movie cars and how fake they are

I remember the 55 in American Graffiti. I believe the car Falfa drove seemed to be a 4 speed, but the rolled car on fire has a automatic trans.

I took my kid to the new Love Bug movie and seem to remember some mistakes in the junk yard former NASCAR car she gets into. The car has 426 on the hood, but for some reason it just didn't jive.

It's funny that someone else noticed the posi burnout in My Cousin Vinnie before they talked about it in the movie too.

 

On the dvd they've got extras that show how they launched that thing up onto the interstate using compressed nitrogen. I forget how much it was but it was alot, slung that car up that ramp like it was a golf ball.

They also said that they used something like thirty six 68-69-70 chargers to make that movie, and most of them were bought from guess where.....EBAY!

 

George Barris has been in the movie business for a long time and he knows what production companies are going to pay for. Why make all that shit functional when no one will ever need to use it? It's just a movie prop, it doesn't have to work.

Interesting trivia: in one of the XXX GTO's, the gauge pods on the dash are beer cans with the labeling polished off of them. I believe that was on the stunt car, so you never got close enough to see it. I read that and saw pictures of it on the Ultimate GTO picture site.

 

I also noticed the cars in Walk the Line the first thing my wife said was you would notice that.I was also watching a HBO movie Walkout this weekend and it takes place in 1968-69 in East L.A,but the Chevy police cars are mid 70's.

 

When I was living in Massachusetts,my 64 Mini Cooper Estate was used in an episode of ,"Unsolved Mysteries" that was filmed in Charlestown.I got to watch how movies were made and got paid for it too!

The episode was supposed to take place in Ireland so they needed right hand drive cars.All they could come up with was my friend Steve's MG-Y sedan.As my Mini was left hand drive,they had to make a few modifications.

It had a wing on the rear of the roof so that had to be removed.They left the brackets on(to remove them required dropping the headliner)and taped over them with olive drab duct tape(the car was blue-green).To simulate right hand drive,they wired a steering column(some tilt wheel thing)to the right side of the dashboard and keeping the camera angle low,the real steering wheel was hidden from view.

Spent a couple o hours at the filming site,got all I wanted to eat from their canteen truck,and made $125 for doing nothing.They disassembled and re-assembled the wing.My buddy Steve got a,"walk-on" part and got an additional $250.

 

As I recall in "Bullitt," the bad guys' Dodge Charger loses something like seven hubcaps while Steve McQueen is chasing them in his Mustang. Great soundtrack of McQueen double-clutching, too.

 

i graduated from whittier high school,,the school they used in Back to the future,

,i was a sophmore at the time BTTF part 2 & 3 were being filmed(they made the two movies at the same time)
down the street from the school was a closed down supermarket with a chain link fence around it,,,that's where they kept all the cars for filming..

the parking lot was filled with 40's-50's cars with many of them never even being used for filming,, i walked by it every morning on the way to school,,drooling..
,i remeber very vividly a 1949-51 merc chopped copper colored and i was almost positive it was the same Pharohs merc from AG,,of course they didnt use it for the movie..
anyways,,they did most all there filimng after hours at night,,so we would head back and watch the filming it was very cool..

 

I remember seeing an episode of the show "Booker" staring Richard Grieco back in the late 80's... Grieco was a detective who drove a primer black 69 Firebird convertible with American 200's on it. In one scene, hes about to get in the car with his girlfriend, but before doing so he says to her "ya know what I like best about this car? I dont care what happens to it". Then he (or the stunt driver) proceeds to chase after the bad guys, sliding sideways into the street, and slamming full broadside into a parked car. I would guess this was a case of it being easier to re-write the script than to fix the car! The shot of them by the car before they got into it didn't show where the damage would have been.

 

Wow, we're all a buncha geeks, you realize that, right?

Anyone else notice the major f-up in the "Gone in 60 Seconds" remake?

Nicolas Cage and Giovanni Ribisi are driving in a minivan when "Johnny B" and his boys cut 'em off in front and back, get out, and proceed to shoot up the car, which has now become a beater from the 70s, I believe... never really paid all that much attention to figure out what kind of car it really is... but it sure as hell ain't a minivan anymore!

Longroof

 

In "Thelma and Louise", their T-Bird loses its fender skirts in one scene, and has them back in the next.

 

"Quadrophenia" set in England in the early60s has a very late 60s triumph sedan in one of the street scenes

 

in the dukes of hazzard movie when they are getting the general lee back after cooter fixed it they show the general with the head lights on reving up. but there is a close up of the closed head light door so you can read "charger". doesnt matter the movie rocked

 

I could only find one big mistake on the "Starsky & Hutch" movie....................... The whole movie! Stu

 

His favorites were always small dirtbikes with fairings and white saddlebags added to make them look like police bikes.

The absolute WORST move of all time for screwing it up was a motorcycle movie called "Fast Charlie, the Moonbeam Rider", with David Carridine. It was in the teens era, but many of the "antique" bikes were modern dirtbikes faked out to look old, including the "Moonbeam Special". The bad guys bike was a white late model Harley 45!!! There were some genuine old bikes in the movie, I think it was filmed in Oklahoma. The guys with old bikes had a lot of fun, but none of them thought it was a great movie. I enjoy it the same way I enjoy early Godzilla movies. Unintentional comedy, the best kind!

