Sometimes, Movie Cars Are Wrong For a Reason

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An old college friend stopped in a few weeks ago, and over beers, he started ranting about cars in movies. He had just watched a recent period pic called The Hill about a disabled boy who overcomes adversity to play baseball and, while he liked the film, he was put off by some apparently flagrant mismatches between the 1960s time period and the cars. His rant building steam, Jeff went on: "Somebody needs to tell these directors that if the scene is in 1965 and a guy who is supposed to be somebody pulls up in a shiny '59 Cadillac, it's wrong! Back then, nobody drove around in a six-year-old Cadillac if they could afford a new one!"

His point might be picayune and it may only matter to a small minority of the viewing audience-the ones married to spouses who are always shushing them to be quiet and stop going on about that one green Beetle that keeps reappearing in the Bullitt chase sequence-but he's not wrong. Cars are important to film because they are the one prop that instantly dates a scene. If the cars have high roofs, wheel spats, and bustlebacks, you're in the 1930s or '40s; chrome swaddling and tailfins, the 1950s; straight edges, the 1960s; landau tops and pea green paint, the 1970s. Used correctly, old cars efficiently and effectively transport us as well as the characters back in celluloid time. Used badly, and it's like watching Napoleon pull out an iPhone to find Waterloo. It takes you right out of the moment. People are still complaining about those kit Cobra replicas with the modern mag wheels that appeared in Ford v Ferrari.

I called Jamie Kitman, a man of seemingly a dozen careers, including writing for this magazine as well as running a business that procures cars for film shoots. I asked him why directors often seem to pick the wrong cars. Do they not care or do they just not know any better? A bit of both, was his answer, and money can dictate what four-wheelers get cast. A lot of people involved in production have very strong opinions, and, "some of them know what they're talking about, some of them don't," he said. "And some are constrained budgetarily or logistically, or they're shooting in a place that doesn't have a wide supply of cars readily available."

The better productions can afford to be accurate where cars are concerned, he went on. "I worked on [The Marvelous] Mrs. Maisel, which was all about its cars, and they were pretty sensitive to the cars being right. The propmaster knew enough to know there was a right and a wrong." However, Kitman often finds himself confronting blunt stereotyping about what a particular era was like (no, not everybody drove triple-tone pastel tailfin cruisers on whitewalls in the '50s) or a simple lack of knowledge about cars. Once, a producer called Kitman wanting an MG TC for a scene, and Kitman was able to match her up with a car. "Then, three days before the shoot, she called and said, 'Just checking; it's an automatic, right?' And we said no, and she said, 'Can you find me an automatic one?' And we said no, automatic MGs didn't exist in 1948. And she said, 'Well, can you make it an automatic?'" Of course, said Kitman, if you give me a month and $30,000. "So they said never mind. That's the sort of thing that happens."

Kitman can find himself immersed in the details of the characters. "Occasionally you'll find yourself saying, 'Based on what you've told me about the character, what you're asking for is completely wrong.' And they may or may not hear me." A big challenge is scenes set in Europe but filmed in America. Since the 1970s, the cars imported into the U.S. have tended to be the larger models, not the small hatchbacks that carpet European roads, and "they often have really big bumpers, which is a dead giveaway to the cognoscenti." So Kitman keeps a ready supply of small, plebeian Euro-gerbils for such scenes, though sourcing right-hand-drivers is always a challenge. "We've had double-decker buses towed from the Carolinas to be in TV shows," he told me.

The takeaway: If car flubs happen on screen, don't assume it's just because the director doesn't know a tailfin from a turbo. Sometimes they can't afford or can't find exactly what would be correct. And sometimes, as in the case of Bullitt, Smokey and the Bandit, and a few others, the cars deserve their own Academy Awards.

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