Cars on film: inside the world of Cinema Vehicles

Trivia fans, a question: What links Anchorman, Captain America, Wayne’s World, Twilight, The Hunger Games, Jason Bourne, Transformers and… Alvin and the Chipmunks? No? Well, before you start trawling websites trying to find a little-known but prolific bit-part actor, I’ll tell you. It’s the vehicles. Because the wheeled stars of all of those movies – and a full credit roll more – were all provided by the same company: Cinema Vehicles in Los Angeles. 

Images: Webb Bland

This article was originally published in issue 289 of Top Gear magazine

Nestled on an eight-acre plot in a nondescript corner of an industrial estate in North Hollywood, the whole Cinema Vehicles universe is basically nirvana for movie car geeks, a working tribute to silver screen wheels. Established by an enterprising chap called Ray Claridge way back in 1975, CV is the place directors and producers from film and television come when they need cars. In fact, any kind of vehicle. And by ‘vehicle’, I mean pretty much anything that moves. It’s the biggest supplier of metal to the film, TV and movie industries in America. By extension, and seeing as it’s based in the feature-film Mecca that is Hollywood, that makes it one of the biggest in the world. 

The roll call of cars the company has provided for films and TV reads like an exceedingly eclectic DVD collection, from creating the ‘Eleanor’ Mustang (of which there were actually several) in classic petrolhead flick Gone in 60 Seconds to sorting cars and trucks for Heat, The Dukes of Hazzard, Austin Powers and the Terminator movies. It supplied the Beetles for Herbie (2005’s Lindsay Lohan hatchet job Fully Loaded, rather than the original), the remakes of Starsky and Hutch and The Italian Job, and bikes and cars for popular TV shows like Sons of Anarchy, as well as more obvious stuff like the neon plastic of the Fast & Furious franchise, currently working on number eight and counting. As Jim Boysen, Cinema Vehicle’s current CEO, explains: “We’re here to work side-by-side with the TV and movie industry to source, build and create anything that moves – from stunt cars to star cars. We’ve got a parking lot out there with sixteen hundred cars all ready to rent out, and anything that we haven’t got, we can get, or build.” 

He’s not kidding. Cinema Vehicles isn’t just the world’s greatest car rental service, but a one-stop shop for automotive actors. Equipped with a full custom fabrication shop, industrial paint facilities, graphic design and vinyl print department, bespoke glass manufacturing, interior retrim services and enough random spares to outfit anything you can imagine, this place is a giant toybox and fancy dress store for the automotive industry. A full-service replication station. Need 50 specific police-dept Ford Crown Vics to smash up in some giant Jason Bourne chase scene? Cinema Vehicles will hit police auctions, buy up whatever you require, repaint and re-graphic to suit, and then supply them on a rent-to-wreck basis anywhere in the world. Yep, they do logistics, too. Need a nondescript but slightly odd brown Ford panel van for Ant-Man to drive? CV will source three, and make them all identical so that multiple exteriors can be filmed at the same time. From populating era-specific street scenes with the right kind of nondescript automotive chaff, to knocking up specialist future-ish troop carriers for The Hunger Games (based on current Lenco BearCat armoured cars), this place can literally make a producer’s wildest fever dream a reality.

It’s not just the actual cars that the company works on, either. One part of the facility is dedicated to essentially stunt-prep – roll cage fabrication, custom metalwork to hold pyrotechnics, the design and build process associated with making cars do things they shouldn’t, like jump and crash in very specific ways. One corner is dedicated to the building of remote-drive pods, a kind of tiny rollcage that sits on top of the feature car and contains the actual controls for the vehicle. Thus, while the actors are inside concentrating on actually emoting, the car can be driven from the roof by a pro. There’s also a department capable of recreating expensive machinery from much more mundane underpinnings – a prime example being a replica of Nicolas Cage’s 1935 Rolls-Royce Phantom Coupe used in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice that looks completely real – until you look inside and realise it’s based on a mid-Nineties Chevy Silverado truck. This is extraordinarily creative, clever stuff. 

But despite the big names and even bigger budgets, it’s the detail that really makes all this stuff so impressive. Unsurprisingly, a lot of movies require more than one feature car to fit with tight filming schedules, and equally unremarkably they need them to look exactly the same. Thus, Cinema Vehicles has the canny knack of replication, right down to the tiniest detail. In the shop, there are a pair of late Eighties Jeep Grand Wagoneers in the process of being cloned, detailing extended to the weather-beaten wood on the side panelling, and exact duplicates can be found everywhere on the lot. I find the pretty, stack-headlight W108 Mercedes convertible from The Hangover in one warehouse, and then discover its sister car 100 yards away. Except that it’s not just a similar car – the seats are ripped in exactly the same places, the scratches and dents and visual ticks are forensically identical. The level of anally retentive attention to detail is staggering. 

In the yard are a pair of very desirable ’68 Dodge Chargers, both in patinated blue, both with the same bumper sticker on the back. Except that the sticker is in millimetrically the same place, with the same corner slightly pulled. The interiors are cloned, the grilles and emblems missing the same tiny pieces. Some of it is actually quite disturbing – because how do you get a car to have exactly the same rust patches? Rust, famously, being terrifically difficult to train. If these guys got into the business of nefarious cloning, even the experts might have trouble telling the difference. 

More than all that, though, the Cinema Vehicles parking lot is just a playground for petrolheads. There are serried ranks of police cars of every age and literal stripe, a small legion of non-specific news crew satellite link-up vans, a fleet of yellow school buses – including one stumpy version that is possibly the least space-efficient vehicle I’ve ever seen. There are limos and delivery trucks with unrecognisable names, random off-roaders, donks on 28-inch wheels and a pair of AMC Gremlins shyly hiding off to one side. There’s a monster truck tucked up in one corner, currently looking slightly spindly on its small transport wheels and an original and rather appealing MkI Honda Civic. There are sports cars and estates, an adventure-spec original Unimog, a battalion of generic armoured cars – even a car with a hand-painted picture of Roy Orbison on the bonnet. Though I’m still not sure about that one. 

The stock constantly changes, with staff dedicated to buying and selling items depending on what they think might be rentable, or what projects production companies have coming up. And the car that does the most work? The one that rents out the most? It’s not a Ferrari, or a souped-up sports car. It’s a moth-eaten, slightly beaten-up blue pickup truck. Old and busted enough to have character, not specific enough to be recognisable. And that’s the thing about Cinema Vehicles – they’re the unsung heroes of the movie world. After all, if they’ve done their job properly, you don’t even notice they’ve done anything at all.