L.A. Auto Show: Black Beauty stars in ‘Green Hornet’
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Most people would say that the upcoming ‘Green Hornet’ movie is about the masked crime-fighting duo Britt Reid and Kato, played by Seth Rogen and Jay Chou.
But the real superhero of the film, according to producer Neal Moritz, is the car.
And what a car it is. Hood guns, bumper rockets, armed suicide doors, grill-mounted flamethrowers and attached missile systems are just the start.
The vintage vehicle, based on a 1965 Chrysler Imperial, is longer than many SUVs and weighs about as much, according to picture car coordinator Dennis McCarthy. Millions of dollars of the film’s budget went to the so-called Black Beauty.
“It’s an incredible arsenal of things this car can do,” said Moritz, who has worked with McCarthy on several ‘The Fast and the Furious’ films. “It’s big, it looks strong, and it has a lot of metal. It harkens back to another era when American cars were king.”
Several automakers came calling before shooting began, interested in pairing with filmmakers to make a new version of the classic vehicle from the 1960s Green Hornet television series. But Moritz and crew decided that the original look was sexier.
The gleaming model currently being displayed at the L.A. Auto Show is one of just three remaining from the set, McCarthy said. The other 26 were cut in half, smashed, dropped by cranes and otherwise destroyed.
Read on to find out how the Black Beauty was prepped for its close-up.
The remnants are now sitting in a makeshift graveyard at one of Sony’s lots. The survivors have hit the pageant circuit, exhibiting at San Diego’s Comic-Con in July. “We all wanted one of the cars by the end,’ Moritz said, ‘but they wouldn’t have been street legal.”
The crew had labored to find mid-1960s Chrysler Imperials, roaming from San Diego to Canada and snatching up every model they could find within several thousand miles, McCarthy said. Most of the vehicles cost roughly $5,000, though some ran as high as $20,000.
“It’s not a car people collect or restore,” he said. “A lot of them were like garbage, rusted out. They’d been in a wrecking yard or someone’s backyard for years.”
About 40 people worked on the car for 11 months during the shoot. But the scenes weren’t filmed in order, which meant that, sometimes, the crew had to damage a vehicle for one clip and then fix it within 24 hours for another sequence.
Still, McCarthy says, “It’s just part of the job. I have no hatred for the vehicle.”
The Black Beauty, along with its vigilante drivers, arrives in theaters Jan. 14.
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-- Tiffany Hsu
Photos, from top: Car coordinator Dennis McCarthy, left, and and producer Neal Moritz. Seth Rogen, left, and Jay Chou. Credit: Sony
