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Edited Date/Time
1/21/2018 5:49pm
Because Steve McQueen...I was in San Fran last week and flashed back to seeing this on TV as a kid. This movie mesmerized me and still kinda does. It was rumored to be the longest on film. I would watch this over a bunch of special effects any day.
https://youtu.be/31JgMAHVeg0
https://youtu.be/31JgMAHVeg0
The Shop
I also didn't know he had proximity to the Sharon Tate murders. Another weird Hollywood tale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_McQueen
Lifestyle
McQueen followed a daily two-hour exercise regimen, involving weightlifting and, at one point, running 5 miles (8 km), seven days a week. McQueen learned the martial art Tang Soo Do from ninth-degree black belt Pat E. Johnson.[3]
According to William Claxton, McQueen smoked marijuana almost every day; biographer Marc Eliot alleged he used a large amount of cocaine in the early 1970s.[72] He was also a heavy cigarette smoker. McQueen sometimes drank to excess, and was arrested for driving while intoxicated in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1972.[73]
Driver was named Marc Myers
https://jalopnik.com/5744523/the-real-story-of-the-chase-scene-in-bulli…
Ford just issued a Bullitt reissue car. Apparently they scored the original car, that a collector had refused to sell McQueen. I didn't even know about the re-issue when I posted this.
That's like saying the latest KTM could smoke a Bultaco around a motocross track.
I really don't understand the point you're trying to make.
But honestly that chase scene is way more captivating to me than today's crap where they just blow everything up and all the CGI bullshit.
To the guy saying McQueen was a less than flattering person in real life - he was a street kid but as he got famous and made money he did a lot of charitable work with orphanages as that was a part of his childhood as well. His drinking, drugs and women, I mean come on a lot of that was a sign of the times
The ISDE. Where you ride 6 days straight, where only you can work on the bike, the event where if youcan't change a flat in under 4 minutes,
including removing and replacing back on the bike, you are not competive.
The guy was a for real motorcycle racer.
When a good dirt bike was a 500cc Triumph set up for the woods.
When men were men.
There were 2 built for the movie.
One was trashed so bad during the movie, it was sent to the scrap yard.
That one was found a rusted hulk in Mexico years ago.
The one in the pic, ended up on an insurance guys hands over 25 years ago.
Got it for around 4K. Drove it as a family car for a few years, then hid it in a barn in Kentucky.
Didn't do anything to it, still has the camera mounts, all the scrapes and dings from the movie shoots.
Original tires, wheels, paint, interior, even dried out duct tape the movie crew had put on the tach and speedo
to keep them from shaking. That's how hard they drove that thing.
Until last week, it was like a big mystery, a ledgend.
Apparently, there is a whole kinda of cottage industry, a rather large group of people that have/are building replicas
of that car. And nobody really knew, besides from stills from the movie, what was done to it.
That's one of the first things they tell you to do when you wanna build one, buy the movie.
Until last week, it was the best way to kinda see how it was done.
That car, with the pedigree it has, the mystique that has built because it's been hidden so long,
Is thought to be the most expensive "survivor" car on the planet, worth over 4 million dollars at auction today.
Yeah, I read the same thing.
Elkins did some of the more dangerous driving, to where McQueen supposedly said, "he stole my show in The Great Escape, and now he's doing it again!".
Apparently, Elkins had a pretty big motorcycle shop in SoCal, and for a few years, if you wanted to get ahold
of MCQueen, you had to leave your number and what you wanted, at the shop.
If he wanted to talk to you, he'd call from a phone booth down the road a few days later.
But Ekins did have a shop in the San Fernando Valley I think over the hill from Hollywood. Mcqeen hung out there and did desert races with Ekins and his brother. They did the ISDT on Triumphs. He sold bikes to a lot of actors and stuntmen.
Pit Row
The Good Die Young is no truer of a saying when it comes to McQueen
I used to have a duct shop back in Baltimore, and there was an old guy Next door to me that fixed TVs.
Louie was a character, fiercely independant, small, but funny as hell.
Told me this story, when he worked for a guy in California back in the 70s.
Boss gave him a call, he heads out in his old van, up this long winding road to the top of a kinda mountain.
Said it scared the heck out of him, the van almost didn't make it.
Top of the development, a really beautiful woman answers, takes him back into the living room, where there are 2 guys watching the tube. The one guy says it just doesn't seem to be working as good as it should, could he fix it.
Louie said he took the back off, tapped on some tubes, blew some air around, turned a few dials back and forth,
And said that's it, should be good now.
Said he was still pissed about the hill and the van, and just wanted to get out of there.
As the guy is paying him, he thought he looked kind of famileier, told him his name, Louie, and if he had anymore
problems to make sure and tell his boss not to send him.
A week later, another ticket comes in, same address, with a request for him.
Barely makes it up the hill, is fuming when the guy lets him in, goes right to the TV and pulls the same act.
As the guy is paying him again, Louie tells him, didn't I tell you not to ask for me?
The guy laughs, says his name is Steve McQueen and this is my wife Ali.
And he really just wanted to see Louie's smoke again, and that he should have been a actor, would have been a natural.
IIRC, James Garner drove a VW Beetle during the Bullitt chase. He was visiting McQueen on-set, and got drafted in to help.
Bullitt clones all in a row
and the original, Or not I guess ?
Plus some cool bikes, Porsche's etc
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