1-STOP SHOPPING FOR MOVIE FLIGHT PROPS.

Byline: Dennis Anderson Associated Press 

Need a reasonable facsimile of Air Force One, or 5 tons of space junk strewn across some asteroid where man has yet to boldly go? The likely place to find it is a Mojave Desert salvage yard.

When Jamie Lee Curtis swung from a helicopter skid in the cliffhanger climax of "True Lies," she was really clinging to a piece of Mark Thomson's Midas horde of junk stored lovingly at his business, Aviation Warehouse, about 50 miles north of downtown Los Angeles.

When Sir Anthony Hopkins impersonated Richard Nixon recently in Oliver Stone's film about the only U.S. president to resign, one of Thomson's mock-ups impersonated Nixon's flying office, Air Force One.

"Most of the stuff you see on the screen these days is ours," Thomson said, surveying the quarter-mile-long yard of aviation junk he maintains at his salvage yard. "Our main income is movie mock-ups."

Walking past his stacks of parts, wings, engines, cockpit sections and entire fuselages, Thomson looks at it all in mild wonder over his own success. He's supplied aircraft for about 300 movies during the past 14 years.

It's a pretty good line of work for a business flier who earned a living in the seat-of-the-pants world of general aviation. Thomson, 54, piloted planes for Hollywood stars such as David Janssen and Robert Wagner and tried his hand running a desert airport.

He even ran his business as a straightforward salvage yard, but he found the customers increasingly picky over the years in their search for the right part.

His fortune lay at his feet in the transformation of trash to treasure for Hollywood.

"When you're dealing in salvage, the guy always wants to kick the tire, or wants a different color," the ruddy, cheerful career pilot said. "With movie people, they get out here and they're cheerful and excited. It's 'Ooh and Ahh.' They're so used to dealing with papier-mache airplanes, they can't believe it when they see the real thing."

A Lockheed Elektra that looks like the one Amelia Earhart piloted into oblivion looms up like a ghost on the sandy desert. It was "flown" by Diane Keaton in a cable movie about the vanished aviator. Nearby, there's an expanse of crunched metal trash that spreads like a steel beach.

"For 'Star Trek V' they wanted 10 loads of scrap," Thomson said. "None of this stuff came from crashes. We just tear it up. You can't tell the difference between airplane junk and space junk."

His salvage business flourished until about a dozen years ago, when insurance costs and aviation-related litigation began to soar higher than the profit margin. But the salvage business gave way to an increasing workload in Hollywood. One production company made a good referral and others followed like crows landing on a fence.

"If you wanted to start a business like this one, you couldn't do it," he said. "The movie studios brought this work to us and we catered to them. If you're lucky enough to get in and you take care of them, it snowballs."

Even the introduction of computerized special effects hasn't slowed the parade of producers seeking things with wings from Thomson's warehouse.

"It hasn't hurt us," he said. "This is the busiest we've ever been."

The ideal combination seems to be a sophisticated digital special effect used in combination with the parts of a real plane. For the movie "Hero," the Aviation Warehouse crew used parts of two jetliners, with the fuselage sloping off a bridge over a dry riverbed.

"Then they filled the river," he said.

With water pumped by the special effects crew swirling around her, Geena Davis was rescued from the wreckage of the airliner.

As a movie pilot, Thomson carries a Screen Actors Guild card, but he says he holds no film ambitions of his own.

"I'd be a fish out of water," he said. "But I'll put an airplane mock-up anywhere you want it."

From the early days of film derring-do in "Hell's Angels" and "Dawn Patrol" to the high-flying supersonic thrills of "Top Gun," aviation has figured as an enduring theme for film. And Thomson figures it will remain that way as long as people look to the sky.

"It's the romance of aviation," he said. "Even when the practicality of it is over, the romance will remain."