession. Even better, he knew he'd make $25 USD million once he brought the contents of the palace back home to International Military Antiques' warehouse in Gillette, New Jersey.

Lagan Silekhana, a wooden palace that belonged to Nepal's prime minister, Bhimsen Thapa, in the early 19th century, had been closed for about 200 years and was covered in a thick layer of soot. Cranmer pushed open the tall double doors of the entryway, flicked on his flashlight, and finally saw what he had come looking for: a massive trove of rare muskets and rifles from the 1800s. He moved the flashlight around and saw Revolutionary War-era weapons piled in every corner, on the stairs, in the basement, and up in the attic, just like in the legend he'd been hearing about since 1969. …"
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Amicalement
Armand

Interesting story. Thanks,

Jim

A votre service mon ami!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Wish we knew more about what weapons he actually found. Are we talking Baker Rifles, Brown Bess in its many variants etc?

Snag must also be, if one suddenly releases literally tens of thousands of what had been real rarities, what does that do to prices?

this recovery and sale was over 20 years ago. he sold off some 6 and 12 pounder cannons. Brown Besses and Martin Henry's. it was quite a find.

An accurate "movie" is called a documentary. A movie is "based on a true story" and as far as accuracy normally misses the mark by quite a bit.

Wolfhag

IMA has (or at least had) a book and DVD on the recovery of the cache. They were partners with another company who also sold the recovered weapons for a long time until they transferred the remaining stock to IMA. I'm not sure if the prices of the weapons were depressed much at all because I remember seeing Martini-Henrys in the 1980's in gun shops for reasonable prices and thinking "Nah, I'll never want one of those" and eventually buying an 1875 Mark II from the Nepal cache for at least twice the price…There were many different types of weapons in the cache up to and including automatic weapons from WWII.

By the way, IMA also sells a recently published work on the Martini-Henry by Neil Aspinshaw that is excellent.

I have 8(?) guns from the Nepal cache, all but 2 are locally manufactured copies of British weapons. The documentary is poor quality technically but absolutely fascinating for military firearm fans. I've actually shot two of the guns, the Martini Henry is my favorite gun to shoot ever.

I had three Francotte copies from IMA and they were all essentially junk with cracked frames etc. I was unable to make one from the three so all I saved were some of the parts. I have a P53 copy in a box somewhere as a rainy day project since it also requires a pile of work. I restored a Gehendra which turned out rather well and was completely functional. It was a quality item when compared to the Francottes… I gifted it to a friend.

My MH Mk II from the Cache is in beautiful shape and occasionally gets swapped into my wall display. :-)

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand