Motion Pictures Car Movie Fun-Facts

Cheech & Chong Movie, Up In Smoke, the licence plate on Cheech's 58 Chevy lowrider MUF DVR, it was a great stupid/funny flick. The best personal plate ever. Thanks Leboski ! It was a 64.

 

Holy cow! That makes Bullitt look like a kiddy ride! Great find Clay!

 

It was actually a '64...

"In the film, Cheech & Chong realize that they need to score some weed before their band can practice, so they climb into Cheech's 1964 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport..."

 

A couple that were not listed,....1) in Hot Rod, during the drive in scene where they steal the rear wheels and tires off the Munn's 442 Cannonball (the big guy) wasn't quite in the bed of the truck as Brian punched it to leave, and does a back flip over the tailgate just as the scene changes. You can tell it wasn't planned, and I always wondered if he got hurt because it looks like its going to be a BAD fall, and 2) In Deadman's Curve, the Jan and Dean story, just before Jan's Corvette plows into the back of the gardners truck, it is switched for a junker with miss-matched body panels and a big primer spot on the left rear corner.

 

Not exactly a movie, but it was the pilot Spenser For Hire series. Pretty good chase scene, but wow, that Mustang took some abuse!

 

One that I have`nt seen mentioned yet."Those magnificent men and their jaunty jalopies".
Goofy but fun.
Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
Leo

 

I cant pass up an opportunity to add a fun fact from the greatest car movie ever, Smokey and the Bandit. I have assembled several 77 Special edition "bandit" cars and in the movie you can clearly tell the 77 Burt is wheeling around in is a 76 with a 77 nose on it. Pontiac wanted to showcase the new car but it wasn't released yet so they doctored up a 76. Here is a picture of Bandit and Frog with a 76 TA door panel. If you know TA's the 77 had a aluminum cover rather than the chrome "buckle" and black plastic cover here.


The stunt cars were 76's as well, here you can see the obvious "honeycomb" 76 wheels rather than the "snowflake" 15X7 wheels used in 77.

There aren't many changes between the years so you have to be a spotter.

I was kidding about the movie being the greatest car flick ever, it was actually the greatest car manufacturing promo film ever. A 2 hour Pontiac commercial. And it worked very, very well.

Bandit Billy, 10-10 on the side

 

Hollywood Knights..Great movie with a disappointing drag racing scene between the "rail job" & cobra..Didn't they blow the engine in Project X during filming ?


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This is an perpetual movie myth, dispelled by Bud Ekins himself in an interview many years ago. It wasn't a GT40.
He said that after the scenes had been filmed in San Fran, they were not happy with some of the quality of the sound recording from inside the car during the sequences, and as such he was instructed to take one of the Mustangs up to Willow Springs raceway with a sound recordist, and he spent the day thrashing the Mustang around for the sounds to be over-dubbed later in production. The session was cut short towards the end when the axle in the Mustang cried enough as the diff blew to pieces.

 

I noticed both of those too. I figured the big guy was sore the next day after busting his butt like that in Hot Rod.


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She was a cute little Frog.


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I remember a short lived tv series called "The New People" in the late 60's. A plane load of kids crash land on a Island that was built up with 1940s-50s buildings, cars, streets and so on to test a nuclear bomb but never got blown up. In one episode the survivors strip down the cars into early front engine water pumper dune buggies, my grand parents had one in Bullhead City Az in the early 60s, and they have races or something on the Island. I thought it was pretty cool being a 13 year old gearhead but then one shot showed a car had a Covico 3 spoke steering wheel! I was pissed, what the hell was a custom Covico wheel like the one on my dads '56 BBW doing on a deserted Island! Never watched the show again and it was cancelled soon after, I like to think I had something to do with it.

 

"The Blues Brothers", somewhere North of 100 cars wrecked in the chase.

 

LynnW
FoBW

 

Well nobody brought up "Heart Like A Wheel" about Shirley Muldowney. They open a scene with "Englishtown 1968" and Kalitta shows her son the "New Bounty Hunter" F/C, a 73 Mustang body! All the cars in the pits were dressed with modern decals, "formula 1" style scoops that weren't popular until the late 70s, even more in the 80s, Cragar Super Trick wheels and several with Centerlines as well. I always figured that a car movie produced to interest car people should have an editing staff that knows their schtick. I watch TCM for the cars in the 30s movies. One of my favorites, James Cagney, declares to someone, "Hey stoop! There's gears in there that ain't no Ford!" Another great car scene movie from the 30s, "SmallTown Girl" with a very young James Stewart as a co-star. There's a college game in town and the streets are packed with cars. She meets a wealthy guy in his Duesenberg, as they get ready to pull away he's frustrated with traffic and they sound effect him bumping a car out of his way to pull out. The car he hit was one of my all time faves, a 34 Packard! Of course when they arrive at his parents home there's not a mark on the Duesy's left side. The background shows all the best of heavy American iron from the time. A couple Stutz, several Auburns of different years and styles, Packard (of course), even an L-29 Cord now and then. Several of you are hitting some of the most popular stuff, but who can forget "The Leslie Special" from "The Great Race"? Courtesy of a google image search:


