Collector’s movie cars star in show at museum.
Local collector’s cars are movie stars, and they’re getting their close-up in exhibit
Bob Wills own two Batmobiles, but he’s only driven one of them — and he did it just once.
He had just spent $160,000 on the car, a reproduction of the one driven by Adam West in the 1960s TV series, about four years ago at a Sotheby’s auction when he decided to give it a spin. He swiftly discovered that the curved windshield may look cool but it’s no safety feature.
“It’s like looking through a fishbowl,” he said. “And so I’m scared to death, driving down I-10, and people are trying to take pictures — I could open my window and I could touch the person, they were this close to me. So I said, ‘I’m never going to do that again.’ ”
Instead Wills, who owns the ad and marketing agency The PM Group, gets around in a Lexus. And he shows off his cars at events, theme parks and, through April 11, at the San Antonio Museum of Art. The museum show, titled “Movie Metal,” includes both his Batmobiles, a Batcycle, a Delorean from “Back to the Future,” an “A-team” van and the F-1 race car driven by Tony Stark in a pivotal scene in “Iron Man 2.” The cars are a mix of reproductions and vehicles that have appeared in the movies.
The exhibit also includes sculptures Wills commissioned based on the the “Transformers” characters Optimus Prime and
Bumblebee, and the creature the Predator from the sci-fi franchise.
“Movie Metal” has proven popular with visitors, said Emily Sano, co-interim director of the museum.
“We’re so excited by the fact that we hit onto something that really has popular appeal and brings in a diverse audience,” she said. “What is remarkable to us is that it’s a local collection. We didn’t get it from anyplace else.”
“Movie Metal” is just part of Wills’ collection of 40 vehicles. He owns a “Ghostbusters” hearse, a Zap Em van from “Men in Black,” a Mystery Machine based on the van the gang drives in “Scooby-doo” and a car based on Lightning Mcqueen, the bright red star of Pixar’s “Cars” franchise.
The cars aren’t driven, but they are cared for to preserve the possibility that they could be.
“We make sure we start ’em up every month so the seals and the engines and the transmissions don’t dry out,” said Wills, 68.
The museum show is a bit of a preview: Wills is making plans
to open an attraction later this year or in 2022 that will put his collection on permanent display. The site, which he said will be called the Hollywood Car Show, will be somewhere in San Antonio, and he expects its programming will include celebrity appearances.
He has experience with that: PMX Events, an arm of The PM Group, produces Celebrity Fan Fast. The comic convention launched in 2018 with the star power of Jason Momoa and Ben Affleck, among others.
Last year’s fest was canceled because of COVID-19. Plans are
being made for a Celebrity Fan Fast later this year, depending on the state of the pandemic.
Wills clearly enjoys sharing his collection with others. During an interview in the museum lobby, he watched people pose for selfies with his Transformers and chatted with patrons as they checked out the cars, which are displayed beneath a tent outside.
“It makes people happy,” he said. “These kids are going to remember this the rest of their life.”
He offered up bits of info on the cars and gamely took a photo of the dashboard in the 1989 Batmobile for one visitor. He also shared a tidbit about that car.
“We can’t do it in the exhibit, but the machine guns do fire pellets,” he said. “And the rocket propulsion system works and shoots flames 12 feet up out the back.”
He joked about an upgrade to the Delorean: “We’re trying to get the time circuitry updated. We want to eliminate the year 2020 — we can never go back to 2020. What do you think?”
Wills has been collecting cars for four years. He draws a straight line from the cars to the comic books he collected when he was growing up in Massachusetts. When he was getting
ready to leave for college, his older brother Rich gave him a piece of advice that Wills has forever regretted heeding.
“He says, ‘Bob, you’re growing up. You’ve gotta act like a college boy now. You’ve gotta stop collecting comic books,’ ” he recalled. “Now, I had an army chest of all DC, Batman, Superman, original comics. I threw them away. I threw away millions and millions of dollars. Because I had them in pristine order.”
After that first auction, where he picked up the Batmobile and some other cars, he started going to sales across the country to add to his collection.
“It’s kind of an amazing thing that in America, there’s a lot of people who have collected cars, but with the boomer generation, they’re getting older,” he said. “A lot of people are cashing out their collections, so I was fortunate to be starting at a good time.”
The cars are a way of getting back to the kind of collection he had when he was younger, he said.
“I’m doing it in a different way,” he said. “It’s fun. And it’s making people happy.”