Re: What year/model is this movie Packard?

Posted by Leeedy On 2016/3/12 22:15:33

There have always been companies that rent cars to the movies-especially in Southern California. In fact, PAC's Earle C. Anthony PMCC region once had a member whose sole business was renting cars for movies, TV and commercials. I also rented a few to the film industry.

And yes, the cars are merely props and considered expendable by some folks. It depends on who you have overseeing the movie... and the cars... and your personal car if you are renting.

Several decades ago, back when I was in college I would sometimes get a fee to go with these cars to make sure directors and stage hands didn't wreck them. One director wanted to drill giant holes in the back of a Packard I was with... then said, "Hey... we've got people who can fix it back so you'll never know!" Right. Another said... "...just turn it in for insurance!"... when something that was irreplaceable was severely damaged. There was no emotion, no historical sentimentality, no fretting about whether something that was original could not be replaced... since it was merely just another prop and expendable-or replaceable so he thought. It was all just dollars and cents to some of these folks. But others had deep appreciation. In particular, one of the guys with the Burbank Studios was a really caring and concerned transportation manager.

I had to get several permissions and became SAG eligible. I babysat the cars and sometimes drove them. In one particular MOTW with Gig Young, Bob Crane and John Savage I took a prewar Packard ambulance and we shot for about a week or so. One of the big guys on the set came over at lunch time and asked me what I thought of the cars they were using. I told him I thought everything was fine, except the scenes were supposed to take place in the late 1940s. I told him it would be a neat trick to have a 1952 Pontiac sitting in the main shot! They weren't too happy to hear that, but the '52 Pontiac later went away.

Another time, my good buddy's black 1956 Patrician (with air) was rented for a TV series about a police detective in New York (it was shot on the sets in SoCal). I was not available to go with the car, and that was ominous.

When the Patrician came back it was barely running. It was quite apparent the car had been overheated ...and the front had been very poorly repainted-with a bug in the paint! My friend found buckets of gravel wedged in underneath the car and the Torsion-Level no longer worked. Oh, and the tires. The whitewalls were scuffed up pretty hard. We finally figured out what had really happened when the show aired a few months later. We were mortified. Burn-outs, drifts, skids...they did them all-and more...with the car in chase scenes and posing as a Russian ZIL. Yes, they figured nobody would know any better-all the way around the equation.

Anyway, yes, there are companies that rent cars to the movies and it can be a very pleasant and even lucrative experience-providing that you have someone to watch over your vintage vehicle when it is out of your hands. Just remember, for a lot of people, a car is just a piece of machinery... or a prop. You can't expect that people will all feel emotional about your baby. Even if they've seen old cars a lot (and most people on movie film sets already have), this does not mean they have either expertise in handling vintage vehicles or emotional attachment to them.