Aces of Trades: City native Randall Thropp is in charge of Paramount costume archives

LANCASTER − It's safe to safe Randall Thropp has a pretty cool job.

The 1974 Lancaster High School graduate is the manager for the costume and props archives for Paramount Pictures in Hollywood. He has been with the company for 21 years and lived in Lancaster from 1956 to 1976. In 2019 LHS honored him with its Distinguished Alumni Award.

Thropp's job includes curating movie costumes and props, preserving them, along with inventorying and photographing them. The Paramount collection goes back to 1914.

"When a film is finished wrapping, unless they're going to do a sequel, then they turn everything over to me and I decide for posterity what we keep to represent the film in the future or an actor's work in the future," he said.

For example, Thropp just received items from the "Gladiator" and "Top Gun: Maverick" films. He will also be getting items from the "Mission Impossible" franchise in the future.

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Thropp has curated some exhibits at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio over the years spotlighting movie costumes. In fact, he works with museums all over the world who may want to display costumes.

"We keep a huge online inventory of what we have so that when museums do call we can immediately send them photographs," Thropp said. "It's been a busy year. I've had more museum requests since January than I had all of last year. It's pretty overwhelming. It's pretty crazy."

Along with his work, a recent photo exhibit in France commemorating D-Day showed his photos of life in the United States from from World War I through World War II. He had been collecting the photos for some time and said going to Normandy was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

"I was blown away," Thropp said of the exhibit. "There are 45 of my photos and some of them are blown up like 7 feet tall. I was just blown away. I couldn't believe they did this."

The exhibit features his photos all through the exhibit in various sizes.

While Thropp lives in California now, he still owns a house here and visits about three times a year.

jbarron@gannett.com

740-681-4340

Twitter/X: @JeffDBarron