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Best looking b-body ever is the 1968 dodge charger ... :)

those blowfish looking cartoon renditions look pregnant
 

Attachments

  • blowfish.jpg
    blowfish.jpg
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68 Charger is one car I want to own,but the 70 RR is by far my favorite. The current 70 Coronet is one mean lookin bastard too.
 
Anybody got one of those 68 GTX cartoon thingies?
 
:headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::headbang::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2::glasses2:
 
The black one with the red stripe and the red line tires is pretty sweet. It is amazing how much different colors can change the entire look of a car.
 
Herr_Poopschitz said:
Yeah, wasn't there a thread like this just last week?

Chargers are aesthetically pleasing, but just like a plus-sized model, no matter how pretty she is or how much make up you put on her, she's still ultimately an underperforming overweight pig.

That said, '64 330. No pretentious bs.All business and attractive while doing it.
View attachment 167270
Click to expand...

Sure they're on the heavy side, but I call BS on that first part especially. I don't see any "pretentious BS" in an 8.99 quarter mile...
[video=youtube;JUPjpF11MIc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUPjpF11MIc&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/video]

Even with my love for Chargers, I gotta give this thread a big thumbs down. Everyone's got their opinions of what they, personally, like best or think looks best, performs best, etc. This is just asking for sh*t talking and ignorant generalizations.

Read the title of my buildthread and you'll know what my personal favorite is, but I really like a lot of other cars. What is it they say about opinions being like a******s? Haha
 
I agree, it's like women how could anyone pick just one and say she's the best looking.
 
Hey that jim he is in PA he is a friend of mine and he built my trans for my car & that Charger is flat nasty.



Mr.SpeedFreak said:
Sure they're on the heavy side, but I call BS on that first part especially. I don't see any "pretentious BS" in an 8.99 quarter mile...
[video=youtube;JUPjpF11MIc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUPjpF11MIc&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/video]

Even with my love for Chargers, I gotta give this thread a big thumbs down. Everyone's got their opinions of what they, personally, like best or think looks best, performs best, etc. This is just asking for sh*t talking and ignorant generalizations.

Read the title of my buildthread and you'll know what my personal favorite is, but I really like a lot of other cars. What is it they say about opinions being like a******s? Haha
Click to expand...
 
My 1st brand new car was a B5 Blue 68 Charger R/T with black vinyl top and 4 speed. I was just out of the Navy and on cloud 9. It got totaled a year later. Then along came the Bullitt movie and reinforced my yearning to have another one. I have always wondered how that rustang was able to keep up. Guess Steve M being the star had something to do with it. Anyway, I now have another 68 Charger and will be doing a Bullitt clone of sorts. This one will have the 6.1 Hemi. Don't think the Rustang will be able to catch it.
 
Sixpactogo said:
My 1st brand new car was a B5 Blue 68 Charger R/T with black vinyl top and 4 speed. I was just out of the Navy and on cloud 9. It got totaled a year later. Then along came the Bullitt movie and reinforced my yearning to have another one. I have always wondered how that rustang was able to keep up. Guess Steve M being the star had something to do with it. Anyway, I now have another 68 Charger and will be doing a Bullitt clone of sorts. This one will have the 6.1 Hemi. Don't think the Rustang will be able to catch it.
Click to expand...


Ah, the Mustang couldn't! There is an article about the movie on the net where the stunt drivers were quoted that the dodge outclassed the ford in all areas, and that production was held up continually just to repair the Mustangs. The Chargers were almost bone stock, the Mustang was highly modified, to no avail. The 440 had so much torque, the drivers had to slow down during the chase scenes. The scenes had to be shot showing the mustang catching up, by slowing the dodge down. I believe it's true, as You can tell by watching the tail pipe
emissions.
 
monaco66coupe said:
Ah, the Mustang couldn't! There is an article about the movie on the net where the stunt drivers were quoted that the dodge outclassed the ford in all areas, and that production was held up continually just to repair the Mustangs. The Chargers were almost bone stock, the Mustang was highly modified, to no avail. The 440 had so much torque, the drivers had to slow down during the chase scenes. The scenes had to be shot showing the mustang catching up, by slowing the dodge down. I believe it's true, as You can tell by watching the tail pipe
emissions.
Click to expand...

