[dlearl]

Originally Posted by ac27

This is an awesome thread guys, I finally finished reading through the whole thing....

+1 On several levels for me.

Originally Posted by village idiot

I'm still trying to find the movie that had Harry Hamlin in a 356 Cab and Dennis Hopper in an old 'Vette.

In late 1979, my then girlfriend took her modeling career to LA. Among work she found was as an extra on "King of the Hill." At the time, I was more into music than cars, and it just so happened that the drummer in our band and I went to LA to shop a demo tape, hoping to score some "showcase" gigs at the Whiskey or Troubadour. Neither happened, but we did get to visit Becky in a parking lot at Griffith Park during night shooting.

Originally Posted by execmalibu .

The producer Noel Noseck (a distant relative as it turned out) had booked my 356 race car as the hero car for the movie. During pre-production they fired the original writer and hired some kid fresh from Film School to do re-writes of the script.

This kid (I dont remember his name) was from the Mid West and had never been to LA let alone on Mulholland. They asked me to take him up on the hill for a few nights in my car at speed and to teach him the car lingo.

After about a week they thanked me numerous times, told my how valuable I was for their project and how much I helped the writer. Then they repaid me by hiring another coordinator and they did not use my car. (normal for the movie biss)

The movie was week! The writer used litlle on none of what I showed him...

The Kid is probably some "A" list writer now with 2 oscars...

I also remeber one of the Carradine Bros was fast in a modified Vette but never caught the Porsches..

To add insult to injury, the car used in the film wasn't even a Porsche, it was a flared Speedster kit car with a VW engine, like this. (Photo too large to link.) The night we were there, it was mounted on a trailer with camera mounts installed, ready for shooting some close up driving scenes.


But this really floored me:

Originally Posted by Banning

Interesting story from Concorso Italiano


I must digress to include some background on Pino Lella. Pino had been with the Italian Olympic ski team of 1950. After the Olympics he decided to jump ship and stay in America rather than return to Italy. With his good looks and Italian accent he soon became friends with the people in the southern California sports car and Hollywood picture scene. To supplement his earnings and support his skiing habit he often arranged to import and sell exotic cars in the US. This was a fortuitous arrangement since he had been childhood friends with Alberto Ascari and had connections with the Ferrari factory as well as with its foremost dealer in Milan, Gastone Cripaldi.

I had the immense good fortune to meet and become friends with Gastone's son, Roberto and be his guest in Milan, and share a couple of fantastic motorcycle trips with him. Both extremely interesting characters.



Finally, thanks to you, Chris, and all the other "first-handers" who have posted. As a kid from Utah who grew up listening to "Little Deuce Coupe" and "Dead Man's Curve," you So-Cal guys were the stuff of legend. As a 50 year commemorative of my family's VW Westie trip from the Seattle World's Fair to Tijuana, I plan to put a roof rack on the SC and do a camping trip the length of the coast this summer. I'm going to have to add a few trips up Mulholland to the list, in your honor.

Really looking forward to the book coming out. Maybe someday I can stop by to have it "signed by author."