THAT'S HOW THEY ROLL
Dax Shepard shows off his love of L.A. in his big-screen remake of beloved TV series
Remember “CHiPs”? The slightly selfjoshing TV drama about two California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers was a solid hit from 1977 to 1983.
Now Jon Baker and Frank “Ponch” Poncherello are back in a big-screen version — this time using all-caps “CHIPS” — that bears little resemblance to the series in numerous other ways. But even though the movie is a flat-out comedy with the Baker and Ponch characters totally re-imagined, it does share one quality with the original version: It’s totally California.
“The real star of the show ‘CHiPs,’ at least from my point of view growing up in Michigan where it was cold and gray eight months of the year, was Southern California,” says Dax Shepard, 42, who wrote, directed and plays Baker in the movie. “You would turn on this show and, for an hour, you would be at the beach, palm trees, warm sun.
“I think that California was as big of a star as Jon and Ponch were, or the motorcycles. Those things were the essential ingredients of what made the show so broadly appealing globally. So for me, it really had to be made in California.”
The film was one of the first major studio productions to receive tax incentives under the state’s improved $330 million per annum program that began two years ago.
It was shot on locations in Long Beach — “They have very liberal policies about riding on the beach, which we appreciated a lot,” Shepard lauds — Orange County, the Devil’s Punchbowl in the Angeles National Forest, at Elysian and Griffith Parks, Cal Poly Pomona, the original Original Tommy’s burger stand at Rampart and Beverly boulevards, in downtown L.A. (including some spectacular mayhem on the sincedemolished Sixth Street Bridge) and, of course, on freeways all over the area.
As a result, “CHIPS” is one of the rare modern movies that looks California real, due to so many states luring production from Hollywood with generous incentives like the ones Sacramento now offers.
“There was a backup plan about going to Louisiana,” TV’s “Parenthood” star admits, in case “CHIPS” had failed to qualify for California’s 20 percent tax credit on its $25 million budget. “But I really never let myself even consider that. It just seemed like such a bad idea; not because Louisiana is a bad place, but simply, California is in the title of this movie and it would be sacrilegious to shoot it somewhere else.
“And we would have had to have changed the name to ‘LHIPs’,” Shepard notes with horror.
There’s also a very Californian spirit to the movie enabled, ironically, by changing Ponch’s character to a transplant from Miami. Played by Michael Peña in the movie, Ponch is actually a hotshot FBI agent gone undercover to root out a robbery ring operating within the CHP.
In an ill-advised effort to enhance Ponch’s cover, he’s partnered with a hopefully unquestioning rookie. But Shepard’s Baker — a beat-up former competitive biker, otherwise incompetent cop and thoroughly sensitive L.A. dude — wants to help his new partner open up and get in touch with his feelings. And become a better motorcyclist.
When the movie is seen from Ponch’s point-of-view, all the potential and terror of the California lifestyle looms large.
“It is a bit of a fish-out-of-water story, only because Ponch is from Miami and he’s very macho,” Shepard explains. “He comes to California, which is very lefty and liberal, which I’ve come to love and has infected me in a positive way. But yeah, I play up a little bit of that.”
His competitive riding days long gone due to his countless injuries, Baker joins the CHP in hope of winning back his heartless, uninterested ex-trophy wife, played by Shepard’s real-life wife, Kristen Bell. He pours his heart out to the even more disinterested Ponch while they’re on patrol, but even the lovably dense Baker comes to realize that his partner is up to something else.
“My approach was to give them a Mars/ Venus dynamic,” Shepard says of Baker and Ponch, who were played, respectively, as a straight arrow by Larry Wilcox and an outgoing type by Erik Estrada on TV. “My character is, like, an emotional genius and then a dip---- on other levels, and Peña’s character is kind of a logical genius. So when they’re arguing, they’re both making valid points, but they’re just on differ-
ent planes. So, basically, it’s like a Harry Met Sally on Motorcycles.”
The movie’s Baker also pops painkillers like crazy. Shepard says that was less inspired by his own, long-abandoned hard partying days — when he was also learning how to act, write and direct at L.A.’s Groundlings comedy theater — than it is a reflection of the condition the pros he rides with find themselves in.
“I’m friends with a lot of these X Games guys, and it is not an exaggeration to say some have had 30-plus surgeries,” he explains. “They all have metal in them. I rode dirt bikes, and I had my shoulder completely rebuilt because of it. So I relate to Jon. The first 10 minutes walking after you get up in the morning are pretty rough. And when it rains ... . This winter in L.A. has been brutal.
“So I relate to all that stuff. Now I don’t get to take opiates to deal with it, but I certainly have done it in the past.”
That all informed the movie’s most outrageous comic scene. The guys have grown a bit closer, despite Baker’s accusations that Ponch must be homophobic because the Floridian doesn’t like touching dudes. But one rainy morning, Baker can’t move to get his pain pills or into the warm bath that will sooth his aching body. The only person to call for help is Ponch and, well, Baker sleeps naked.
Slapstick ensues, and Shepard performed most of it for a day on wires in a rubberized bathroom set.
“It’s our broadest sequence in the movie, but the reason that works is, I don’t think it’s just that a guy faceplants into another guy’s groin,” the artist reckons. “I tried to spend some time setting up who these guys are, just so you know what could be the worst thing that could happen to them.
“I had a merkin on; that was the layer of courtesy I added,” Shepard shares about his otherwise au naturel approach to the scene. “The day started off with me being very respectful to the crew and putting a robe on between takes, but as we were running out of time I realized well, I’ve been naked for three hours in front of everybody, so I lost track of the robe.”
Gearheads, like Shepard, should appreciate the courtesy applied to shooting the riding scenes more realistically than they’ve ever been done before.
“I’m just always on the lookout for any project that I think can combine motorsports and comedy,” says the filmmaker, who previously directed a $1 million entry in the subgenre, “Hit and Run” (2012). “Those are my two favorite things. I race cars and I race off-road, do track days all the time on motorcycles. To me, this movie was the perfect excuse to have two heroes on motorcycles.
“Also, no one had tackled a motorcycle chase movie in, like, a billion years. Now, there have been so many technological advances that allowed us to film them in a way where you feel like you’re on the bike. Traditionally, you had a camera car chasing a motorcycle, but that thing can’t go where a motorcycle can go. We had drones and electric camera bikes with mounts, we had helicopters and the Porsche Cayenne with the huge Russian Arm [a gyro-stabilized crane] . ... We just had so much stuff that they didn’t have on the show, or even 10 years ago.”
The result: seeing L.A. in a thousand new ways.
“I’ve lived here for 22 years, and there are areas I’ve driven by a million times that, now that we’ve shot there, every time I go by it I remember going under that bridge or climbing that hill,” Shepard points out. “Now, as I drive around the city, these places mean even more to me. It’s exciting that we got access to so many great places here in L.A.”