I have no idea if thats fact or not but I love the story :). I don't doubt you one bit though 66'er
 
tallhair said:
I have no idea if thats fact or not but I love the story :). I don't doubt you one bit though 66'er
Click to expand...
I have found Wikipedia to be accurate usually, and if you google Bullit the movie, the story is on the net, with pictures.

3.1 Filming
3.2 Editing
4 Soundtrack
5 Release

6 References
7 External links
Plot[edit]

Ambitious politician Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) is about to hold a Senate Subcommittee hearing in San Francisco on organized crime in the United States. To improve his political standing, Chalmers hopes to interrogate key state's witness Johnny Ross (Pat Renella), who has represented himself as a Chicago defector from the "organization". Chalmers hopes to introduce his surprise witness, whom he will question in the subcommittee's public hearings. At Chalmers's request, Ross is put under protective custody on Friday evening, supposed to be kept in for 3 days until Monday morning, when he is supposed to testify at court.
Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), Sgt Delgetti (Don Gordon) and Det. Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel), are assigned to give Ross around-the-clock protection at the Hotel Daniels, a cheap flophouse near the Embarcadero Freeway. Late Saturday night, Ross inexplicably unchains the hotel room door. Before his young police protector Stanton can react, a pair of hitmen (Paul Genge and Bill Hickman) burst into the room and shoot Stanton and Ross, seriously wounding both. Bullitt wants to investigate the shooting in the hotel, while Chalmers attempts to place blame for injury to his witness on Bullitt and the San Francisco P.D to avoid a media scandal. Subsequently, Bullitt thwarts a second assassination attempt on the hospitalized Ross, although he shortly dies of his wounds from the initial hotel-room shotgunning. Bullitt suppresses this news of his death, sneaking the man's body out of the hospital and sending it to the morgue as a John Doe, hoping to draw out the assassins.
Beginning the investigation anew, Bullitt goes to a confidential informant to get the “lowdown” on just who Ross was and why a high-priority mob hit had been ordered on him. Bullitt is also made suspicious by the fact that Ross had unchained the door to the hotel room just prior to the shooting. Ross had been apparently expecting someone whom he wanted to assist in entering his hotel room, but to Ross’ surprise the intruders were a professional contract murder team. Bullitt learns the real reason for the hit on Ross from his North Beach informant. It turns out that the Organization has been looking for and trying to assassinate Johnny Ross for several days. They had first tried to kill him while he was still in Chicago. When that attempt failed, Ross fled unharmed to San Francisco. The West Coast mob is reportedly assisting with the Chicago Outfit in looking all over the city for Ross, and has all the transport outlets covered.
It is progressively revealed that the 'Ross' character is not who he has represented himself to be to Chalmers. Johnny Ross is not the low level mob technician who has come to Chalmers to testify. Ross is actually a high-ranked informant who stole two million dollars from the Outfit, and has came to San Francisco to seek help from Chalmers, but in reality, the deal is a flop; he is planning to escape from both the mob and the police.
