Name: How Hollywood Builds Its Dream Cars
Uploaded: 2025-07-19T17:52:46.000Z
Duration: 8 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hollywood's biggest stars aren't always actors, sometimes they're cars.

We're diving into the world of iconic movie vehicles, the rides that steal the scene and burn rubber into film history.

We'll go behind the scenes with Cinema Vehicles, the largest supplier of movie cars in Hollywood.

Then we'll meet the ultimate car enthusiast who recreates legendary rides like the Batmobile and Kit from Knight Rider.

And finally, the story of a man who built supercars from scratch, and how his dream machine ended up on the big screen in the movie Suicide Squad.

These stories are firing on all cylinders, so buckle up.

This is the car that Brad Pitt drove in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

We are the largest movie car provider in Hollywood, so there's a good chance if you see a movie with a car in it, it came from our lot.

My name is Sean Grogan, I'm one of the fabrication managers at Cinema Vehicles.

We have about 1,100 cars on our lot, anywhere from police cars, ambulances, school buses, 50s cars, 40s cars, 30s cars, military vehicles, trailers, taxicabs, prison buses.

Some of our cars are in pristine condition, some of them are crashed, some of them are burned.

I mean, you name it, we have it on our lot.

We've been in the business for over 40 years, we've done tons of movies, but some of the ones you might recognize would be Gone in 60 Seconds, Die Hard, Ant-Man and the Wasp,

The Avengers, Spider-Man 2, The Hangover, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Rush Hour, and the list goes on and on.

In our shop we have an upholstery department, we have a fabrication department, we have a mechanical department, paint and body department, and a graphics department.

The way that it works is a production company will call us and say they're filming a new movie and they need X, Y, and Z, and they'll send us over basically a drawing of what they want and then it's our job to turn that drawing into reality.

One of the challenges that we run into is finding multiples of the same car, so at one point in time we turned a Chevy Silverado pickup into a Rolls Royce for the movie A

We go to any one of a million sites where you can find used vehicles.

They don't have to be in running condition, as long as they look good and we can make them run again, that's the most important part.

Once that vehicle comes into the shop, we'll have our design team do some renderings and drawings and spec things out.

From there, the upholsterer will change the seats, maybe we'll add seat covers, maybe we'll add dash covers.

Once the upholstery shop is working on their portion of it, the fabrication team is building custom parts.

When the car is completed, it'll go over to our paint and body shop and from there, they will do all the body work needed to make the car look like it's pristine and then they'll go in and they'll paint it.

And then the mechanics will just check the powertrain, check fluids, make sure there's no leaks, take it for a test drive, make sure the brakes are good, but make sure that when that car is on set, it doesn't break down.

The last step is the graphics team will print those logos up and then install the graphics.

And from there, a production team will come pick the cars up and then we don't see them again until the movie shoot is over.

We're here in building C where we keep a lot of our cars that need to stay indoors.

We have this lovely Pontiac Firebird with suicide doors from an old commercial for Kentucky

One of my favorites is from the movie The Hangover, but they were painted brown for another movie.

If you've ever seen the show The Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., this red Corvette is Lola.

We're proud of the work that we do here at Cinema Vehicles.

Hollywood wouldn't operate the way that it does without us.

When we see our cars on the big screen, it's one of the most gratifying things to see the finished product.

When we get pulled over in the back cars, luckily a lot of the police officers just want their picture taken with it.

We've created the back car from the Michael Keaton Batman movie, the mystery machine from

Scooby-Doo, everything from Herbie the Love Bug to the Land Speeder from Star Wars.

We create a lot of wild rides out of some junk.

In the past two or three years, we've created 15, 16 iconic movie cars.

I had a real job at one time at a major airline.

We initially started out refurbishing old cars.

We decided we were going to start making some iconic cars that you could actually get in and out of it, drive it, kids can climb on it and look at it.

Vehicle builds can be anywhere from as little as two weeks to as much as three years.

The Speed Racer Mach 5 sitting here beside us started off as a 94 Corvette.

Hopefully here in about 30 days, it'll be finished up, have a great big honking M on the hood of it, and it'll look awesome.

There's a tremendous amount of trial and error.

A lot of these cars have a lot of fiberglass on them.

It's a labor of love to come out and just continue putting down layers and layers of fiberglass.

You can't go to O'Reilly's or Advanced Auto Parts and ask them for a part for a back car.

Our Eleanor from Gone in 60 Seconds car up front is absolutely as screen accurate as we can get it, from the stainless aluminum interior to the seats to the shifter, the go baby switch in the center.

We drive Eleanor just like it's supposed to be driven.

Everything we have, we take out and drive, every single piece.

What better thing to get groceries in than the back car?

So if I wanted anything, I'd have to build it myself.

I want other people to be able to do that.

We have a unique design car that looks like a million dollars, and we produce it so that the average person can build it for an affordable price.

We're making a new car out of an existing car.

We're cutting everything off, and what we're left with is just bare bones.

The motor, the drivetrain, the frame of the car.

So you have all of your dashboard intact, all of your engine intact, all wiring.

It's just the cosmetics that's been cut off the car.

My whole life, I always fixed up my own car, so then I decided I was going to design my own car that I can call my own.

I'm extremely excited that a car that I designed, the Vader, is going to be used in the Suicide

I had built a car for a customer on the other coast of Florida.

While it was there, the production company walked in, and they said, that's great, it's perfect.

You know, it looks like a million dollars, and then nobody's seen it before.

I think that it ties in to Suicide Squad because it's threatening when it drives down the road.

It's an angular, open-mouthed, angry car.

Seeing my own design on the big screen is really exciting to me.

The easiest way to put it is, it's a lottery ticket.

I have no design experience, so I just shaped it out of foam.

And it took me a year and a half, seven days a week, before I had a car out of the mold.

I literally had nothing when I finished this.

Whatever money I had went into developing this, it was pretty much the biggest chance