JIM SMART May 29, 2022 All Feature Vehicles
Iconic automotive illustrator Steve Stanford has loved automobiles ever since he was a kid growing up in St. Louis. Now aged 60, you can find him in Southern California where he’s spent his career creating thousands of automotive renderings and illustrations for magazines and custom car builders. In fact, he’s so prolific that you’ll either bump into him or his work just about anywhere cars and car people congregate in Southern California.
Steve admits he doesn’t know exactly where his ability or his success comes from. He tells us there’s an art background in his family, but also admits he’s the only member of his family who loves automobiles. He’s also never had any formal training as an illustrator or artist. He’s completely self-taught.
Steve discovered the Los Angeles car culture in the ’70s while he was stationed at George Air Force Base in the high desert. As someone who fostered an intense passion for automobiles, he spent a lot of time enjoying the local cruising scene off base. After Steve got out of the Air Force and returned to St. Louis, it wasn’t long before the pull of California’s car culture became too strong to resist, and he returned to begin living out his dream in earnest.
When Touchstone Pictures, film producer Jerry Bruckheimer and production designer Jeff Mann called Steve and asked him to come up with a concept of the ultimate Eleanor Mustang for the production of Gone in 60 Seconds, he was all too happy to oblige. Steve had never been asked to create a rendering for a movie car, let alone a car that would receive top billing; still, he broke out his pencils and created the renderings. Then, famed car designer and builder Chip Foose was enlisted to work out the final details. Chip added striking elements like sculpted PIAA driving lamps, hood, ground effects and other subtleties that thrust this design into the limelight.
Touchstone’s producers didn’t initially have Ford’s sporty Mustang in mind to star in the movie. They were thinking of Ford’s hot new GT40 supercar; however, the GT40 was cost prohibitive, even for a movie that cost $90 million to make, but a Mustang was required, and Eleanor filled the bill.
Cinema Vehicle Services (CVS) in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley was enlisted to take the Stanford/Foose Mustang visions and build clay models, mold them into fiberglass and steel, and turn exciting renderings into real automobiles: 11 in total. The build process at CVS was a highly involved process and consisted of ’67 Mustang fastbacks that had to be purchased and turned into Eleanor cars for filming.
Ray Claridge, owner and founder of CVS, started the business as a modest auto repair shop in the San Fernando Valley. When Hollywood studios began farming out movie and television vehicle work instead of doing it in-house, they found Ray.
Ray never dreamed the Eleanor phenomenon would endure the way that it has. “The reaction to Eleanor has been nothing short of amazing,” Ray comments, “we did the movie cars, and then did roughly 150 Eleanor kits for people who wanted them, but Eleanor body kits are not what we do. We build and provide vehicles for the television and movie industries.”
Ray still gets requests for Eleanor kits nearly 14 years later. He’s had to decline most of them, because there’s simply not enough time to produce all of them.
Ray comments that he was surprised when Nicholas Cage didn’t ask for one of the cars.”
Ray reflected on finding these Mustangs, building them and keeping them running during filming and told us that Touchstone would film all night long, tear up the cars, and CVS would spend the next day repairing them and getting them ready for another grueling shoot schedule. He remembers a very hectic period. Building the cars was fast-paced due to the necessity of finding ’67 Mustang fastbacks, and then painstakingly building them to suit the filming process. Ray tells us that all of the cars featured V-8 engines. All were Tremec five-speed cars, except two, which were fitted with Ford top-loader four speeds. Of the 11, four were destroyed, including one used as a seating buck for interior shooting, which called for chopping the car up for camera and equipment access. One was built as a right-hand drive so that a stunt driver could pilot the car and actor Nicholas Cage could appear to be driving. When the crew discovered there was no interior room for this approach, the car was converted back to left-hand drive.
There were three cosmetic “hero” cars used strictly for mild driving or stagnant shooting. There was the “river” car producers wanted to use on the Los Angeles River at speeds courting 130 mph. It was set up to do 120-130 mph and did. There were the four “jump/stunt” cars, which were destroyed in shooting and are now gone.
Ray comments that he was surprised when Nicholas Cage didn’t ask for one of the cars. He was even more shocked when the number one hero car Cage was filmed in went to auction at Mecum and fetched $1.1 million. Though many want to know where this car is today, Ray isn’t saying aside from the fact that it’s in a private collection outside of the United States.
To this day, Ray still has all of the vehicle identification numbers of the 11 Mustangs used in Gone in 60 Seconds. He keeps them on file just in case anyone claims they have one of the movie cars. These numbers are kept in strict confidence to weed out scammers.
Noel Romeo had his vision of the perfect Eleanor Mustang fastback and went after his dream aggressively. It wasn’t going to be dull by anyone’s definition. It was going to be powerful, heavy on the cubes and fast. For Noel, it was going to be faster than anything Hollywood could slap on the screen. “At 16, I was lucky enough to have a 1967 Mustang 390 fastback as my first car, thanks to my uncle Pierre,” Noel comments, “It was his, and he was somehow able to convince my mother that I should have it.”
Noel reflects on high school in the early ’70s and who had the baddest cars: “As nice as my 1967 Mustang was, I wanted to make it better with wheels, a stereo, spoilers and more. But there was a problem of no cash flow at the time, so stock it remained.”
Fast forward to the twenty-first century and enter some nostalgia. Noel spotted this ’67 Mustang fastback for sale for $8,800 in the greater Los Angeles area and snapped it up. He decided to build a ’67 Eleanor that would have stood his high school competition on its ear. Beneath the fiberglass hood is an all-aluminum FE series 476-ci Shelby big-block, constructed by Nelson Racing Engines, splined to a C6 automatic and 3.55:1 Ford 9-inch cogs. On the ground are Cobra wheels working hand in hand with Baer disc brakes and a complete TCP suspension system.
I now have a modern 1967 Mustang with all the goodies including my history and dreams. You just can’t get that with a new car.”
Noel says, “I now have a modern 1967 Mustang with all the goodies, including my history and dreams. You just can’t get that with a new car.”
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