Interesting F & F 2 Article
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Interesting F & F 2 Article
The Fast and the Furious 2: A day in the life of making a car movie.
By NATALIE NEFF
Posing pretty for the camera, the stars of The Fast and the Furious 2, from left to right: Mazda RX-7, Honda S2000, Nissan Skyline, Toyota Supra. Oh yeah, there are some people in the movie, too.
Act Three, Scene One
We ease the nose down the diamond-plate ramp, squeezing the brake pedal almost to the floor. The engine rumbles in a lumpy pahkedah-pahkedah of protest at our speed, which tops out somewhere near half a mile an hour down the loading dock. Fact is, no Yenko Camaro wants anything to do with the left end of the speedo, and this one makes its feelings known as we lurch our way in growling fits and starts toward the tarmac below.
The entire trip out of the warehouse takes maybe two minutes—two, interminable, minutes—time enough for nerves to fray and heart rates to flutter and engine temps to soar in anticipation.
We are piloting a Yenko, after all, a true-blue beast of Detroit-born (Pennsylvania-bred) iron and steel with no fewer than 450 horses chomping at the big-block bit underhood. All it wants to do is stretch its legs and take us for a ride. This creeping along only irritates it.
Finally, with wheels down, and with a hard crank of the steering wheel, we point the beast about 30 degrees to the right and stomp the gas. Ah, sweet release! The pahkedahs roar, and the cabin swells with the booming pedal tones of the Yenko’s exhaust pipes, the screeching of burning rubber and the thunder of those lumpy cams turning full-bore.
As we hurtle headlong into a parking lot, the breath sucked right out of our lungs, we find that happy calm of car-lover nirvana: Speed, or more importantly, acceleration.
Too bad it only lasts three seconds.
Act Two, Scene One
The warehouse sits in the back corner of a small industrial cluster in Miami, a few minutes north of downtown and west off I-95. There isn’t much in the way of signage to identify it, surely nothing that screams “Picture Car and Special Effects Warehouse of The Fast and the Furious 2.”
To get to the building requires driving through some not-so-savory neighborhoods, and we wonder what the young men hanging out on every street corner and ramshackle stoop might have thought about the treasure trove of machinery just blocks away.
Director John Singleton consults with Eva Mendes, who plays one of the good guys in the film.
Surely they must have seen the cars being trucked down their streets, perhaps even driven, with superchargers whining and exhausts rumbling and thousand-dollar paint jobs glinting in the warm sunlight of a South Florida December. Or maybe they wouldn’t notice. After all, it seems like everyone in Miami has a hot ride, something bright and lowered and tinted and booming. Not like back home, where cars on this day are painted not red or black or silver, but salt.
Inside, the warehouse looks more like the set of Gone in 60 Seconds, with its rows of dream cars closed off from the rest of the world. Over here sit four matching Hemi-orange Challengers, one with a crunched nose and broken glass. There are two Le Mans-blue Yenko 427s, one of which we later try on for ourselves. In the corner sit five Baja-looking Dodge Ram 1500s, clad in Road Armor-supplied garb, while facing them are two identical Nissan Skylines, right-hand-drivers, intimidating just standing still. Shells of other cars, many unidentifiable, lie scattered about the rest of the warehouse, between the odd Toyota MR2, Acura NSX and Mitsubishi Evo VII.
Running a hand over the Hemi Challenger, ducking a head under the hood and inside the cabin, it is clear this is no mock-up car, no Hollywood stunt double for the real thing. “A lot of people don’t like to do cars like I do,” says Ted Moser, overlord of this auto mecca that rises from corrugated steel and I-beams. “Cars look great on camera, but these cars go on tour. If I don’t have a Yenko or 426, then no one’s going to buy it.”
The Skyline gets ready to kick some Mazda butt.
Moser’s business card calls him the “Transportation Coordinator,” but scanning the warehouse, listening as he tells the story of each car, it’s clear his responsibility is so much more. Officially he’s the guy who coordinates the catering trucks, gets the transporters loaded with set equipment, choreographs the movements of what he calls this “traveling carnival.” But really: He is this car movie’s official Car Guy.
“I got into the movies because of the cars,” says Moser, who worked a previous stint as the picture-car mechanic on Die Hard 2. “The way they look at picture cars in Los Angeles is just as cars nobody will sit in. A picture car is usually a retired car, one where the gauges don’t work, the brakes are shot, etc. Not me. I make sure they’re right, because,” he says, pointing, “you’ll know if they’re not.”
