The car’s the star

I recall pointing out to him that Sex And The City was nothing but superficial froth and mindless titillation, but Froning said that was exactly its appeal, which is strong not just among an audience of 30 to 40-year-old women who are traditionally hard to reach for car makers, but also a huge hidden audience of men as well.

Froning took no chances with film roles for his charges. He lived the life of a Hollywood pitcher, breakfasting over the trades (Hollywood Reporter, Variety), feasting on who’s up and down, whose script just got optioned and whose project had stalled. Mornings would be spent working the phones, to agents, studio fixers and a Runyonesque cast of characters that surround the movie business, and afternoons reading scripts and meeting Froning’s retained agency that seeks film outlets for the Mercedes brand.

‘We wouldn’t do anything without reading the script,’ he told me. ‘We need to see how the whole story turns out; does the hero climb in a car and end up driving under the influence? Does the car end up in a ditch?’

Ah yes, the script thing. Not always available. Whitehead says some placements are just awful for the brands concerned, with the net effect of the car on screen detracting from the marque rather than enhancing it. He cites the spin off from the popular BBC TV series Motherland called Amandaland starring Lucy Punch.

‘In the first series,’ says Whitehead, ‘her character’s car was a Tesla. Now, for her kind of wealth and level of income, and everything she was, you would put her in a Tesla – you absolutely would.

‘However, the negativity associated with that vehicle and the action that was scripted in that first and second episode was horrific for the product. In one of the scenes, she’d run out of charge at a friend’s address and she gets a three-pin charge plug from her car and literally takes it all the way across the pavement to look for a plug socket. She was blocking people on the road and it was awful for EVs and Tesla; that’s a negative placement.’

Personally I’m not really Amandaland’s target audience or frankly a potential customer for a Tesla, but I did catch that scene and thought it was pretty situation normal with EVs. Attempting to charge EV test vehicles, I’ve been locked in a field, begged a minimal three-pin charge from an old lady in Rettenden, crept along at 20mph when the charge available gauge turned into a mendacious bastard and parked without charge or sustenance for five hours in freezing temperatures behind a queue of a squillion vans waiting for the single working charge point.

Besides, there are worse things to see on screen, movie or TV, which I suppose marks me out as an enthusiast rather than a marketing target for the Madison Avenue or Charlotte Street crews.

Turn to film director, stunt planner and vehicle wrangler Al Clark for his thoughts on bad product placement.

‘One of the worst I’ve seen are those Defenders loaned to the Bond movie No Time To Die,’ he says. ‘Remember that scene where they all appear to be flying through the air and then Bond betters them with a battered old Toyota Land Cruiser? Did anyone actually read that script? They can’t have been very pleased with the end result.’

He’s not alone and to many those forest scenes seemed like a witty twist on that old saw: ‘if you want to go into the boondocks, get a Land Rover. If you want to come out again, get a Land Cruiser.’ Yet with captain hindsight firmly in attendance, the marketing wonks hailed the genius recovery of JLR’s agency, as they bought footage of their cars and turned them into an advertisement with no context from the film. I’ve seen those ads and I reckon the jury is out on a six-month cruise.

Besides, the best car placed in the entire film is the gorgeous Aston Martin V8 Vantage Series II, which appears in the final scenes with the equally statuesque Léa Seydoux at the wheel. Aston Martin Works Service told me they had no end of enquiries about buying one after the film came out.

But Clark also points out another major hazard with product placement, which he calls the ‘how did that car get there factor?’

Take the second series of the BBC police procedural Vigil starring Suranne Jones, for example, which had her driving a BMW X7 costing well over six figures – a bit of a stretch even on a detective chief inspector’s salary. Similarly, the spin-off from the original Inspector Morse series, Lewis, had the team swapping from Vauxhalls into BMWs and back again, which not only begged questions about the vacillations of the Thames Valley Police vehicle budgets, but also which car maker was in (and out) with the producers.

And it doesn’t always go right even if the plot, the character and the car fit like a dovetail joint. The 2008 Iron Man film had a prime role for the Audi R8 carefully negotiated by Audi’s chosen product placement agency and inserted into the action as a way of allowing Robert Downey Jr to escape his enemies. But that scene got cut as too difficult to film, which was a poor result for the provision of all the cars in the movie including the alleged wrecking of two R8s and a major promotional spend on behalf of the VW Group. Honour was eventually satisfied with a peculiar scene into which an Audi Q7 was shoehorned, but again the marketing wonks were ecstatic.

I put it to both my experts that most memorable ‘car films’ are those where the director chooses the cars rather than having cars foisted upon them. Clark acknowledges the point and says that one of his best car films is the 1998 John Frankenheimer-directed film Ronin, with an ensemble cast headed by Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean and Jonathan Pryce.

