Architect Chad Oppenheim: What Hollywood's Cars Can Teach Us About the Future
Season 2 Episode 4
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
For our first-ever live audience recording of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon sat down with architect and author Chad Oppenheim at Book Passage in San Francisco.
The conversation centers around Chad’s book RIDE: The Iconic Wheels of the Silver Screen and the vehicles that became emotional anchors in film history. From the Back to the Future DeLorean to Ferris Bueller’s Ferrari, these cars were modes of transportation, meaning, and possibility.
Chad shares how childhood Matchbox cars sparked a lifelong fascination with design and storytelling, and how those early influences still shape his architecture today. This live episode explores the importance of imagination and why the things that once made us feel limitless can still guide how we build the future.
You’ll hear:
Why movie cars function as emotional characters
How nostalgia shapes creative vision
Chad’s favorite movie car
This week, take Ferris Bueller’s advice and slow down. Revisit a movie that meant something to you as a kid.
Ask yourself:
What did this story, or this machine, make me feel back then?
What part of that feeling do I want more of in my future?
And if you’re up for it, share with us: What was the iconic ride that changed how you saw the world?
Links from the show:
Watch 1 minute Trailer: RIDE
🎧 Listen now:
📖 Read now:
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
This week’s episode of How We Future is a special one. It’s our very first live audience recording, captured last week at Book Passage in San Francisco. I’m joined by my friend, award-winning architect and author Chad Oppenheim, for a joyful conversation inspired by his new book, Ride: The Iconic Wheels of the Silver Screen. We talk about cars as emotional characters, childhood wonder, and how imagination shapes the futures we want to build. I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation with Chad. Let’s dive in.
[applause]
Lisa: All right, Chad.
Chad Oppenheim: Let’s do it.
Lisa: We’re going to have a good time. How We Future Live. This is a milestone event. This is just so exciting. Elaine, thank you and your team, Zack and Karen, for believing in this collaboration. For those of you that are new to the How We Future podcast, it’s really about having conversations with people like Chad that are imagining new futures and bringing them to life.
The goal, as Elaine said, is to put some positive bright spots out there for us to learn from, not Pollyanna, not toxic positivity, but ways that we can all learn to maybe reframe, ask different questions, and get inspired. My gosh, Chad, do you inspire me. Thank you so much for being here.
Chad: Oh, thank you. It’s amazing.
Lisa: We’re going to talk about cars. We’re going to talk about movies. One of the things that’s great about both of those is that I think we all can relate. What I thought we would do to get a sense of the people in the room is I want you to think about your favorite car, like the car that you dream of or that you thought of as a kid that just stuck with you. On the count of three, I want you to say that really loud. Okay? Everyone have one? All right. One, two, three.
Audience: [crosstalk]
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. So good. So good. Energy for cars. Okay. I think I heard “Batmobile.” I think I heard “Thelma and Louise convertible.” I know we have some outlaws. We’ve got some good car buffs in the room. That’s amazing. Chad, as Elaine said, you are a world-renowned architect. Chad actually was just a guest in my class today, View from the Future, that I teach at Stanford.
You could literally see our students’ jaws just drop when Chad started to show these gorgeous buildings that blended with nature. In your spare time, you decided to write an incredible book about cars and movies. We’re going to talk about all of that. I just maybe want to start with the why behind this gorgeous book.
Chad: I wrote another book called Lair. We have a little mini version here. There’s a new mini-Lair that just got released. To Elaine’s point, it is very expensive to make these books. They’re passion projects. That idea of that book was about why movie villains all have the most incredible homes and things that inspired me as a child. My mother always complains when I speak about this. Growing up in central New Jersey, there wasn’t much immediate excitement around me, so I kind of reverted into movies. A lot of them have shown up in my architecture in some ways. I only realized that after I wrote the book, that I was inspired by these James Bond lairs and things like that.