That means making sure each of 200 cars is right, and that the 150 or so people Moser oversees understand this. And because many of the cars play the same part on screen—like the matching Hemi Challengers, of which only one was the genuine article—they had to look identical, too.
More importantly, like any other actor in the movie, the cars had to perform right. “Usually races are shot in slow speed and sped up,” says Moser. But not these races. “The races they’ve run, they’ve run in excess of 100 miles per hour.”
While we rummage through Moser’s collection, the film’s second crew has shut down a chunk of I-75 about 10 miles west of town, giving them room enough for real-time action sequences to be shot in real time, using Moser’s real cars.
Act One, Scene One
Before heading to the warehouse, we spent the morning watching the first crew shoot the climactic scene of the movie. At least we were told it is the climactic scene. It feels a lot more like standing around, staring at a yacht moored at a dock while various people carrying clipboards, walkie-talkies and film canisters mill about in designer eyeshades, munching chimichangas. The location, in Bill Baggs State Park at the easternmost tip of Key Biscayne, is only 15 minutes down the interstate by car but a world away from the Picture Car and Special Effects Warehouse of The Fast and the Furious 2. Here, wealthy dowagers walk their poodles by the beach and yuppies rollerblade to a Walkman beat. There is no shady street corner or stoop in sight.
A trio of cars-a Dodge Hemi Challenger, Chevrolet Yenko Camaro and Dodge Viper-line up for a shot.
A crunched Yenko Camaro sits perched atop the yacht. We’re told that the good guys were supposed to have launched the vehicle off a pier in pursuit of the bad guys trying to make a getaway on the yacht—but we figure that much out on our own. While an assortment of people ready the next shot, a lone figure stands at the bow, casting a line into the ocean.
John Singleton’s hook comes up empty, so he reaches into a bucket.
“The cars are the stars of the picture. It’s more of a cultural experience than it is a movie,” says Singleton, director of The Fast and the Furious 2, as he impales another shrimp. The energy in his voice, the way he punctuates his words and his promo-poster language tell us he’s genuinely geeked about the movie. And he’s aware of the copycats: “We’re not following the trend, we’re making it. Others already are jumping on the bandwagon, like that Fast and the Furious TV show ripoff.” Uh, Fastlane?
“This is the real deal. And this is the car movie. There are no other true car movies of this generation because it’s about that world, of street racing, of hot cars and young, sexy mechanics,” says Singleton. “The first movie was a huge hit because it filled a gap, because people either were in that world or wanted to be in that world. “But this movie’s gonna blow all other car movies out of the water.”
Part of his reasoning is based on volume. Late last summer, Universal conducted a car show in South Florida—open to anyone who wanted to show off a ride—with the specific intent to pick out extras for the film.
“We had 512 cars show up,” says Singleton. “We had everybody from all over Florida, from New York to San Jose. They came from all over the country. You could put these cars in shows anywhere, and they’d win. People would freak out. “So we picked the cars,” he says, about 180 of them in all. “And we picked the chicks, too.”
Act One, Scene Two
So we know where the “chicks” come from, but how does a car make it into the movies? And what’s a Yenko doing in a rice-rocket, nitrous-fueled movie like The Fast and the Furious 2? Or for that matter the Hemi Challenger, Dodge Ram, Saleen Mustang or Viper RT-10?
The short answer is that the film’s producers want to appeal to as wide a car-loving audience as possible, and who doesn’t love cars? But the deeper truth may lie with folks like Artie Malesci, stunt coordinator.
Malesci sits down. He is the spitting image of Billy Bob Thornton but with less twang. “I’ll be honest with you. Before I did this movie, I didn’t even know what a Nissan Skyline or an Evo was. I had a ’69 Charger R/T and a ’69 GTO.”
Looking at the crew around us, fully half the guys on the set would probably say the same thing—though their children are likely well versed in the language of Japanese car culture. We can thank video games like Gran Turismo for that, as neither a Skyline nor Evo can even be had (yet, legally) on these shores.
A Lancer Evo dukes it out with an Eclipse...
But Malesci knows cars—and car movies. The veteran of Miami Vice, and Bond, James Bond films, works closely with Singleton to design the action sequences and choreograph the film shoot.
“In any one given scene, we’ll have 50 stunt people, and maybe 150 cars in the background,” says Malesci. “We also help design, rig and set up the cars and pick which cars to use in which scenes. And we have these huge traffic sequences, with dozens of cars running at the same time.”
While he set up a stunt racing school for all the actors, Malesci knows a thing or two about driving fast cars himself: He races his own Corvette Z06 and Mustang GT on tracks across South Florida.
