Cars,Cars,Cars.. Where did they get all of those cop cars??

[wheeling500]

Here's a general question for anyone to chime in on. Where did they get all of the cop cars for the movie? Did they get cars and paint them with the IL State Police theme and the same for Chicago Police too. Having lived in the Chicago area all my life, there is one thing wrong with the numbers on the Chicago cop cars. The cars all numbered with three outside numbers. In reality there are 4 outside numbers. Were these cars "has-beens" waiting for the crusher before they were resurrected for the movie. Just wondering. Have a nice day.

[Elwood_Stantz]

In Hollywood theres a place where this company buys old cop cars, they have a whole parking lot right now full of LTDs. They also have ambulances, fire tracks, junk cars, you name it they have it. So my feeling is Universal got the cars from them. Cop cars are pretty easy to get a hold of anyways.

I also might note studios put out a search for cars to use in movies. This is going off topic but the "Fixer Upper" car in Gb1 was on loan from a collector of ventage ambulances. I have pics of it before she was painted black for her brief cameo on the screen. Same thing goes for the orginal Ecto-1 and Ecto-1a, Columbia put out a search and they got the 2 cars. Heck i even have a pic of the Ecto-1 before she was painted white and all that roof rack stuff was place on her.

In the movie Christine they put out a search for 57 and 58 Plymouth Furys, well they got 38 of them. Guess what??!!? Only 2 survived and one just got sold last yr.

So to whap up this thread, you can basicly get anything you want to make a movie. Sometimes they used the same cars over and over again.

[3LW00D]

I have heard lots of different things on where they got the cars. I had heard that the CPD was getting new cars that year and sold about 70 of the old ones to the studio for $700 each, I also heard that they just gave them all the old cars on the force. I also heard from someone else that they were all old California police cars. There are about a million theorys out there on where the cars came from.
But I go for the 70 cars because someone else on here posted an interview with Dan where that was the answer he gave to that question.

[Elwood72]

Originally Posted by 3LW00D

I have heard lots of different things on where they got the cars. I had heard that the CPD was getting new cars that year and sold about 70 of the old ones to the studio for $700 each, I also heard that they just gave them all the old cars on the force. I also heard from someone else that they were all old California police cars. There are about a million theorys out there on where the cars came from.
But I go for the 70 cars because someone else on here posted an interview with Dan where that was the answer he gave to that question.

Ahem....

From the interview.....

Aykroyd:

The major expense of Blues Brothers was not the seventy police cars we bought from the Chicago Police Department. We paid only $700 each for them. the major expense was labor, so that's good, it gets people working, and why shouldn't the profits of the megacorporations be reinvested in the trades of this industry? If I write a big show and it costs a lot of money, I make no apologies.

(Emphasis mine)

[3LW00D]

Thanks, I couldnt remember who it was that posted it.

[blues51]

The following is verbatim from Chicago-Sun Times, published on June 23, 2005:

Filmmakers flew in 40 stunt drivers every weekend. They used 13 different Bluesmobiles, including five for filming John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as they portrayed Jake and Elwood Blues driving about town.
Two other cars were built specifically for speed while another three had one-gallon gas tanks and were used for jumps, said Jerram Swartz, an assistant director who oversaw the fleet.
Yet another was rigged to fall apart with the pull of a lever, used for just one scene: when the Blues Brothers finally arrive at the Cook County Building after a long chase. First assistant director David Sosna remembers it took a mechanic several months to rig the car up. "That is a very expensive gag,'' he said. To pursue the Blues Brothers, filmmakers bought more than 60 old police cars at $400 apiece, according to news reports at the time, and also hired real police to participate in some chases. They reinforced them with steel cages and ran a 24-hour body shop on the Near West Side to fix them for later use. Most of those cars were destroyed by the end of filming.


Two hundred police and production assistants manned nearly every conceivable entrance to Lower Wacker for a famous chase in the bowels of the city. At Monroe, the Bluesmobile races up an exit ramp and vaults a squad car in what Landis called his "favorite stunt.'' Landis wanted the driver to take out the Mars lights on top of the police car, but the driver could only guarantee he could clear the cop car. But after Belushi and Aykroyd each offered him $1,000, his car ended up clipping the Mars lights.


Filmmakers actually got permission to drive down Lake -- between trestles supporting the L, no less -- at more than 100 mph. After Landis shot the sequence he realized it looked as if he simply speeded up the film. So he reshot it with stunt pedestrians on the sidewalks so viewers could tell the drivers were, indeed, going that fast.
At La Salle, near what is now the James R. Thompson Center, they staged a pile-up of grand proportions, with more than 10 cars careening into one another. They drilled holes in the street to install a pipe ramp, technology developed in Australia that had never been used in a major motion picture before, Landis said. The pipe flips a car if it's struck correctly.
The crash is over the top: police cars enter the frame already upside down, turning sideways, you name it. "We were just seeing how wacky you can be,'' Landis said. The pileup so impressed Ebert that he wrote it "has to be seen to be believed. I've never seen stunt coordination like this before.''


Another memorable pileup took place off the side of these roads in Wauconda. More than 50 police cars were involved in the chase. More than 10 cars go flying off the road and into a median. Filmmakers dug a ditch immediately off the side of the road so the cars would flip as they hit it, Sosna recalls.
For one shot, a squad car sails into a moving truck. To do that, a stunt driver drove the car off a 150-foot-long ramp that crossed the highway. The truck, driving at 15 mph, was equipped with special break-away sides. Even with all the stunts, there were only a few minor injuries throughout filming. That "we got away that lightly, I would say is miraculous,'' Aykroyd said. "God was on our side.''

[3LW00D]

Ok, I was just reading that when you posted this...wierd.
Anyway, sweet, thanks for posting it!