As Bullitt reconstructs Ross's movements, he finds the cab driver Weissberg (Robert Duvall) who originally brought Ross to the Hotel Daniels. Bullitt is told by the cabbie that Ross had made both local and long distance calls from a pay phone before he was taken to the hotel. Long distance toll records from the pay phone revealed that 'Ross' had placed an inter-city toll call to a hotel room south of San Francisco. Bullitt picks up his 1968 Ford Mustang GT and sees he is being tailed by the same hitmen who killed Ross in their black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T. He turns the tables and follows them, resulting in a protracted, visually dramatic car chase through the hills and streets of San Francisco. The chase ends when Bullitt forces their speeding car off the road and into a gas station, causing a fiery explosion which kills the hitmen. Back at the police station Bullitt is given until Monday morning to follow his remaining lead.
Bullitt heads to the hotel to which Ross had telephoned, where he finds the woman Ross had called still registered under the name Mrs. Dorothy Simmons, who has been graphically murdered. The dead woman, or someone, had had her luggage sent to the airport. After being examined by Bullitt and Delgetti, the contents of the dead woman’s luggage begin the unraveling of the mystery. They find a pair of empty passport and airline ticket folders in each luggage set, plus brochures from a Chicago travel agency advertising a Rome vacation. The luggage clothing contents are also strange as well, they appear to be staged. All of the items are brand new, and have never been used or worn, with the price tags still attached or still inside of them. The man’s shirts are personally monogrammed, A–R, which of course does not match the name Simmons. However, inside the pockets of each of the sets of clothing are found several thousands of dollars of travelers’ checks, in multiple folders. The checks have been separately issued to and properly endorsed by, a Mr Albert Renick and a Mrs. Dorothy Renick. Bullitt tells Delgetti to contact Immigration Service in Chicago and obtain the photos and applications that their passports were issued under.
Bullitt comes to reason the events of the weekend into a coherent whole. Johnny Ross is an embezzler and had set in motion a scheme to get away with his thefts from the mob. From the beginning Ross knew that the mob, not the police, were his most important problem. He needed a way to have the mob stop looking for him, if he were to have any hope of actually getting away with his $2 million thefts. So Ross had recruited and paid the Renicks to have Albert Renick impersonate Johnny Ross as a man on-the-run in San Francisco, seeking protective custody in a Senate hearing, and turning state's evidence under police protection. Renick (as Ross), took the chain off the door of the hotel room to help his "kidnappers" (as he thought the plan was) make him disappear from police custody. The airline tickets and the traveler's checks in both Mr. and Mrs. Renick's names wrongly convinced them that they were to have a vacation in Rome.
Chalmers arrives at the morgue, demanding from Bullitt a signed admission that Ross died while in his custody. Bullitt demurs, and when the faxed copy of the Renicks' passport application photographs arrives, Chalmers is shown to have sent the police to protect the wrong man. Ross, and his older brother, had set Albert Renick up in order to be killed as "Johnny Ross" so the real Ross could escape both the mob and the police under a false name. Johnny then killed Dorothy Renick to silence her.
At the San Francisco airport a surveillance of passengers boarding the flight to Rome does not discover anyone resembling Ross/Renick. Bullitt guesses that Ross switched his ticket to an earlier international flight heading for London. He rapidly discovers that Ross has boarded and the London flight is taxiing toward takeoff. Chalmers makes one last attempt to use Ross for his own ends, which Bullitt moralistically rejects before pursuing Ross. A chase across the busy runways of San Francisco Airport ensues. Bullitt chases Ross back inside the crowded passenger terminal to a tense cat-and-mouse pursuit among the innocent throng. When Ross bolts and shoots a security guard, Bullitt shoots and kills him.
Cast[edit]