Then after that, I had other ideas. This is part of that series. The next one is Ride, which we see here, and that’s all about the cars and vehicles from films. Before I wanted to be an architect, I originally wanted to be a car designer. I would really just draw cars all the time. I think as a little boy, seeing all these exotic cars in movies and things, it just really blew my mind. That’s where this book comes from. That love. The immediate love of a child seeing a Lamborghini for the first time in Cannonball Run. I was like, “What?” [chuckles] I still have the same excitement.
Lisa: That’s amazing. You talk about in the book that when you were younger, your grandparents used to bring you one of those-
Chad: Matchbox cars.
Lisa: -Matchbox cars. Yes.
Chad: Yes, every week, they would come, they would drive from where my mother grew up in Bayside and bring me a Matchbox car. I don’t know where I was more excited, to see them or get the car. I had hundreds and hundreds of these cars and made little chase scenes going on in the house. Everything fit. I don’t know if it’s like a marketing ploy, but like the movies, the Matchbox cars, it’s like you just want to get a car and drive and the freedom and so forth.
Lisa: Oh, I just love it. They really open up imagination. You get this small artifact, but it’s not the artifact. It’s what it represents.
Chad: Right. Exactly.
Lisa: You remember we put those tracks around.
Chad: Totally. Yes.
Lisa: Different cars winning just because you want them to. Right?
Chad: Exactly.
Lisa: Yes. I was struck by something you said in the intro. You said, “It was my love of cars that opened me up to design and how it can invoke feeling.”
Chad: Yes, and I can still feel-- I didn’t love the car, but the symbolism, I guess. My father started his own business, and times were pretty tough financially. Then when he finally started to make enough money, he bought a new car. It was this Cadillac Seville. I remember the smell, that new car smell. My father was so proud. He was so precious with the car that he never took out the paper mats that came with it.
Me and my sister had to take our shoes off. I just remember the car so well and the pride that he had with being able to buy that car and drive around, not that I love the car, but just that symbolism of I can afford to transport my family in style. Yes. Maybe more like pimp style and the like.
[laughter]
Chad: I don’t know, but it was--
Lisa: No, but it was such a meaningful display of status and mobility. Again, throughout the book, really, this is like a book about emotion. You feel it. You say, cars in film represent more than just mobility. They embody freedom, power, and possibility. They’re reflections of our desires and extensions of our identities. I think that really captures that.
Chad: Oh, for sure. My father would always tell me stories about cars, like how he used to drag race when he was a kid, and how he borrowed his father’s car and his friends were provoking him to take this turn really fast, and how he went off the road and his father was going to kill him because that was his car that he earned enough money to make. It was always this notion of this precious status symbol, but at the same time, inherent connection to this incredible vehicle.
Lisa: There’s so much about your work, Chad, even just hearing that story about your childhood memories that then became the future that you are now living and continuing to shape. I know we’re not talking about Lair, but I do want you to share the story about, again, another ritual you had with your father growing up on Friday night and how that led to a whole other path.
Chad: Yes. Once again, the boring New Jersey story that my mother, I hope, is not listening to this podcast.
[laughter]
Lisa: She’s definitely not listening. No way she is.
Chad: Well, edit that out. My father and I would watch Miami Vice growing up, and you would hear that music at the beginning. It was just so exciting. I don’t know if it’s because-- I guess if I was living in Miami, it would have been rather exciting, but I was living in suburban New Jersey. That music and Michael Mann, the director, put together this--
I think it was really the first show of its kind. It was almost like a movie every Friday. It really changed television, and just all the attention to detail, the car, the Ferrari Daytona, the clothes they wore. It’s embarrassing, but I wore a deconstructed linen suit to graduation thinking I was Crockett in suburban New Jersey. I was surprised that it wasn’t best dressed. I had espadrilles. I don’t know. I just bought into that whole Miami Vice vibe and just every detail that Michael Mann accumulated for these things.