Clark reckons the obvious love and care that went into the choice of cars such as the Audi S8, BMW 535i and Peugeot 406s, the real-time action sequences (the crew tried not to speed up or ‘over crank’ the chase scenes saying it wasn’t authentic and affected the lighting), and the skills of cinematographer Robert Fraisse, stunt coordinator Jean-Claude Lagniez, sound engineer Mike Le Mare, who went so far as to record the cars on a race track, and of course the drivers including Jean-Pierre Jarier and Michel Neugarten, just shone through.

‘Those car scenes were the result of someone who was really into their cars,’ says Clark.

The 1970s saw the start of serious car product placement with movies such as Smokey And The Bandit (1977), directed by Hollywood stuntman Hal Needham. The film is basically one long moustache-powered car chase for which Pontiac supplied the cars including Burt Reynolds’s Firebird Trans Am and saw a significant uplift in sales after the film debuted.

The flood-damage programmes of US car makers were wildly plundered by the second unit action crews of the car-chase movies in the ’70s and ’80s, with endless destruction derbies in such films as White Lightning (1973), with 60 wrecks; Gone In 60 Seconds (1974) with 93 wrecks; and The Blues Brothers (1980) with 104 wrecks. These films simply couldn’t have happened without the tacit support of car makers. General Motors, for example, donated all the 300 cars wrecked in that famous freeway crash scene in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and the current wrecking record film, Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, which destroyed 532 cars, the majority secured as slated-for-scrap-yards from insurance companies.

Bored with mass car crashes? Try The Last Run, a 1971 ‘one-last-job’ movie, a troubled production initially directed by John Huston then Richard Fleischer and starring George C. Scott. There’s just one car here, a BMW 503, produced between 1956 and 1959 (just 139 were made) with a 3.2-litre V8 and most of the undercarriage lifted from the 507 sports car. Rare, super expensive, with an aftermarket supercharger and at least 11 years old by the time the film came out, you can take it to the bank that this wasn’t placed by BMW. But it was a classy whip indeed racing round the roads of Albufeira in Portugal.

Similarly styled in that ‘floppy convertible driven with gusto’ style is The Hot Rock, a brilliant 1972 William Goldman-scripted, Peter Yates-directed comedy caper, with Robert Redford and George Segal, and the classiest getaway car, a Mercedes-Benz W111/112 convertible driven, we are led to believe, with some aplomb by Stan Murch (played by Ron Leibman) – ‘I don’t think it cornered too good,’ he says after wiping it round the block. Again, did Mercedes provide this car? I think not.

Clark counters with La Casse (The Burglars), another 1971 flick directed by Henri Verneuil and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Omar Sharif and with stunt sequences organised by Rémy Julienne, who did the same thing on The Italian Job and numerous Bond films. As car capers go, this is simply astonishing.

‘That’s incredible,’ said my brother William after he’d seen the link. ‘The  instructions must have been: “don’t hit anything for five minutes, then bash into anything you like”.’

‘Who’d have thought you could make such an amazing action sequence with a super ordinary Fiat 124 and Opel Rekord,’ says Clark. It’s one of his favourite car chases and he reckons that some of the high-speed scenes filmed in Athens were done on public roads, with the public on them. Its IMDb listing agrees, saying the local authorities said only that they didn’t ‘overdo it’. Take a look and see what you think.

A similar epithet could be levelled at The French Connection (1971), where Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle chases a Brooklyn subway train in a puppy-poo brown Pontiac LeMans, where the public extras are really just, erm, the public. Driving and stunt coordinating was Bill Hickman, who did the same on Bullitt, which was directed by Peter Yates – are you getting the connections here? The French Connection director William Friedkin later admitted they had filmed on public streets without permits or permission. Funnily enough, it’s hard to find out if Pontiac supplied Hackman’s car, though there’s not much left of it at the end.

But it doesn’t have to be a chase. The sight of Frank Sinatra climbing into a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL in that 1959 Rock Hudson and Doris Day vehicle Pillow Talk rather set that car in stone as the two-seater of choice for the Hollywood glitterati. In fact, it’s one of the first in a series of SL screen credits which include: On the Beach, High Society, Bullitt, Play Misty for Me, Viva Las Vegas, Beverly Hills Cop, The Bucket List and The Simpsons.

But don’t think that what you see on screen is necessarily what you are getting. The invisible Aston Martin Vanquish in Die Another Day (2002), starring Pierce Brosnan, was basically a Ford Explorer. The 1936 Avions Voisin C28 from Sahara (2008) was a Jaguar-engined special built in France (it later came up for sale in a Brooks auction and I nearly bid for it).

One of the Rolls-Royces in the 2010 movie The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was created by Cinema Vehicles in Los Angeles out of a Cadillac Silverado. Crowley’s 1933 Bentley in Good Omens was a real 1933 car, but the one they blew up was a scrap Bentley shell. And after a special effects mishap in filming The Italian Job, the stand-in car for the Aston Martin DB4 convertible was a hastily converted Lancia Flaminia 3C Touring convertible. And that DB5 shot to smithereens at the end of Skyfall? A 3D-printed, one-third scale model you’ll doubtless be glad to learn.