Cast notes
  • McQueen based the character of Frank Bullitt on San Francisco Inspector Dave Toschi, with whom he worked prior to filming.[SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP] McQueen even copied Toschi's unique "fast draw" shoulder holster. Toschi later became famous, along with Inspector Bill Armstrong, as the lead San Francisco investigators of the Zodiac Killer murders that began shortly after the release of Bullitt. Toschi is played by Mark Ruffalo in the film Zodiac, in which Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) mentions that "McQueen got the idea for the holster from Toschi".[SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][9][/SUP]
Car chase[edit]

287px-Burninrubber4.jpg

Bullitt burning rubber in the car chase scene.


At the time of the film's release, the car chase scene generated a great amount of excitement.[SUP][2][/SUP] Leonard Maltin has called it a "now-classic car chase, one of the screen's all-time best."[SUP][3][/SUP] Emanuel Levy wrote in 2003 that, "Bullitt contains one of the most exciting car chases in film history, a sequence that revolutionized Hollywood's standards."[SUP][4][/SUP] In his obituary for Peter Yates, Bruce Weber wrote "Mr. Yates’ reputation probably rests most securely on “Bullitt” (1968), his first American film – and indeed, on one particular scene, an extended car chase that instantly became a classic."[SUP][5][/SUP] The editing of this scene likely won editor Frank P. Keller the Academy Award for Best Editing.[SUP][10][/SUP]
Later, producer Philip D'Antoni filmed two more car chases for The French Connection and The Seven-Ups, both set and filmed in New York City.
Filming[edit]

The total time of the scene is 10 minutes and 53 seconds, beginning in the Fisherman's Wharf area at Columbus and Chestnut, followed by Midtown shooting on Hyde and Laguna Streets, with shots of Coit Tower and locations around and on Filbert and University Streets. The scene ends outside the city at the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in Brisbane.[SUP][11][/SUP]
Two 1968 390 V8 Ford Mustang GT fastbacks (325 hp) with four-speed manual transmissions were used for the chase scene, both loaned by the Ford Motor Company to Warner Bros. as part of a promotional agreement. The Mustangs' engines, brakes and suspensions were heavily modified for the chase by veteran car racer Max Balchowsky. Ford also originally loaned two Galaxie sedans for the chase scenes, but the producers found the cars too heavy for the jumps over the hills of San Francisco. They were replaced with two 1968 375 hp 440 Magnum V8-powered Dodge Chargers. The engines in both Chargers were left largely unmodified, but the suspensions were mildly upgraded to cope with the demands of the stunt work.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]
The director called for maximum speeds of about 75–80 miles per hour (121–129 km/h), but the cars (including the chase cars filming) at times reached speeds of over 110 miles per hour (180 km/h). Driver's point-of-view shots were used to give the audience a participant's feel of the chase. Filming took three weeks, resulting in 9 minutes and 42 seconds of pursuit, first of Bullitt by the hitmen then the reverse. Because of multiple takes spliced into a single end product, heavy damage on the passenger side of Bullitt's car can be seen much earlier than the incident producing it and the Charger loses five wheel covers, with different ones missing in different shots. Shooting from multiple angles simultaneously and creating a montage from the footage to give the illusion of different streets also resulted in the speeding cars passing the same cars at several different times. At one point the Charger crashes into the camera in one scene and the damaged front fender is noticeable in later scenes. Local authorities did not allow the car chase to be filmed on the Golden Gate Bridge, but did permit it in Midtown locations including the Mission District, and on the outskirts of neighboring Brisbane.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]
McQueen, an accomplished driver, drove in the close-up scenes, while stunt coordinator Carey Loftin hired stuntman and motorcycle racer Bud Ekins and McQueen's usual stunt driver Loren Janes for the high-speed part of the chase and other dangerous stunts.[SUP][12][/SUP] Ekins, who doubled for McQueen in the The Great Escape sequence where McQueen's character jumps over a barbed wire fence on a motorcycle, also lays one down in front of a skidding truck during the Bullitt chase. The Mustang’s interior rear view mirror goes up and down depending on who is driving; when the mirror is up McQueen is visible behind the wheel; when it is down Ekins is driving.
The black Dodge Charger was driven by veteran stunt driver Bill Hickman, who both played one of the hitmen and helped with the chase scene choreography. The other hitman was played by Paul Genge, who had ridden a Dodge off the road to his death in an episode of Perry Mason – "The Case of the Sausalito Sunrise" two years earlier. In a magazine article many years later, one of the drivers involved in the chase sequence remarked that the stock Dodge 440s were so much faster than the Mustang that the drivers had to keep backing off the accelerator to prevent the Dodge from easily pulling away from the Mustang.[SUP][13][/SUP]
One of the two Mustangs was scrapped after filming because of damage and liability concerns, while the other was sold to an employee of Warner Brothers.[SUP][14][/SUP] The car changed hands several times, with McQueen at one point making an unsuccessful attempt to buy it in late 1977. The current state and location of the surviving Mustang is largely unknown, but it is rumored many times that the Mustang is kept in a barn in Ohio River Valley by an unknown owner.[SUP][15][/SUP]
 
Last edited:
monaco66coupe said:
I have found Wikipedia to be accurate usually, and if you google Bullit the movie, the story is on the net, with pictures.

