Most reused prop

The most-used prop in film and TV history is The Recurring Newspaper, produced by The Earl Hays Press, a props house in Los Angeles, California, USA. The Recurring Newspaper is a dummy newspaper, with multiple pages of stories, pictures and adverts. This paper is mostly lorem ipsum (traditional printer's placeholder gibberish) but the front page is blank, allowing for custom stories and pictures to be added. The paper has been conservatively estimated to have appeared in more than 10,000 film and TV productions since its introduction in the 1960s.

Although the current incarnation of The Recurring Newspaper dates from the 1960s, the Earl Hays press has been making fake newspapers of various kinds since at least the 1920s. The inside pages contain a range of non-descript headlines such as "Valley Area Records Record Growth" and "Upper House Committee Opens Debate", along with black and white pictures of a middle-aged man in a trenchcoat (Earl Hays himself) and the girlfriend of the designer who put the paper together.