William Bodie drove a Ford Capri in The Professionals, the snappy 1980s London Weekend Television series. This was largely because Ford snaffled a car supply contract after a British Leyland deal unravelled. Few, however, recall the opening credits of the early series with a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow cornering on its door handles, which seems unlikely to have been a supply deal out of Crewe.

Sometimes it’s just sheer pester power that gets a car on screen. The stylish 1969 thriller La Piscine, starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin, had a lovely Maserati Ghibli racing along the French Riviera. The screenwriters had planned to use a Lamborghini Espada, but Maserati’s French official merchandiser got wind of the shooting and eventually convinced the producers to use a Ghibli instead.

And what about that most common of clichés, the detective with a classic car? The insubordinate loner who solves the mystery from behind the wheel of an off-beat classic: Inspector Morse and his Jag Mark II; Bergerac and the Triumph Roadster; Gene Hunt and his Audi Quattro; Jim Rockford in his Pontiac Firebird; Ludwig’s Saab; Magnum and his Ferrari 308 GTS; Columbo and his Peugeot 403 cabrio; and Luther and his Volvo 240. The list goes on…

‘One of my friends is an action vehicle coordinator, who did the first series of Luther,’ says Whitehead. ‘He kept that old Volvo and they had it back, year after year, series after series, but then the producers said there’d be no more Luther and since it was in the way, he sold it. Of course, they reversed their decision and wanted it back again…’

But isn’t the classic hero car a busted flush these days? Whitehead says not if it’s carefully curated. ‘They do work for a brand,’ he says, ‘because sometimes it’s just all about nostalgia, showing the brand’s history.’

And it doesn’t have to be automotive, either. Whitehead recalls working on Sherwood, a BBC crime drama where the shooting script called for a period bottle of Macallan whisky – cue a frantic search for 1950s original bottles and labels.

But it doesn’t always work; in some cases the car overshadows the plot and the character. Take the statuesque Citroën DS goddess for example: brilliant and historically correct in Frederick Forsyth’s Day Of The Jackal; the fantastical flying car in Back To The Future II, or Fantômas se Décaîne; a charmer in Ma Il Cielo è Sempre Più Blu; cool getaway car in Le Samouraï; simply gorgeous in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but barely credible in Murder In Provence; and absolutely unbelievable in Apple TV’s recent Down Cemetery Road.

And of course, the Minis in The Italian Job. Few have been able to escape the shadow of the archetypal Turin heist movie, though Clark reckons director Paul Greengrass did in the first of the Bourne franchise, the 2002 Bourne Identity.

‘It felt right,’ he says. ‘Not a homage to The Italian Job, but a Mini used properly and they didn’t over stretch it or try things that would have written the car off in real life.’

I’d place the 1981 New Zealand movie Goodbye Pork Pie in this category, where the protagonists sell bits of their little yellow Mini to fund their road journey.

Given the finances of the film and TV industry these days, there’s not much that appears on the screen which isn’t placed there, most often for a fee, but not always. Kia, for example, reverse engineered the process in a deal with Disney which provides Disney-themed displays for the infotainment screens in Kia cars, something I’d pay good money not to have. And while BMW might have a very high-end deal with the producers of the Mission: Impossible franchise which ended this year, it isn’t necessarily the new stuff which you remember.

‘Some of these things are pure storytelling,’ says Clark. ‘That electric Fiat 500 from Dead Reckoning is just brilliant, barely capable of being driven in a straight line. Then there’s the BMW E28 from Fallout; these are clearly people who love cars.’

The fact that they ‘tortured’ that BMW should act as a warning to those inclined to ‘lend’ their classic cars to production companies. As Clark puts it: ‘I directed a car chase with Audi R8s, which was a seven-minute sequence, nose-to-tail, through snow dunes, with rigs attached by sucker cups by the camera department and stunt drivers just there to do a job. We’d rented those cars…’

Wow, what sort of condition were they in when they went back? Silence. The phone line appears to have a bit of a problem…

But I wonder, couldn’t they have done it with computer-generated graphics?

‘There’s an enormous disconnect between those who want to do something that’s real,’ he says, ‘and those who want to project something on screen, which looks real. Some will tell you that there’s no difference, some will tell you the polar opposite.’

If it’s all a little bit too new and shiny, most likely it’s placed; if it’s old and kind-of well used, then it probably isn’t. A good director will have a gut instinct for what works and what doesn’t, and the ‘look’ they want for the film. But very often, product placement is trying to sell you something – so trust your gut, and above all, remember it’s a magic lantern show, not a buying guide.