3.1 Filming
3.2 Editing
4 Soundtrack
5 Release

6 References
7 External links
Plot[edit]

Ambitious politician Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) is about to hold a Senate Subcommittee hearing in San Francisco on organized crime in the United States. To improve his political standing, Chalmers hopes to interrogate key state's witness Johnny Ross (Pat Renella), who has represented himself as a Chicago defector from the "organization". Chalmers hopes to introduce his surprise witness, whom he will question in the subcommittee's public hearings. At Chalmers's request, Ross is put under protective custody on Friday evening, supposed to be kept in for 3 days until Monday morning, when he is supposed to testify at court.
Lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), Sgt Delgetti (Don Gordon) and Det. Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel), are assigned to give Ross around-the-clock protection at the Hotel Daniels, a cheap flophouse near the Embarcadero Freeway. Late Saturday night, Ross inexplicably unchains the hotel room door. Before his young police protector Stanton can react, a pair of hitmen (Paul Genge and Bill Hickman) burst into the room and shoot Stanton and Ross, seriously wounding both. Bullitt wants to investigate the shooting in the hotel, while Chalmers attempts to place blame for injury to his witness on Bullitt and the San Francisco P.D to avoid a media scandal. Subsequently, Bullitt thwarts a second assassination attempt on the hospitalized Ross, although he shortly dies of his wounds from the initial hotel-room shotgunning. Bullitt suppresses this news of his death, sneaking the man's body out of the hospital and sending it to the morgue as a John Doe, hoping to draw out the assassins.
Beginning the investigation anew, Bullitt goes to a confidential informant to get the “lowdown” on just who Ross was and why a high-priority mob hit had been ordered on him. Bullitt is also made suspicious by the fact that Ross had unchained the door to the hotel room just prior to the shooting. Ross had been apparently expecting someone whom he wanted to assist in entering his hotel room, but to Ross’ surprise the intruders were a professional contract murder team. Bullitt learns the real reason for the hit on Ross from his North Beach informant. It turns out that the Organization has been looking for and trying to assassinate Johnny Ross for several days. They had first tried to kill him while he was still in Chicago. When that attempt failed, Ross fled unharmed to San Francisco. The West Coast mob is reportedly assisting with the Chicago Outfit in looking all over the city for Ross, and has all the transport outlets covered.
It is progressively revealed that the 'Ross' character is not who he has represented himself to be to Chalmers. Johnny Ross is not the low level mob technician who has come to Chalmers to testify. Ross is actually a high-ranked informant who stole two million dollars from the Outfit, and has came to San Francisco to seek help from Chalmers, but in reality, the deal is a flop; he is planning to escape from both the mob and the police.
As Bullitt reconstructs Ross's movements, he finds the cab driver Weissberg (Robert Duvall) who originally brought Ross to the Hotel Daniels. Bullitt is told by the cabbie that Ross had made both local and long distance calls from a pay phone before he was taken to the hotel. Long distance toll records from the pay phone revealed that 'Ross' had placed an inter-city toll call to a hotel room south of San Francisco. Bullitt picks up his 1968 Ford Mustang GT and sees he is being tailed by the same hitmen who killed Ross in their black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T. He turns the tables and follows them, resulting in a protracted, visually dramatic car chase through the hills and streets of San Francisco. The chase ends when Bullitt forces their speeding car off the road and into a gas station, causing a fiery explosion which kills the hitmen. Back at the police station Bullitt is given until Monday morning to follow his remaining lead.
Bullitt heads to the hotel to which Ross had telephoned, where he finds the woman Ross had called still registered under the name Mrs. Dorothy Simmons, who has been graphically murdered. The dead woman, or someone, had had her luggage sent to the airport. After being examined by Bullitt and Delgetti, the contents of the dead woman’s luggage begin the unraveling of the mystery. They find a pair of empty passport and airline ticket folders in each luggage set, plus brochures from a Chicago travel agency advertising a Rome vacation. The luggage clothing contents are also strange as well, they appear to be staged. All of the items are brand new, and have never been used or worn, with the price tags still attached or still inside of them. The man’s shirts are personally monogrammed, A–R, which of course does not match the name Simmons. However, inside the pockets of each of the sets of clothing are found several thousands of dollars of travelers’ checks, in multiple folders. The checks have been separately issued to and properly endorsed by, a Mr Albert Renick and a Mrs. Dorothy Renick. Bullitt tells Delgetti to contact Immigration Service in Chicago and obtain the photos and applications that their passports were issued under.
Bullitt comes to reason the events of the weekend into a coherent whole. Johnny Ross is an embezzler and had set in motion a scheme to get away with his thefts from the mob. From the beginning Ross knew that the mob, not the police, were his most important problem. He needed a way to have the mob stop looking for him, if he were to have any hope of actually getting away with his $2 million thefts. So Ross had recruited and paid the Renicks to have Albert Renick impersonate Johnny Ross as a man on-the-run in San Francisco, seeking protective custody in a Senate hearing, and turning state's evidence under police protection. Renick (as Ross), took the chain off the door of the hotel room to help his "kidnappers" (as he thought the plan was) make him disappear from police custody. The airline tickets and the traveler's checks in both Mr. and Mrs. Renick's names wrongly convinced them that they were to have a vacation in Rome.
Chalmers arrives at the morgue, demanding from Bullitt a signed admission that Ross died while in his custody. Bullitt demurs, and when the faxed copy of the Renicks' passport application photographs arrives, Chalmers is shown to have sent the police to protect the wrong man. Ross, and his older brother, had set Albert Renick up in order to be killed as "Johnny Ross" so the real Ross could escape both the mob and the police under a false name. Johnny then killed Dorothy Renick to silence her.
At the San Francisco airport a surveillance of passengers boarding the flight to Rome does not discover anyone resembling Ross/Renick. Bullitt guesses that Ross switched his ticket to an earlier international flight heading for London. He rapidly discovers that Ross has boarded and the London flight is taxiing toward takeoff. Chalmers makes one last attempt to use Ross for his own ends, which Bullitt moralistically rejects before pursuing Ross. A chase across the busy runways of San Francisco Airport ensues. Bullitt chases Ross back inside the crowded passenger terminal to a tense cat-and-mouse pursuit among the innocent throng. When Ross bolts and shoots a security guard, Bullitt shoots and kills him.
Cast[edit]