Subsequently, he’s actually in the book. When he filmed the movie, he came to Miami. This was really, I would say, one of the greatest moments of my life in architecture was-- he’s like, “Your architecture represents the new Miami because living in Miami--” then we became fast friends because anyone who compliments my architecture is a very close friend suddenly.
He was telling me how he was going to Moderna to pick out the color of the Ferrari for the movie. He was just so into all these incredible details and the music. It was just like a total sensory experience, what he created in Miami Vice and the architecture. That’s really how I ended up in Miami because of all the cool architecture.
Then I went to go work for the architecture firm who designed a lot of the architecture used in Miami Vice called Arquitectonica. I have a lot of full circles in my life, Michael Mann inspiring me, meeting him in Miami. He’s in the book. He’s actually in both books. We interviewed him for Lair. We have an incredible interview with Michael about the movie, Ferrari, which he made, and his passion for these cars and the attention to detail is spectacular. There’s some really interesting nuggets about Michael’s experience with Ferrari.
Lisa: Did they actually film part of the movie, the new Miami Vice, in your home?
Chad: Yes. In our house. Yes. He wanted to shoot in our house, and he ended up-- there was a murder scene. Yes. It was interesting. He ended up building a new kitchen, putting it on exposed to the living room in a different way, and then had someone murdered on the floor with a ton of ketchup or something. I don’t know what the blood was, but I knew we were there. He was like, “No. That’s not gory enough.” He was squirting all over the place.
[laughter]
Chad: It’s amazing to see these films being done and how many people for just this one scene, which literally was five seconds. There must have been 200 people. SWAT teams. The real Miami SWAT teams were outside waiting to charge. It was pretty amazing.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. That sounds incredible. That same attention to detail, Chad, is throughout this gorgeous book.
Chad: Thank you.
Lisa: One of the things I appreciate most is the way that you organize the book. It’s not by model or year or chronological. It’s about emotion. You really are celebrating the character of these cars. You have cars that are the speed machines that are really the high-octane movies, the heroes of the cars that save the day, the outlaws, the rebels on wheels, possessed, sci-fi, futuristic, fantasy rides, comedy, and music. When you read them, you’re getting a little portal into these cultural zeitgeists that are just extraordinary. How did you come up with that?
Chad: I think it was just the categories of the films and the way-- I think a little bit-- We had 50 cars in the book, and we had to cut it down because it was 700 pages. It would have been many multiple times more expensive, or maybe we’d do volume two if it does well. I still remember watching-- One of the movies that got removed, although I’ll speak about it, is the movie The Car. Has anyone ever seen that movie? That car was this possessed demon car, and it went after everyone in this town. That just scared the living heck out of me as a kid.
I had to have a possessed portion. There’s also The Wraith, which is a cooler car. That’s one of my father’s-- My father, I think, one of the things he’s shared with me many things, but he knows more about TV and movies. [chuckles] He just loves watching all these films. He showed me that, and he loved that. That had a Dodge Interceptor that was a concept car. That was very clear.
Then, of course, the hero cars, like Batman, was a hero, and his machinery, and James Bond is a hero. Then The Outlaws had cool cars. It just kind of-- I wouldn’t say it wrote itself, because these things never do, but it just was evident how they would be organized and the chapters that moved me in terms of the way these cars operated.
Lisa: Well, I love in the book, you also brought in two collaborators that I think really added a whole other level of depth and complexity. You have Matt Stone, who’s really into the cars. He was the editor of--
Chad: The car driver, like part of-- Yes.
Lisa: A judge in the Pebble Beach. We also have Chris Nashawaty, who is a film critic in Entertainment Weekly. For each car, they each give commentary. Matt goes deep in the technical, like what’s going on.
Chad: Under the hood, every detail.
Lisa: You’re really like, “Oh, I could be a car person. This is amazing.” Then Chris is giving the “This is the significance of this moment in this film.” Talk a little bit about that collaboration.
