Cut To The Chase

It’s San Francisco, and the year is 1967. Two intimidating American muscle cars are thundering along the steep, narrow streets of the city, all screeching tyres, growling engines and white smoke.

The good guy, lieutenant Frank Bullitt, drives a ‘68 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback, in hot pursuit of the bad guys, in their ‘68 Dodge Charger 440 Magnum.

From the back of his dad’s 1966 Buick LaSabre, a school-aged Tony Piazza has watched multiple scenes of the movie, Bullitt, unfold in front of his eyes – including this chase scene, considered one of the most adrenaline fuelled (and expertly captured) automotive sequences on film.

But freeze! As with any decent cop drama, we need to establish a motive; how did they arrive at this moment?

In the case of tough guy Lieutenant Bullitt – played by Steve McQueen – he is on the tail of hitmen who rather gruesomely blasted two star witnesses before their showing at a hearing about organised crime.

One of the victims dies from his injuries and Bullitt decides to keep the lid on this development, putting an anonymous name on the victim at the morgue while he works the case. Cruising the streets of San Fran, the bad guys give chase – before Bullitt turns the tables in a 11-minute chase scene which ends with the thugs spinning off the road, crashing into a petrol station, and exploding in an inferno.

For Piazza, it was his father’s real world involvement in law enforcement (albeit at a slower pace) that landed him on set. Anthony Piazza Sr. was a San Francisco police officer assigned as a liaison between visiting motion picture companies and the City of San Francisco.

When Solar Productions (McQueen’s Company) and Warner Brothers came to the city to film Bullitt in 1968, Piazza’s father was assigned to assist.

“My dad’s duties were many, but chiefly he worked closely with Steve McQueen and executive producer Robert Relyea on the day-to-day activities of shooting the film,” explains Piazza, now a few decades wiser and a regarded film historian and mystery writer.

“Crowd control and safety, moving of equipment, escorting movie cars on running shots, coordinating with stuntmen were some of the duties he had to perform. I was very fortunate – because of my father’s involvement with the production I was allowed under-the-rope access to the film production. I was able to spend time at a number of the locations, meet with the actors, and even have lunch at times with the crew.”

McQueen was an ideal choice to play moody protagonist Bullitt – a character written as ‘doing authority differently.’ Oddly enough, though, the original Bullitt screenplay was supposed to be a vehicle for actor Spencer Tracy, “But sat on Warner Brother’s shelves after Tracy’s death until it was fashioned for McQueen in 1968, by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner,” reveals Piazza.

It was a fortunate turn of events; Bullitt is one of Steve McQueen’s most memorable roles. “In it, he cements his title as ‘The King of Cool’,” believes Piazza. “He wasn’t just another button- down shirt and tie detective. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and sports jacket, and questioned authority.”

The script required a setting, and location scouts settled on San Francisco. Why does Piazza, given his local slant, believe they opted for the city at a time when cop movies were predominantly shot in New York?

“I could sum it up in three words – hills, hills, hills. If you follow the route of the chase and know the city, it doesn’t follow any logical pattern. The chase moves from one part of the city to another on the opposite side and back again, solely for the use of the hills and the terrific scenery their heights provided. It was all about what looked good and what would be exciting to movie-going audiences. No one would argue that bouncing over those San Francisco hills with the beautiful vistas of the bay and city skyline didn’t add to the now iconic images of Bullitt.”

A director of photography once told Piazza that cinematographers regarded two cities as the most photogenic: “Rome and San Francisco. What they have in common is hills.”

It would require adept driving skill to hurtle round these streets and again, McQueen was a great pick for leading man – while the cars jumped the hills in San Francisco during filming, at lunchtime McQueen found time to do the same with his motorbike.

“Steve McQueen was a fantastic driver, of course, that’s no secret, and he did some of the driving in the chase with Bud Ekins and Cary Loftin (stunt coordinator) doubling him for the rest. It was interesting to watch when McQueen was at the wheel because he made sure to lean out the window to show the audience that it was him driving and not anyone else. Watch the film again, and it will be obvious.”

Similarly for director Peter Yates, authenticity was crucial. “For the chase to seem real, it had to be real, and that meant no movie tricks that would give the illusion of speed” – I sense Piazza has misspoken, but he reaffirms the incredible: the Bullitt chase was filmed at actual speed.