Cast notes
  • McQueen based the character of Frank Bullitt on San Francisco Inspector Dave Toschi, with whom he worked prior to filming.[SUP][7][/SUP][SUP][8][/SUP] McQueen even copied Toschi's unique "fast draw" shoulder holster. Toschi later became famous, along with Inspector Bill Armstrong, as the lead San Francisco investigators of the Zodiac Killer murders that began shortly after the release of Bullitt. Toschi is played by Mark Ruffalo in the film Zodiac, in which Paul Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) mentions that "McQueen got the idea for the holster from Toschi".[SUP][8][/SUP][SUP][9][/SUP]
Car chase[edit]

287px-Burninrubber4.jpg

Bullitt burning rubber in the car chase scene.


At the time of the film's release, the car chase scene generated a great amount of excitement.[SUP][2][/SUP] Leonard Maltin has called it a "now-classic car chase, one of the screen's all-time best."[SUP][3][/SUP] Emanuel Levy wrote in 2003 that, "Bullitt contains one of the most exciting car chases in film history, a sequence that revolutionized Hollywood's standards."[SUP][4][/SUP] In his obituary for Peter Yates, Bruce Weber wrote "Mr. Yates’ reputation probably rests most securely on “Bullitt” (1968), his first American film – and indeed, on one particular scene, an extended car chase that instantly became a classic."[SUP][5][/SUP] The editing of this scene likely won editor Frank P. Keller the Academy Award for Best Editing.[SUP][10][/SUP]
Later, producer Philip D'Antoni filmed two more car chases for The French Connection and The Seven-Ups, both set and filmed in New York City.
Filming[edit]

