Gone in 60 Seconds: the car chase porn movie as crazy as its creator

H.B.Halicki died in 1989. He was killed when a water tower collapsed, snaring a telephone pole which hit him on the head. Minutes prior to this he was shouting into a TV news camera, threatening to sue the local city for making him take out a $10 million insurance bond. Halicki threw fury at the screen, claiming there has never been an accident on his movie sets.

This alone was an incredible lie and perhaps an indication of how much Halicki believed his own mythology. There had been many accidents on his movie sets, almost all of them as legendary as this maverick of cinema.

Prior to 1974, H.B.Halicki was an unknown, except among the Los Angeles scrap yard crowd and federal law enforcement. At age 16 he had left home and started working in his uncle’s garage business. A few years later he was running his own garage and scrap operation. Then came a brief flirtation with the law as he was indicted as part of a car theft gang.

The charges did not stick, but more on that in a moment.

Halicki, who amassed a large car collection, had a dream. Like everyone in Hollywood’s proximity, he wanted to make movies. At this time, exploitation was the big ticket in. Making a movie on a small budget, with sufficient titillation and excitement to turn a big profit, was the modus operandi. Legendary schlockmeister Roger Corman was doing well with a parade of dodgy b-movie treats, several locked in on the ‘carsploitation’ genre. It was an era that started Ron Howard as a film director and created the petrolhead movie experience.

This was to be Halicki’s calling: he would make a carsploitation movie. And he did, in true guerrilla style. Initially many scenes were made by placing cones in a road, getting the shot, and racing out of there before the cops arrived.

Eventually the scope grew and some scenes had to be done in a legit way. This included a chase down a highway, during which Halicki’s car clipped a barrier and crashed, sending him to hospital for six months. So much for that ‘no accident’ claim. He would also later crash into a Cadillac dealership, damaging several cars.

By the time it was wrapped, Gone in 60 Seconds had destroyed over 90 cars — a record at the time. This movie has virtually no story, beyond a yarn about thieves nabbing exotic cars for a client. In some scenes, you can watch the actors — most just friends and family of Halicki — mulling around a workshop while a voice-over conversation advances the paper-thin plot.

This is because the movie’s high water mark is a 40-plus minute, non-stop car chase. Slightly more than a whole third is devoted entirely to this. Though there have been films that use a non-stop car chase as their basis and the chase movie is a bona fide sub-genre, Gone in 60 Seconds was different. Chase movies normally blend the plot with the chase. Characters pause, stop, get out or at the very least talk.

But not in this film. Once the chase starts, it’s a non-stop reel of insanity. Halicki, a self-styled stunt man with little actual experience, clearly didn’t fear much. This makes sense if you know that he likely funded much of the tiny $150,000 budget (which delivered more than $40 million) through money from car thefts, at least according to Ron Moore. Halicki was a maverick in every sense of the word.

It echoes in Gone in 60 Seconds, arguably the closest answer to car chase porn yet. Yes, closer than Vanishing Point, Mad Max, Fast & The Furious, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, Bullitt, The French Connection, Ronin or anything with Gumball or Cannonball in the title.

Halicki made a few more movies, such as the madcap but unfocused The Junkman (also the scene of a near-lethal stunt accident involving an airplane) and the forgettable pastiche Deadline Auto Theft. It was during the filming of Gone in 60 Seconds 2 when that telephone pole ended his life. But perhaps fitting for the man’s hubris-stuffed legend, most reports claim the water tower itself killed him.

H.B.Halicki wasn’t actually a good filmmaker. His work copied others and he showed little patience for the finer elements of the art. All he wanted was to make movies that were as loud and bold as his ego.

The result, though, was 1974’s majestic Gone in 60 Seconds. They don’t make them like this anymore. They simply can’t.