The car looked so elegant in motion, in the movie. If I recall correctly it was a Barris creation/collaboration and powered by a Ford 6 for the sound effect. Probably the only "Movie Car" I'd really like to have. A 2nd favorite (again with the 30s classics), the Pierce Arrow driven by "the mark" in "The Sting".
This is one really sexy big sedan:

There's so many more but I'd get booted for excessive bandwidth!

 

Nobody puts one over on me; you follow?

 

Thanks so much for all the posts! There were a lot of really great posts on here, and I really enjoyed reading them! Thanks for the awesome trivia, guys!

 

As luck would have it our family was in Las Vegas for a few days in the Summer of 1971 and upon our evening visit to Fremont Street we saw the film crew setting up for the Mustang scenes from "Diamonds are Forever". There were many hundreds of others watching as well. Finally, we had to leave and I'm sure they finally filmed everything in the night time AM hours. When you watch the movie and see the vast crowds on the sidewalks they were standing there for hours, waiting and watching.

 

My favorite is in American graffiti when they finally get the 55 to roll over. The first explosion the trunk flies open. Next shot it is closed. Great movie.


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^ And the spray bombed wheels seriously stand out.^

 

Ace, you are correct on the engine blowing. Right as Tony Danza loses to the Chinese bandits, you can see a huge cloud of smoke roll over the roof.

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Here's a clip from a lesser known movie called "The Reivers" featuring a fictitious Winton Flyer automobile. Oh, and by the way, it stars Steve McQueen. And the Winton Flyer was designed and built by Von Dutch. And it's actually a very watchable little movie.

 

How about Matt Helm's 'Shaggin Wagon"? 65 Mercury Colony Park all decked out for fun with the fair sex



Who'd have suspected this to be such a fun car?

 

The same '55 Chevy (and the big block) were used in both movies painted in AG and primered in TLB ....if the small block pictured is from an American Graffiti car it is most likely the thx 138 "puke green" 5 w coupe

 

The wife of the guy who made those movies claims there was one stunt car used for the movie and they still have it.... still running .... it hits a phone pole at one point in the movie if you run it on slo-mo you can see the exact damage on the existing car

 

Apparently both of the movie Mustangs have been found and restored the latest one was the stunt car with the performance upgrades unfortunately instead of leaving the camera mounts etc they chose to restore it to stock and lowered the value! (cue wa wa waaaa horn music lol)...... to me it always looked like it broke a spindle or lower control arm before it went off into the ditch after avoiding the guy who fell off the motorbike

 

Carey Loftin was also credited for bullit and french connection he actually drove in more of our favorite car chase scenes than is possible to list here. He, Bill Hickman, bud Ekins, Loren Janes and guys like them are responsible directly for most of the cult status these movies attained... unsung car heroes....man those guys could handle a car
http://jalopnik.com/5744523/the-real-story-of-the-chase-scene-in-bullitt

 

The 1977 David Carradine movie "Thunder and Lightning" the hero car is a black '57 Chevy 4 door hardtop later the car and whole scenes from the movie were lifted for the 1981 Jimmy McNichol flick "smokey bites the dust" two duds but good ol' drive-in Roger Corman car classics...
In the '76 movie " The Pom Pom Girls" Carradine's brother drive a red '55 chevy 2 dr. post as a beater they even throw rocks at it one scene...
One of my all time favorite car movies not mentioned yet is 1975's Nick Nolte and Don Johnson in "Return to Macon County" in which the hero car is a banana yella '57 Chev 2 dr. hardtop w baby moons and a "custom" fuel injection system they plan to race cross country to Cali living on winnings til they meet a crazy chick and it all goes sideways...apparently the car is still around http://www.streetmusclemag.com/news...eturn-to-macon-county-57-chevy-is-alive-well/

 

This is wrong. That happened at the end when the Charger was lost to the gas station. The cycle gig was a simple spin out in the gravel road side.

 

My Dad sitting in our 1960 Mercury in the movie "Cold Turkey". We still own the Mercury but Dad has been gone for almost 30 years. Years after this movie was filmed my Brother bought the 1964 Buick Wildcat, that is sitting behind the green 1965 Chevy, from the original owner and it now lives in the shed at Mom's beside my 1955 Ford. It had been sitting in an open shed beside a gravel road for several years and it had an inch of dust on it when we pulled it out of there but it cleaned up a lot better than I thought it would.