The total time of the scene is 10 minutes and 53 seconds, beginning in the Fisherman's Wharf area at Columbus and Chestnut, followed by Midtown shooting on Hyde and Laguna Streets, with shots of Coit Tower and locations around and on Filbert and University Streets. The scene ends outside the city at the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in Brisbane.[SUP][11][/SUP]
Two 1968 390 V8 Ford Mustang GT fastbacks (325 hp) with four-speed manual transmissions were used for the chase scene, both loaned by the Ford Motor Company to Warner Bros. as part of a promotional agreement. The Mustangs' engines, brakes and suspensions were heavily modified for the chase by veteran car racer Max Balchowsky. Ford also originally loaned two Galaxie sedans for the chase scenes, but the producers found the cars too heavy for the jumps over the hills of San Francisco. They were replaced with two 1968 375 hp 440 Magnum V8-powered Dodge Chargers. The engines in both Chargers were left largely unmodified, but the suspensions were mildly upgraded to cope with the demands of the stunt work.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]
The director called for maximum speeds of about 75–80 miles per hour (121–129 km/h), but the cars (including the chase cars filming) at times reached speeds of over 110 miles per hour (180 km/h). Driver's point-of-view shots were used to give the audience a participant's feel of the chase. Filming took three weeks, resulting in 9 minutes and 42 seconds of pursuit, first of Bullitt by the hitmen then the reverse. Because of multiple takes spliced into a single end product, heavy damage on the passenger side of Bullitt's car can be seen much earlier than the incident producing it and the Charger loses five wheel covers, with different ones missing in different shots. Shooting from multiple angles simultaneously and creating a montage from the footage to give the illusion of different streets also resulted in the speeding cars passing the same cars at several different times. At one point the Charger crashes into the camera in one scene and the damaged front fender is noticeable in later scenes. Local authorities did not allow the car chase to be filmed on the Golden Gate Bridge, but did permit it in Midtown locations including the Mission District, and on the outskirts of neighboring Brisbane.[SUP][citation needed][/SUP]
McQueen, an accomplished driver, drove in the close-up scenes, while stunt coordinator Carey Loftin hired stuntman and motorcycle racer Bud Ekins and McQueen's usual stunt driver Loren Janes for the high-speed part of the chase and other dangerous stunts.[SUP][12][/SUP] Ekins, who doubled for McQueen in the The Great Escape sequence where McQueen's character jumps over a barbed wire fence on a motorcycle, also lays one down in front of a skidding truck during the Bullitt chase. The Mustang’s interior rear view mirror goes up and down depending on who is driving; when the mirror is up McQueen is visible behind the wheel; when it is down Ekins is driving.
The black Dodge Charger was driven by veteran stunt driver Bill Hickman, who both played one of the hitmen and helped with the chase scene choreography. The other hitman was played by Paul Genge, who had ridden a Dodge off the road to his death in an episode of Perry Mason – "The Case of the Sausalito Sunrise" two years earlier. In a magazine article many years later, one of the drivers involved in the chase sequence remarked that the stock Dodge 440s were so much faster than the Mustang that the drivers had to keep backing off the accelerator to prevent the Dodge from easily pulling away from the Mustang.[SUP][13][/SUP]
One of the two Mustangs was scrapped after filming because of damage and liability concerns, while the other was sold to an employee of Warner Brothers.[SUP][14][/SUP] The car changed hands several times, with McQueen at one point making an unsuccessful attempt to buy it in late 1977. The current state and location of the surviving Mustang is largely unknown, but it is rumored many times that the Mustang is kept in a barn in Ohio River Valley by an unknown owner.[SUP][15][/SUP]
Click to expand...

No surprise here ... :icon_winkle:
 
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