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SPEED Presents Hollywood’s Hottest Car Chases
Two-hour Thanksgiving TV special focuses on the greatest movie chases, their history and their impact, featuring director Hal Needham, stunt driver Tanner Foust and Playboy's A.J. Baime.
David Harris  |  Posted November 22, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Hollywood’s Hottest Car Chases premieres Thanksgiving Night at 8 pm ET/5 pm PT on SPEED.
All you have to do is type “favorite car chases” into a web search engine, then sit back and enjoy. You will get pages upon pages of clips, descriptions, discussions – some heated – and fond memories from past movie-going experiences.

On Thanksgiving Night, national cable-television network SPEED will enter the fray with the two-hour special Hollywood's Hottest Car Chases at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. The program, produced by Pangolin Pictures, will venture through the past 40 years of cinema's finest chases in chronicling how they were made, reliving iconic sequences and talking to the people who created them.

The program also helps kick off SPEED network's Dream Ride II holiday programming and promotional event.

With movie car chases, as with any widely appreciated genre, most people have strong opinions about what they like or dislike, and those within the automotive and entertainment industries are no different. But their perspective on what's considered significant may be a little surprising to some.

"At the moment, and I do vacillate on this, my favorite is the multiple car chases in ‘Ronin,’" said SPEED Automotive Editor Bob Golfen, talking about the 1998 police thriller starring Robert De Niro. "I love those claustrophobic chase scenes through the European streets, those small towns and everything. They are terribly violent as you see bystanders shot down, but aside from that, they are just fascinating. The cars are great with an Audi A8 and cars like that. Very cool stuff."

Check out: “Ronin” video clip.

Steve McQueen lights them up during the famous chase scene from "Bullitt." (Photo: Warner Bros.)
While “Ronin” has often been sighted as a favorite for many, it was another police drama in 1968 that brought the car chase to the fore. Many film historians consider the chase scene from Steve McQueen's now famous 1968 police drama “Bullitt” to be the modern-day benchmark.

Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (McQueen), his Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT and stunt
driver Bill Hickman's Tuxedo Black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 highlight a lengthy (nine minutes, 42 seconds) and “never-before-seen” chase (at the time) through the streets of San Francisco, where in-car cameras, wide-action shots and impressive closed-quarter driving outshone every other aspect of the movie.

"Being a little bit of a purist, I look at ‘Bullitt,’" said Hollywood stunt driver Tanner Foust, whose numerous works include “The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift” and “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

"It's the quintessential car chase,” Foust said of “Bullitt’s” famous scene. “In looking back at how guerrilla it was, like being shot in real time where sometimes streets weren't even closed completely. It sounds like they just went for it and the footage was really cool and the driving was really committed."

Check out: “Bullitt” video clip.

"There were earlier car chases like in ‘Thunder Road,’ and obviously, there were 'chase scenes' in others as well, but (Bullitt) became the standard," Golfen said. "And that Mustang is so great. You see it coming around the curve and its standing on tip toe, and you would just say, 'Man, that is such a badass car.' I was pretty much sold after that. (The Mustang) was a 1968 390 (cubic-inch-engine) GT."

Popeye Doyle stresses out during his madman chase after an elevated train in 'The French Connection.' (Photo: 20th Century Fox)
Foust's perspective on what was accomplished in those earlier chase scenes is also revealing. While CGI is an important on-screen technology, the actual evolution of the automobile also changed movie-making.

"You have to take into account that the cars are a lot different now than they were in the 1960s," Foust said. "Now cars are so much more capable of doing really crazy things. A modern film, like ‘The Bourne Ultimatum,’ where driving through the city of New York with the city police department police cars... those police cars are modern. So they are capable of speeds and maneuvers you couldn't get away with in older cars.

“So to see these older Mustangs like ‘Eleanor' in (the original) ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ and some of these older movies, and seeing what these guys were doing with the older cars was absolutely incredible."

Three years after “Bullitt,” “The French Connection” (1971) premiered in theatres to rave reviews. Once again, a wide-open car chase scene stole the show. Starring Gene Hackman as Detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, this American crime film featured Popeye frantically driving a 1971 Pontiac Le Mans through the busy streets of New York City chasing a hit man who tried to escape in an elevated train above.

Many of the scenes resulted from real-life incidents that resulted from mistimed stunts. Bill Hickman, who also stunt drove the opposing Dodge Charger in “Bullitt,” was Hackman's driving stand-in during this film as well. The authentic nature of that movie was a precursor to much of what you see today.

Check out: “The French Connection” video clip.

"It's amazing to look back and see that it was already being done with ‘The French Connection,’" said Joey Allen, Pangolin Pictures vice president of Production and Hollywood's Hottest Car Chases supervising producer. "I like the realism with that movie."
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