Drive Times Five
Famous movie cars that aren’t what you thought they were
Sometimes filmmakers can’t quite get the exact car they want for a movie or television show. Sometimes they simply can’t afford to blow one up. Sometimes they are just lazy. We look at five famous screen-cars that weren’t quite what they appeared to be.
Vanishing Point
When the makers of the existentially angsty 1971 classic Vanishing Point chose a car for main character Kowalski to drive across the US, there was only one choice – the (then) allnew Dodge Challenger R/T. Not because it was an awesome car, mind you, but because 20th Century Fox executive Richard Zanuck told them to. He wanted to do Chrysler a favour for its practice of providing the studio with cars on a rental basis for only a dollar a day. Really. So Chrysler loaned five Challengers that had to be returned, making the final scene where Kowalski drives into bulldozers a bit hard to execute. But not if you slyly substitute the Challenger for a Camaro for the key scene. Which they did. And which people noticed.
Ferris Bueller
It is pretty widely known that the ‘‘Ferrari 250 GT’’ in Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off was actually a kit car built on an MG chassis. What is less well known is that the company that built it was effectively sued into oblivion after the movie came out. By 1986 Ferrari was pretty fed up with all the kit car makers ripping off its old designs. More importantly, it was even more upset with them using its logo and name on the fakes. So after a bunch of movie and TV shows came out in the early 1980s that used fake Ferraris they decided to get all litigious. Mark Goyette and Neil Glassmoyer built the replica and thought there could be a business in it, but Ferrari had other ideas.
Rendezvous
Perhaps the most infamous Ferrari-based celluloid deception of all time was in the short film C’e´tait un rendezvous by French film maker Claude Lelouch. And the car in question is never even seen. The legendary film is basically an eight-minute long highspeed (and illegal) drive across Paris in the early morning. Filmed by Lelouch with a 35mm camera attached to the front of a car, he also did the driving – in his own Ferrari 275 GTB. Except it actually wasn’t. While the sound of the engine was the Ferrari, the actual car he used was his Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. Not quite as romantic, perhaps, but a hell of a lot more impressive! It also explains why it was so easy for him to belt up over the kerb at one point and simply carry on.
Miami Vice
Like the Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day
Off the Daytona that Sonny Crockett drove in Miami Vice was also a fake. While Ferrari sued the makers of the replica, they also offered real Ferraris to the TV show. According to legend, Ferrari offered five Testarossas – one each for main actors Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, one for producer Michael Mann and two to be used in the show. So in season three, Crockett drove a white Testarossa. Ironically, however, a Testarossa replica (made from a De Tomaso Pantera) was used for stunt work. It was created by the same bloke that built the Daytona!
Skyfall
When Javier Bardem’s dentally-challenged villain shot up James Bond’s iconic Aston Martin DB5 in
Skyfall, it was a scene that made many an Aston Martin fan squirm in horror. After all, a DB5 is something of a rare car these days. Aston Martin only made 1059 examples of the DB5 between 1963 and 1965, and even the car that originally featured in the 1964 Bond film Goldfinger was a DB4-based prototype. But fear not, because the producers of Skyfall didn’t actually destroy a DB5. Instead they destroyed a 1/3 scale model of a DB5. Possibly because they were aware of the history and rarity of the DB5, but more likely because they couldn’t justify the cost of destroying an actual DB5. They do tend to sell for about US$5 million.