 

I hate to ruin the effect, but in "Walk the Line" ... that guy who is supposed to be Johnny Cash ... IS NOT ACTUALLY JOHNNY CASH!

The actual person shown is Jaoquin Phoenix, who is easily several years younger than the real Cash.

When I found this out, I felt duped!

 

They filmed all of the sequences in the "Bullit" chase scene from 3 or 4 different angles and showed each angle shot as a continuous (sp) part of the chase. That's why you see things like them passing the same car 3 or 4 times and loosing 7 hubcaps. It's still my all time favorite chase scene.

Has anyone here seen the early '70s New York police drama with Roy Scheider called "The Seven Ups"? There is a bitchin' car chase through Manhattan with Schieder's character driving a Pontiac Ventura chasing the bad guys in a Bonneville 4 door. The chase is almost identical to the "Bullit" chase (they even found some hills to jump), and the guy driving the Bonneville is actually the same guy who drove the "Bullit" Challenger, but he has long hair in this one. The movie wasn't all that good, but it is worth a watch for the killer car chase.

 

I am a storyboard artist and sometimes get to hang out during shoots. To illustrate the point of "fake", here are some photos to show just how much work goes into capturing something on camera. This might be interesting to some of you.

While I love movies, I am always very conscious of the production and how the shots are put together. When you consider how many things need to come together, it's amazing that any movies are made at all.

The stunt cars get destroyed in use, and as someone pointed out, the cars are beat back into shape and rattlecanned on set just to keep them going.



Camera rig to capture interior shots of driver:




Motorcycle sidecar rig used film low angle chase shots:




You can see this particular commercial at
http://www.sonyericsson.com/walkmanphone
click on "watch the ad". I offer this up because it has car chases and explosions -- stuff HAMBers might like.

 

In Gone in 60 Seconds...didnt Giovanni chain the front wheels of the car to the big rig and the rear wheels came out? Or vice versa? I think it was reversed...

 

Ok the Shelby in gone in 60 sec, was a 67, but in one quick shot it had a 68 door panel on it. The secne was maybe .5 sec but I know what I saw.

 

Nobody has mentioned the fiberglass cars in Pearl Harbor that got shot up. I don't know why they didn't shoot up real steel... stupid movies.

 

I just had this conversation earlier today about how cars are so inaccurate in movies. I guess there are a lot of inaccuracies in the new movie 'Capote'. However it was agreed that the tech director really did his homework in 'World's Fastest Indian' car wise. The cars seemed to be perfect for the time period and location including Burt's car down under.

 

You're not gonna believe this, but the cars aren't the only fake thing in that Walk the Line...That wasn't really Johnny Cash, but someone pretending to be Johnny Cash.

 

StratoStreaker, THANK YOU!! I am laughing so hard I t hink I am crying! That was great!!!!!!!!

 

Ain't it the truth! I was disappointed to find out that ALL the CSI shows, (Miami, NY and the one from Vegas) are actually filmed in Hollywood!

Once and a while they throw in some footage taken from a chopper flying around the places the show is SUPPOSED to be taking place in!!

I spotted an episode of CSI Miami the other night, where a couple of the cars had California plates. Someone goofed!

 

It seems they went to great lengths to make sure everything was "period perfect." Even the timming stand and the clocks were correct.
Many of the extras in the pit area at Bonneville were actually people who had been there when Burt set the record. (which still stands today! )

And, the show opens here TOMOROW!!!

 

Another movie I saw that had a lot of mistakes was the one about evel kenivel if I spelled it right. at the begining the show the time being in the early 50's but the police officer is driving a 57 ford. Plus later in the movie you can see some mid 90's pickups in the back ground when it was suppose to be in the 70's.

I also got the nudge from my wife for noticing the wheels in walk the line. Glad to know I'm not alone on that.

 

I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the wagon from sin city--it was at a local show recently. "she is the only one that can keep this old heap running"---right. I would drive it to cali tomorrow. green screen is cool,though. I think it was yellow in the movie, but the car was actually aqua!

 

someone help me out with this one, but the thing that jumped off the screen in walk the line, was when the carters were climbing into the truck to leave the lakeside home, the truck was nice (relatively new for era) but all the weather stripping around the doors was rotten and falling off......at least thats what i remember seeing...anyone else??

 

I just saw that movie last night for the first time.

I noticed the weatherstripping right away. Yeah, that truck was supposed to be NEW...or at least only a few years old. The weather stripping looked like the ragged shit in my '63 Fairlane.

I always look at steering wheels and little bits and pieces of cars when there is a close up in the movies.

Most of the time you will see a steering wheel all cracked to shit when its supposed to be in a brand new car!

 

I'm just relieved to find out I'm not the only nut out there picking movies apart instead of enjoying them. I guess we could add this to the "You might be a HAMBer if..." list
"you might be a HAMBer if you go to a movie and pick out all the wrong era cars, wrong wheels and cracked weather stripping."