856: You’ve Come to the Right Person

A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm David Kestenbaum, sitting in for hourglass.

And I'm just going to let my first two guests today introduce themselves. My name's Gary Powell. I'm a stunt coordinator, second unit director in motion films. Name a couple movies.

Oh, Titanic, James Bond, Mission Impossible. OK, Miles, your turn. I don't have a job. You could say your name, though.

Miles. Miles is seven. Well, almost seven. And we ran from the talk to Gary because he had some urgent questions about car chases from movies.

And Gary, that's his particular set of skills. I drove the cranium terminator, the bus in Harry Potter. Wait, you drove the bus in Harry Potter? I did.

A little background. Miles loves cars. His mom says that before he could read, he could tell you make and model and sometimes year of any of their friends' cars.

He draws cars, makes cars out of Legos. He brought one with him, actually. And he and Gary quickly got down to talking shop. I do car chases with my, like, seven and eight cars.

Right. So do you choreograph little car chases for yourself, do you? Yeah. That's cool.

You know what you should do? Before this conversation with Gary, Miles showed me this one kind of amazing drawing he does. It's a scene from a particular movie.

He's drawn what looks like a black police car, in the air, flying backward over a second car. Miles would tell you the second car is a Ford Pinto. Miles hasn't seen the actual movie this is from, just this scene, over and over.

Have you watched the Blues Brothers car chase that's eight minutes long? Yes I have. Have you seen the backwards flip? The one at the end?

Yeah. Yeah. That's a picture of it. This is the thing he had questions about.

The famous car chase at the end of the Blues Brothers. The whole thing is actually 11 minutes long. I remember the first time I saw it. I fell over.

Because it was so amazing. I mean like are those people billionaires if they can buy 150 Dodge Police cars, because they'll need to crash them? If you haven't seen the movie,

it's a ridiculous massive smash up of cars. Miles had questions about how it was all done. And Gary Powell, world expert on car chases, said he was happy to help.

Hey Miles, should we just play through it? And whenever you have a question, you just say stop. All right. All right, here we are,

the final car chase scene in The Blues Brothers. Let's go. I'll marry it for you. It starts with The Blues Brothers,

sunglasses, black suits, driving an old beat-up black cop car that they bought used. It's their single car being pursued on the highway by a long line of police cars. Officers are in pursuit of a black and white 1974 Dutch man. Paws.

Paws. Are those Nazis real Nazis? He's talking here about members of the Illinois Nazi Party who joined the car chase in an orange Ford Pinto.

Are those Nazis real Nazis? No, there'd be actors playing those parts. Miles is like, good to know. We move on to the action.

Chase continues. Dan Ackroyd drives right through a highway barrier and down the embankment. They continue okay, but the cop car behind them crashes, followed by the one behind them and the next one, some upside down.

It goes on quite a while. Do they actually, are the people okay in the cars when they crash? Are there people in there like real people who are? Yes, there is.

There'll be stunt people in those cars. They'll all be strapped in. They'll have roll cages inside the cars, probably wearing crash helmets, some of them. So yeah, they'll be safe.

First all of Miles' questions were like this, about safety. Some version of, are those people I'm seeing in the movie okay? Like in this one scene where the Blues brothers in their car go plowing through a mall, and all these people have to jump out of the way at the very last second.

They're all stunt people that have been trained and they all move on a cue, you know, and they're really good because you can see they leave it right to the last second before they move, but that was lots of stunt people, lots of rehearsals. They continue.

Miles shouts, pause a couple more times. Once to ask if Dan Ackroyd had to take special driving lessons, answer probably yes. Another time to ask if that car that goes flying through the air and sticks into the side of a truck is real, answer yes.

And then we're at the climax of the chase, the one that Miles had drawn a picture of. The Blues Brothers are now being chased by just the Nazis, who are pursuing them ridiculously in the Orange Ford Pinto. Brothers gun it up and on ramp to a highway. But oh wait, the highway hasn't been built yet.

It's just a ramp into the air. Blues Brothers hit reverse, somehow flip backward over the Nazi car behind them. But the Nazi car keeps going, off the ramp and into the air. It flies through the air, impossibly and comically far, and then there's a shot of it falling straight down a really long way. You see the Chicago skyline in the background, and the car

smashes into the ground. Wait! Pause, pause, pause! This is where I had the question, how do they film that part? Gary explains that they actually dropped the Ford Pinto from a helicopter.

And then they're just dropping it and then obviously when the wide shot we see the car dropping, again that could be filmed from a helicopter or a building, and you're just seeing it dropping all the way down. But like, the question I had for that part, like,

Are they okay once the car lands because you don't see it after it lands? So in the car when it's dropping, when the physical car is dropping, they've probably got two dummies sitting in there, no real people. But how do they get out?

Gary explains that the interior shot of the two people in the car while it's falling, that was done separately, safely on the ground. Miles nods. Miles is actually the son of one of our co-workers here at the show, Alyssa.