Chad: This is really an incredibly collaborative project. The real glue of it is my wife, Ilona, who’s the publisher and the one who made this all possible. She actually did watch every film, all 50, actually, captured everything, bought special Blu-ray discs, and all these things to capture all these images, did all the graphic design, coordinated with Matt and Chris and myself, a bunch of circus clowns. These guys just brought an incredible amount of knowledge and depth.
There’s so many layers. We have such incredible artwork in the book, too. There’s a company from Paris that did many of the drawings and the maps and the diagrams. There’s just layer upon layer. I think the part that I really am most excited about are these interviews. We have the Michael Mann interview, which is incredible. We have Michael Bay, who’s in the book for two movies; Transformers and Bad Boys.
Michael and I ended up doing Michael’s house, two houses for Michael, but he was last-minute. We have, like, “Michael, this book’s going to print. If you’re not having an interview right now, you’re out.” He came through at the last second in a typical Michael fashion, and just delivered an incredible story from his heart about how he was a boy and how he loved cars and how many of the things that happened in his life turned into the Transformers.
His father brought him when he was going to look for a car, his first car, to a Porsche dealer. Then they’re pulling in. Michael’s like, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It’s my favorite.” Then he’s like, “Nah,” and diverted. That’s actually in the movie Transformers where the father takes-- He also spoke about how he had a business washing cars. They’re really touching stories. Here’s one of the most successful directors of all time telling about his childhood and revealing his love for cars. In order to buy his first car, because his father said he would pay for half, he had a car washing company. The car washing company was like Nice Boys That Do Nice Work.
[laughter]
Chad: Which is so funny. Michael’s talking about everything. He’s revealing everything. You don’t see the side of many of these people because they’re really important in their industry. It was going really well. He was making a lot of money washing cars with his friends. Then, his grandfather-- Michael was adopted actually. He speaks a little bit about that. His adopted grandfather got him a buffer to help him wax the cars, but it turned out not to be a car buffer. It was something else. Some guy brought in a Rolls-Royce, and he buffed all the paint off of the Rolls-Royce. That was the end of Good Boys That Do Good Work.
[laughter]
Chad: That became Bad Boys, and then the movie-- No. Joke.
[laughter]
Chad: Yes. It’s just incredible, the stories about his first car. We have that about so many people, like Marc Newson, who, along with Jony Ive, is designing the new Ferrari. Marc Newson is regarded as the goat of industrial design. He speaks about his favorite car, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which blew my mind as a kid. I could still watch all these films over and over again, and how-- He loved that car because he grew up in Australia. His family had a shop, and they used to tinker and make soapbox derby cars. That reminded him of how Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was reassembled from all these parts. Really, I realized, doing these interviews is so much fun.
Lisa: It’s so much. They’re incredible. Stephen King is in there.
Chad: Stephen King. I didn’t interview Stephen King, but that was Chris-
Lisa: Talking about [crosstalk].
Chad: New [crosstalk].
Lisa: Yes. Possessed.
Chad: John Landis.
Lisa: Incredible.
Chad: There’s so many. It’s really great to speak with these people who are your heroes.
Lisa: I know. They didn’t just land in films, too. So many of the films were starts of other movements. Such a great chapter on the The Blues Brothers, which wasn’t even supposed to happen. That was a thing on Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels was like, “No. This is going to be terrible.” Here it is, this blockbuster movie.
Chad: Right. “On a mission from God.”
Lisa: Yes. Incredible. Incredible. Getting that detail really helped me see how these directors saw cars as characters to be casted.
Chad: Totally.
Lisa: It’s when you talk about the fact that you need the right car for the right character, and then it’s not even that you find the right car, you have to costume it. I thought that was amazing. You’ve got to soup it up and do all these things.
Chad: Right. Modifications inside and out. Even in Bullitt, they removed the grille on the front of the Mustang. It was just like-- but you see, there’s something like-- it’s a subtle move, but it makes a difference when you see it. It has a grittiness, like Steve McQueen, very cool and unique. Of course, it was filmed in this great city of San Francisco.