Like Singleton, Malesci grins when he talks about this project. “It’s nothing like the first movie. It’s probably going to be the big-gest car action movie ever made. In every scene there are cars racing or crashing. Like a modern-day Bullitt—with a lot more cars.”
Act Two, Scene Two (Dream Sequence)
“If you’re lying in bed, in your wildest dreams, what would you take for the car?” Ted Moser needed a Hemi Challenger, at least one. The others could be faked but he wanted a real one. When an orange Challenger caught his eye at a local South Florida car show, he approached it slowly, thinking there was no way it could be real. A man and a woman sat in lawn chairs by the car’s trunk.
“It’s not for sale.”
It was real, and Moser wanted it.
“Name your price.” Its body looked straight, the interior intact.
“$43,380.”
And underhood sat the unmistakable heft of a 426 Hemi.
“Sold.”
Such is the story of the Hemi as Moser relates it, laughing as he describes the gentleman’s face once he realized Moser probably would’ve paid darn near anything for the car. But before the guy could stammer anything else, Moser had the check written. That was just the start. There were oh-so-many more cars to acquire.
“We first got ahold of 12 cars, Evos, Eclipses, Skylines,” says Moser. “Then Dodge gave us some trucks. We also got Vipers and Saleen Mustangs. And we had Cobras but they got kicked out of the movie. So I sold them to Charlie’s Angels.”
Now before you think The Fast and the Furious 2 is totally indiscriminate in the cars it cast, consider this: “Dodge wanted Neons, the SRTs, in the film, but the director wasn’t going for it,” says Moser. “When you have Skylines and Evos, it’s hard to put in a Neon.”
Indeed.
Act Three, Scene Two
We slam the brakes and feel them lock up under the car. The parking lot behind the warehouse didn’t leave much room to really open up the Yenko, just enough space to feel its potential before avoiding a chain-link fence.
As we turn the car around behind a row of semitrailers, we spy them: a heap of Crown Vics in the back corner of the lot, each dressed in a convincing simulation of Miami-Dade cop car finery. They’re beaten up and pulled apart and look like a lost scene from the Blues Brothers. We’ll have to wait until June when the film comes out to see how they got that way. But as we slow the car down, and circle this heap, it’s easy to imagine: Nothing that Miami’s finest can muster can catch a mad auto writer on the lam, running from the law behind the wheel of a Yenko.
The End
By NATALIE NEFF
Posing pretty for the camera, the stars of The Fast and the Furious 2, from left to right: Mazda RX-7, Honda S2000, Nissan Skyline, Toyota Supra. Oh yeah, there are some people in the movie, too.
Act Three, Scene One
We ease the nose down the diamond-plate ramp, squeezing the brake pedal almost to the floor. The engine rumbles in a lumpy pahkedah-pahkedah of protest at our speed, which tops out somewhere near half a mile an hour down the loading dock. Fact is, no Yenko Camaro wants anything to do with the left end of the speedo, and this one makes its feelings known as we lurch our way in growling fits and starts toward the tarmac below.
The entire trip out of the warehouse takes maybe two minutes—two, interminable, minutes—time enough for nerves to fray and heart rates to flutter and engine temps to soar in anticipation.
We are piloting a Yenko, after all, a true-blue beast of Detroit-born (Pennsylvania-bred) iron and steel with no fewer than 450 horses chomping at the big-block bit underhood. All it wants to do is stretch its legs and take us for a ride. This creeping along only irritates it.
Finally, with wheels down, and with a hard crank of the steering wheel, we point the beast about 30 degrees to the right and stomp the gas. Ah, sweet release! The pahkedahs roar, and the cabin swells with the booming pedal tones of the Yenko’s exhaust pipes, the screeching of burning rubber and the thunder of those lumpy cams turning full-bore.
As we hurtle headlong into a parking lot, the breath sucked right out of our lungs, we find that happy calm of car-lover nirvana: Speed, or more importantly, acceleration.
Too bad it only lasts three seconds.
Act Two, Scene One
The warehouse sits in the back corner of a small industrial cluster in Miami, a few minutes north of downtown and west off I-95. There isn’t much in the way of signage to identify it, surely nothing that screams “Picture Car and Special Effects Warehouse of The Fast and the Furious 2.”
To get to the building requires driving through some not-so-savory neighborhoods, and we wonder what the young men hanging out on every street corner and ramshackle stoop might have thought about the treasure trove of machinery just blocks away.
Director John Singleton consults with Eva Mendes, who plays one of the good guys in the film.