“Prior to that, movie chases were filmed by undercranking the camera for a slower frame rate” he explains, “but Bullitt’s chase reached over 160km/h during some shots. You can imagine how many sleepless nights this had caused my father – the amount that could go wrong was unthinkable.”

The recording technique was also pioneering, explains Piazza, “Because cars racing through a city between 120- 160 km/h was not standard practice when filming a chase. Yates raised the bar when it comes to film chases because of Bullitt; in my opinion, there hasn’t been anything since that could compare to it. I’d imagine later production companies might’ve looked toward it as a barometer for their own goals in filming a chase. I know as a moviegoer I have always made comparisons.”

Technical challenges are plenty at such high speeds. “They tried using a dune buggy, fibreglass camera car during the shooting, but because of the high speeds, this car proved unsteady and particularly unsafe,” Piazza reveals. “Eventually, they strapped a cameraman in the back of the Dodge to capture some of the running shots looking back toward the following Mustang.”

The scene’s success can be attributed to Yates, who had a sense of what needed to be shot from his vision of the chase, and his editor, who knew how to put it all together; Frank Keller won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing in 1968, and a large sway on the decision was thanks to this roaring Bullitt montage.

Award-winning sequences can still suffer turbulence, though. One mishap was when a car cut a corner too close, and there was some damage to a company parked car and the camera (fortunately, the camera crew was spared). Also, on the last day of shooting, which coincidentally was the final shot of the chase, Piazza was on location at the bottom of Guadalupe Road in Daly City, where the production crew had built a gas station and several wooden buildings in an empty lot for the fiery finale. “

I had taken my 8mm movie camera to film the event. The Mustang was driven by McQueen’s stunt double, and connected to it by a release bar was the Dodge Charger, which had inside it a couple of mannequin ‘passengers’ to represent the actors. As the two cars raced down the hill, the driver of the Mustang released the Dodge near a small ramp that it would jump over, and by momentum hit the gas pumps at the service station – supposedly causing an explosion,” explains Piazza, of the scene’s climactic detonation.

“In real life – and caught on my self-recorded film – the special effects man got too anxious and set off the explosion too early, so the Dodge drives into the explosion instead of seeming to set it off. Fortunately, the day before, Yates and William Fraker [the director of photography] had time on their hands and decided for the cars to make a run out to this location. A point-ofview shot taken the day before and a smart edit ended up saving the scene.”

Perhaps most incredible of all is that, in the beginning, the entire chase scene was entirely unscripted. “My dad had a script from the film, and I remember being disappointed because the details of the chase were missing from its pages. In fact, I remember it only said CHASE in the portion of the story where it was supposed to occur.”

Having had the original script in his hands is yet another marker that Tony Piazza’s life has been entwined with this iconic film, and he notes another particular scene that remains poignant to him; the foot chase in the basement of San Francisco General Hospital.

“That was the first time I met Steve McQueen, and the visit left a lasting impression on me. I was thirteen at the time, in an era when kids should be seen and not heard, but he showed me a lot of attention,” he fondly recalls.

“He wanted to know about my interests and goals in life. We spent a great deal of time talking, and McQueen knew how to draw me out of my shyness. Later in life, I learned about his association with The Boy’s Republic in Chino, California, and how he would visit the school and speak with the teens there. It all made sense then.”

With this year marking the movie’s 50 th anniversary, nostalgia for the film remains a powerful tool – Ford has even released a limited edition 2019 Mustang Bullitt, in a perfectly matched shade of Dark Highland Green and available only in manual transmission with a cueball shifter. The appeal of this movie remains on the ‘red line’.

“One has to look at what defines a classic: a story that wears well with time, starring an iconic actor that could never be replaced, and a supporting cast and crew that gave their best during its production,” says Piazza. “With Bullitt, I believe all of this is captured on screen, and is the key to its enduring appeal.”

In its in-depth drive review of Ford’s 2019 Mustang, Engadget lists one of the ‘pros’ being that it has ‘more horsepower and a higher top speed than the Mustang GT’. Yet one of its tongue-in-cheek ‘cons’ doubles as an apt analysis of the movie itself: ‘You’ll never be as cool as Steve McQueen.’ Tony Piazza’s ‘Bullitt Points: Memories of Steve McQueen and Bullitt’ is available from Amazon. On its 50 th anniversary, the movie will be rescreened at approximately 550 US-based cinemas from 7-9 October