Lisa: I think you have a map of it. Right? The drive?
Chad: Yes. That’s so cool, too. There’s so many layers of information. There’s actually a map of the chase-
Lisa: It’s so cool.
Chad: -scene of where it is. Same with Easy Rider. There’s all these incredible layers of information that you just-- you watch these movies, and I think what’s interesting is you read the book, and then you watch the movie again, and it opens up many other things that you just didn’t understand or think about or know.
Lisa: One of the things I love is that you’re really giving some heft to these characters that often go overlooked. As you also say in the book, it’s really the congruence of the story. It elevates the story in ways that you may not even realize. It just brings a whole other polish to it. We have to talk about the DeLorean.
Chad: Yes. I was just going to-
Lisa: I mean, we have to talk about the DeLorean.
Chad: -think about the DeLorean. Interestingly enough, the DeLorean wasn’t the first, let’s say, vehicle thought of for the time machine. Does anyone know what it was?
Audience Member: Fridge.
Chad: Bingo. A refrigerator was actually-- that was the original idea for the time machine.
Lisa: Can you imagine? Back to the Future, just in case anyone doesn’t know what we’re talking about here. Back to the Future.
Chad: It’s very difficult to get a refrigerator to go 88 miles an hour, unless you drop it out of a plane or something. Apparently, Steven Spielberg, who was producer on the movie, thought that it was very dangerous to have a refrigerator be the time machine because he was afraid that kids would lock themselves in their refrigerators and not be able to get out and probably disappear until they open it up frozen.
They opted for the DeLorean. That car was just very impactful. There was a lot of history about the car. We didn’t really speak about John DeLorean and his tainted past but just the idea of that car and the modifications and the flux capacitor and the professor. It’s just an incredible story.
Lisa: I think it’s why it’s lasted 50 years, almost? 40 years?
Chad: It inspired the Cybertruck finish of Elon.
[laughter]
Lisa: Yay.
Chad: Is that a bad one?
[laughter]
Lisa: Even that detail about Stephen King, having the vision to be like, “Wait a minute. This is going to be something that inspires people to do other things.” Again, just trying to make the connection, like, “Where do these futures come from?” They come from somewhere. They come from someone having an imagination about a story that’s going to be sticky, that’s going to stick in our minds, and have the wherewithal to be like, “Fridge. No go. That is not the move.”
Chad: It’s funny. The one thing that sticks in my mind, speaking about the future, is when Doc comes back at the end, and the DeLorean is there. Then Marty’s like, “Well, how do we--? We don’t have enough road to--” He’s like, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” That line, I use it all the time.
Lisa: It’s such a great line. It really is a line that invites you to dream, like status quo behind. “We don’t need the road.” “We’re going somewhere new.” “Come with me.” They’re like, “Yes.”
Chad: What’s crazy about that is that actually, if you think about the time when that future was, I think it was two years ago, that future, I think it was 1985. Then it went to 1950 or ‘60, and then it went--
Lisa: It went to this 2025 or something.
Chad: Yes, ‘25 or something. You’re like, “Where the hell’s the flying cars?” We’re still waiting. Maybe we’re actually very close. Very close.
Lisa: Yes. Hang out here.
Chad: I know.
Lisa: We are in Silicon Valley. There’s definitely a hovering. They’re figuring it out. I also love that you have this great forward from Jay Leno who had a lot to say about [crosstalk].
Chad: He did. He did. He did. He was a little perturbed. He writes honestly from the heart, which I think is really good. He was very excited about a bunch of the cars. Then he was disappointed that we put in Lightning McQueen and other cars that you can’t drive because he’s really a car enthusiast. We were going to go back to him and be like, “Hey, could you be a little more positive?” He loves the book. He said this book is all about emotion, excitement, nostalgia, but also sometimes anger because he was pissed at Lightning McQueen. I forget what other car. He was like--
Lisa: There were some physics details. I don’t know how to put that one.
