OBJECT LESSONS.(movie property master Peter Gelfman)

On the first day of principal photography for Marc Forster's next movie, a surreal psychological thriller called "Stay," Peter Gelfman, a property master, is overseeing a peacock and a peahen in Central Park. For the entire morning, the birds must pose calmly while the actor Ryan Gosling stands nearby, smoking and gazing forlornly at the gushing fountain at the center of the Conservatory Garden.

Of all the props that Gelfman has handled in his career (he's worked on the last eight Woody Allen movies), these are among the best behaved, partly because the female bird was brought along to keep the male in line. "Look, they're just staring at each other," Gelfman says. The scene also involves an eight-year-old boy who holds a shiny silver helium balloon, and fifty background actors who have been told to stroll about carrying silver bags or briefcases and old cameras and transistor radios. "We're trying to do a stylized thing here with background," Gelfman says. "A lot of muted monochrome. It's sort of subtle."

Roughly half of the props that Gelfman uses are his own, and he's always on the lookout for more: "If I see somebody on a great cruddy old bicycle, I'll offer to buy it off them." He shares, with two prop-master friends, a large warehouse space on a pier in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an Alexandrian library of stuff acquired over twenty years. Anything for which he doesn't have a just-right version must be found, bought, ...