Surely they must have seen the cars being trucked down their streets, perhaps even driven, with superchargers whining and exhausts rumbling and thousand-dollar paint jobs glinting in the warm sunlight of a South Florida December. Or maybe they wouldn’t notice. After all, it seems like everyone in Miami has a hot ride, something bright and lowered and tinted and booming. Not like back home, where cars on this day are painted not red or black or silver, but salt.
Inside, the warehouse looks more like the set of Gone in 60 Seconds, with its rows of dream cars closed off from the rest of the world. Over here sit four matching Hemi-orange Challengers, one with a crunched nose and broken glass. There are two Le Mans-blue Yenko 427s, one of which we later try on for ourselves. In the corner sit five Baja-looking Dodge Ram 1500s, clad in Road Armor-supplied garb, while facing them are two identical Nissan Skylines, right-hand-drivers, intimidating just standing still. Shells of other cars, many unidentifiable, lie scattered about the rest of the warehouse, between the odd Toyota MR2, Acura NSX and Mitsubishi Evo VII.
Running a hand over the Hemi Challenger, ducking a head under the hood and inside the cabin, it is clear this is no mock-up car, no Hollywood stunt double for the real thing. “A lot of people don’t like to do cars like I do,” says Ted Moser, overlord of this auto mecca that rises from corrugated steel and I-beams. “Cars look great on camera, but these cars go on tour. If I don’t have a Yenko or 426, then no one’s going to buy it.”
The Skyline gets ready to kick some Mazda butt.
Moser’s business card calls him the “Transportation Coordinator,” but scanning the warehouse, listening as he tells the story of each car, it’s clear his responsibility is so much more. Officially he’s the guy who coordinates the catering trucks, gets the transporters loaded with set equipment, choreographs the movements of what he calls this “traveling carnival.” But really: He is this car movie’s official Car Guy.
“I got into the movies because of the cars,” says Moser, who worked a previous stint as the picture-car mechanic on Die Hard 2. “The way they look at picture cars in Los Angeles is just as cars nobody will sit in. A picture car is usually a retired car, one where the gauges don’t work, the brakes are shot, etc. Not me. I make sure they’re right, because,” he says, pointing, “you’ll know if they’re not.”
That means making sure each of 200 cars is right, and that the 150 or so people Moser oversees understand this. And because many of the cars play the same part on screen—like the matching Hemi Challengers, of which only one was the genuine article—they had to look identical, too.
More importantly, like any other actor in the movie, the cars had to perform right. “Usually races are shot in slow speed and sped up,” says Moser. But not these races. “The races they’ve run, they’ve run in excess of 100 miles per hour.”
While we rummage through Moser’s collection, the film’s second crew has shut down a chunk of I-75 about 10 miles west of town, giving them room enough for real-time action sequences to be shot in real time, using Moser’s real cars.
Act One, Scene One
Before heading to the warehouse, we spent the morning watching the first crew shoot the climactic scene of the movie. At least we were told it is the climactic scene. It feels a lot more like standing around, staring at a yacht moored at a dock while various people carrying clipboards, walkie-talkies and film canisters mill about in designer eyeshades, munching chimichangas. The location, in Bill Baggs State Park at the easternmost tip of Key Biscayne, is only 15 minutes down the interstate by car but a world away from the Picture Car and Special Effects Warehouse of The Fast and the Furious 2. Here, wealthy dowagers walk their poodles by the beach and yuppies rollerblade to a Walkman beat. There is no shady street corner or stoop in sight.
A trio of cars-a Dodge Hemi Challenger, Chevrolet Yenko Camaro and Dodge Viper-line up for a shot.
A crunched Yenko Camaro sits perched atop the yacht. We’re told that the good guys were supposed to have launched the vehicle off a pier in pursuit of the bad guys trying to make a getaway on the yacht—but we figure that much out on our own. While an assortment of people ready the next shot, a lone figure stands at the bow, casting a line into the ocean.
John Singleton’s hook comes up empty, so he reaches into a bucket.
“The cars are the stars of the picture. It’s more of a cultural experience than it is a movie,” says Singleton, director of The Fast and the Furious 2, as he impales another shrimp. The energy in his voice, the way he punctuates his words and his promo-poster language tell us he’s genuinely geeked about the movie. And he’s aware of the copycats: “We’re not following the trend, we’re making it. Others already are jumping on the bandwagon, like that Fast and the Furious TV show ripoff.” Uh, Fastlane?
“This is the real deal. And this is the car movie. There are no other true car movies of this generation because it’s about that world, of street racing, of hot cars and young, sexy mechanics,” says Singleton. “The first movie was a huge hit because it filled a gap, because people either were in that world or wanted to be in that world. “But this movie’s gonna blow all other car movies out of the water.”