Chad: Yes. [chuckles] It’s like the person who watches Star Wars and like, “Why are there laser sounds? Space, it’s a vacuum, and sound--” “There should be no laser sound. It should be like a silent movie. “You’re like, “No. Those laser sounds make the movie when they shoot.” Anyway, I love Lightning McQueen. I got one of the most amazing opportunities to collaborate with Pixar to do a hotel in Shanghai. I’m a huge Pixar fan.
My late friend, who became a friend through this project, he helped work on a lot of the production design of Pixar films. It’s just an incredible honor to include Lightning McQueen. I do think-- and it’s interesting. We also interviewed Jeff Gordon. You guys know Jeff Gordon, one of the most celebrated NASCAR racers in the world. A lot of these people I interviewed, they’re friends through architecture. Michael Mann reached out to me because of architecture.
I did Michael Bay’s house. Jeff Gordon, I met because he called me to do a house for him. We hung out. He was driving us in this off-road vehicle. They’re all super nice to actually contribute. Jeff Gordon was in a really incredible story as well of how he became one of the greatest racers of all time. He was one of the voices in Cars 2. He wanted to be in Cars 1.
If you think about it, those movies probably inspired more kids recently than any other movie about cars. NASCAR people should be kissing Pixar because of the amount of fans and people and Lightning McQueen. We really wanted to make this book for everyone. It’s for scholars. It’s for enthusiasts. It’s for film. It’s for car experts. Even a kid could look through it and just be like, “I want that.” [chuckles]
Lisa: No. There’s this incredible connective tissue to it. The interviews are so special. I think, Chad, one of the things I’ve gotten to really appreciate about you is how you build relationships. It’s how you go through life. Again, one of the things we talk about in the How We Future podcast is how do we have outsized influence when it feels like there’s so much happening in the world around us that feels out of our control.
I think you really model such both curiosity and generosity when it comes to learning from others and wanting to understand what makes them excited and then offering, well, “How about we do this?” All of a sudden, there’s a totally different relationship, different kind of collaboration. I just love how you’re building homes for all these great movie makers and giving them the dreams that they want.
Chad: Thank you. I would say the same for you even more. I enjoy very much engaging in the universe that you’ve created with all these great thinkers. Thank you for making me part of it.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh. It’s been incredible. We’ve talked about these cool fantasy cars and even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We have to talk about some of the non-perfect cars that are equally powerful, starting with the Ecto-1 in Ghostbusters. I wonder if we could talk about that, or coming up with the van and Stripes as an unexpected contribution.
Chad: No, it is. I think Ghostbusters is maybe more obvious. It’s just like a car that people really connected to, if you will, that movie, the humor, and the cars. It was really just assembled with parts from a hardware store and painted. That was pretty interesting to hear those stories and uncover how something that looks so high-tech was just really low-tech. I’ll talk a little bit more about Stripes just because it’s one of those in the book where people are like, “Really?”
I don’t know if you guys have ever watched Stripes. It’s actually a really funny movie. There’s something about that vehicle that is super cool because it was actually like an RV that GM had. GMAC, I think it was. How they modified it, and they turned it into this assault vehicle. There was a lot of discussion. “Let’s take this out when we were editing from 300 down to 100, down to 50.”
We made the book with 50, actually. We have all the content, drawings, all the images, all the graphic layout. It was really at the end when we’re like, “Oh, my God. This book’s 700 pages, and it’s going to be $700.” We cut it all down. That Stripes one, I don’t know. I fought for it. I don’t know. It was really impactful to me as a kid that this RV could become this armored assault vehicle. I don’t know. There was something really funny in the way they operated it and things like that. It’s a cool car. It’s just really interesting.
Lisa: So unexpected that it takes the time that it does.
Chad: I know. There’s some really cool drawings about that.
