Bringing to mind the apocryphal tale of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest story ever—“For sale: grown actor’s jock strap, worn a lot”—a new prop auction has opened up, allowing Dirty Grandpa superfans to take their picks of the movie’s memorabilia. The most notable item on the auction is a “stunt” jock-strap, shaped like a stuffed hornet, which Zac Efron’s character ends up wearing after his Dirty Grandpa (Robert De Niro) drugs him, leading to a night of partying and bingeing. We made inquiries to the auction site in question, in order to clarify what “stunt” meant in this context:
According to the L.A. manager of Prop Store, the company holding the auction, it’s “very possible that this was indeed used by Zac on set,” but that, thanks to the way props are built and used in major motion pictures, “the honest answer is that we will never know if this particular piece was the actual one used for the specific take that made it to the final cut seen on screen.”
Outside of items which may or may not have been close to Efron’s genitals, though, the auction is mostly made up of clothing worn by the movie’s stars, including De Niro, Aubrey Plaza, and Jason Mantzoukas. The auction is ten days away from closing, so bids are still low. That makes this a great time for the De Niro-shaped people of the world to pick up a paddle and bid on a selection of pretty decent looking suits, regardless of the awful, tired movie they were used in against their poor, nicely tailored will.