Part of his reasoning is based on volume. Late last summer, Universal conducted a car show in South Florida—open to anyone who wanted to show off a ride—with the specific intent to pick out extras for the film.
“We had 512 cars show up,” says Singleton. “We had everybody from all over Florida, from New York to San Jose. They came from all over the country. You could put these cars in shows anywhere, and they’d win. People would freak out. “So we picked the cars,” he says, about 180 of them in all. “And we picked the chicks, too.”
Act One, Scene Two
So we know where the “chicks” come from, but how does a car make it into the movies? And what’s a Yenko doing in a rice-rocket, nitrous-fueled movie like The Fast and the Furious 2? Or for that matter the Hemi Challenger, Dodge Ram, Saleen Mustang or Viper RT-10?
The short answer is that the film’s producers want to appeal to as wide a car-loving audience as possible, and who doesn’t love cars? But the deeper truth may lie with folks like Artie Malesci, stunt coordinator.
Malesci sits down. He is the spitting image of Billy Bob Thornton but with less twang. “I’ll be honest with you. Before I did this movie, I didn’t even know what a Nissan Skyline or an Evo was. I had a ’69 Charger R/T and a ’69 GTO.”
Looking at the crew around us, fully half the guys on the set would probably say the same thing—though their children are likely well versed in the language of Japanese car culture. We can thank video games like Gran Turismo for that, as neither a Skyline nor Evo can even be had (yet, legally) on these shores.
A Lancer Evo dukes it out with an Eclipse...
But Malesci knows cars—and car movies. The veteran of Miami Vice, and Bond, James Bond films, works closely with Singleton to design the action sequences and choreograph the film shoot.
“In any one given scene, we’ll have 50 stunt people, and maybe 150 cars in the background,” says Malesci. “We also help design, rig and set up the cars and pick which cars to use in which scenes. And we have these huge traffic sequences, with dozens of cars running at the same time.”
While he set up a stunt racing school for all the actors, Malesci knows a thing or two about driving fast cars himself: He races his own Corvette Z06 and Mustang GT on tracks across South Florida.
Like Singleton, Malesci grins when he talks about this project. “It’s nothing like the first movie. It’s probably going to be the big-gest car action movie ever made. In every scene there are cars racing or crashing. Like a modern-day Bullitt—with a lot more cars.”
Act Two, Scene Two (Dream Sequence)
“If you’re lying in bed, in your wildest dreams, what would you take for the car?” Ted Moser needed a Hemi Challenger, at least one. The others could be faked but he wanted a real one. When an orange Challenger caught his eye at a local South Florida car show, he approached it slowly, thinking there was no way it could be real. A man and a woman sat in lawn chairs by the car’s trunk.
“It’s not for sale.”
It was real, and Moser wanted it.
“Name your price.” Its body looked straight, the interior intact.
“$43,380.”
And underhood sat the unmistakable heft of a 426 Hemi.
“Sold.”
Such is the story of the Hemi as Moser relates it, laughing as he describes the gentleman’s face once he realized Moser probably would’ve paid darn near anything for the car. But before the guy could stammer anything else, Moser had the check written. That was just the start. There were oh-so-many more cars to acquire.
“We first got ahold of 12 cars, Evos, Eclipses, Skylines,” says Moser. “Then Dodge gave us some trucks. We also got Vipers and Saleen Mustangs. And we had Cobras but they got kicked out of the movie. So I sold them to Charlie’s Angels.”
Now before you think The Fast and the Furious 2 is totally indiscriminate in the cars it cast, consider this: “Dodge wanted Neons, the SRTs, in the film, but the director wasn’t going for it,” says Moser. “When you have Skylines and Evos, it’s hard to put in a Neon.”
Indeed.
Act Three, Scene Two
We slam the brakes and feel them lock up under the car. The parking lot behind the warehouse didn’t leave much room to really open up the Yenko, just enough space to feel its potential before avoiding a chain-link fence.
As we turn the car around behind a row of semitrailers, we spy them: a heap of Crown Vics in the back corner of the lot, each dressed in a convincing simulation of Miami-Dade cop car finery. They’re beaten up and pulled apart and look like a lost scene from the Blues Brothers. We’ll have to wait until June when the film comes out to see how they got that way. But as we slow the car down, and circle this heap, it’s easy to imagine: Nothing that Miami’s finest can muster can catch a mad auto writer on the lam, running from the law behind the wheel of a Yenko.
The End