Lisa: It’s incredible. Okay. I have to ask about another one that has also just become a meme, which is National Lampoon‘s Vacation. We can all picture that moment in time. We’re like, “Station wagon, here we go.”
Chad: Yes. The Family Truckster. In Lair, it was also about editing. I’m not very good at editing. I’m not very good at coming up with a lot of ideas. The editing part was specific. In Lair, it was about what has inspired me architecturally. It wasn’t like, “Okay. It’s just a bad guy who has a house.” It had to be a bad guy that had a house that inspired me or developed me as an architect in some interesting subconscious way.
The Family Truckster was not really a cool car. It was the most uncool car that you could possibly find, and that was its charm. It turns out, a friend of mine, who was one of the founders or the founders of Vrbo owned that car. He was telling me about how him and the office, and he showed me a picture of them when they first started. I think he started HomeAway, and then they acquired Vrbo or whatnot.
It’s just like it’s such an iconic car because it’s so awkward, with the grandmother up on the roof and the kids. There’s one scene in that movie that I think is-- there’s so many memorable ones, but there’s one scene where everyone, the whole family is asleep, he’s driving, and Christie Brinkley pulls up in a Ferrari, and her hair is blowing. She was such an incredible beauty.
In the car, you’re like, “Oh, my God.” I think he goes off the road or something. I forget exactly because he’s so busy looking at her. That’s just a funny scene that is so memorable. He’s in this, the most dorky car. One of the features that I didn’t even notice when I was researching is it has multiple stacked headlights, which is interesting. I don’t know.
Lisa: Like you do if you’re Knight Rider?
Chad: Yes. I don’t know. That was like a funny car. It had to be in there because everyone’s always like, “The Family Truckster.”
Lisa: We used to picture the wood paneling on the side. I mean [crosstalk]--
Chad: Totally. My parents had a Wagoneer with the wood paneling. That was our little family. We called it “The Family Truckster.” It was funny.
Lisa: Yes. Absolutely indelible in our memories.
Chad: Totally.
Lisa: Speaking of which, once I read about it in the book, I have, of course, been listening to now the soundtrack of Grease, which is like the total iconic Grease Lightnin’ car movie of the ‘80s. We all wanted to be either living--
Chad: You got the jacket.
Lisa: I mean, I have the jazz.
[laughter]
Lisa: We got the Pink Ladies. Talk a little bit about cars and even music and even like that.
Chad: Yes. I mean, Grease Lightnin’. I had this vision as a child that I was going to do some incredible dance number in front of the school like John Travolta-
Lisa: Yes. Yes, you were.
Chad: -and impress everyone. It never happened. I even wore the suit vest that he wore to school. Anyway, I became like a big John Travolta fan. Many of you know, he probably even started before that with Welcome Back, Kotter, which was just an incredible cast.
Lisa: Gabe Kaplan. You
Chad: Gabe Kaplan
Lisa: Yes. It’s amazing.
Chad: John Travolta. Then he shows up in Grease, I think, sequentially. This guy is just so cool. Then the car, and it was like this jalopy, and they fixed it up. It kind of lost something when it started flying at the end, like, “What was that?”
Lisa: Yes. That was such a [crosstalk] out of nowhere. Out of nowhere. Unnecessary.
Chad: Yes. I know. It’s like I’m believing it, and then suddenly, they’re like up in the air.
Lisa: It was like my high school, and then it wasn’t.
Chad: Yes. Exactly. Like Olivia Newton-John with her coat, how he molds to her image, and then she molds to what she thought he wanted, then they’re like opposite, and like, “The one that I want.” Anyway, it was so great. The car and the race scene in the LA River. They’re racing for pink slips. It made me think of my father and him racing as a kid.
Lisa: I know, and the friendship?
Chad: Oh, yes.
Lisa: “Will you be my second driver?” Then he drives. Oh, it’s awesome.
Chad: It’s so much emotion.
Lisa: He wants to see all these [crosstalk]--
Chad: There’s so much emotion, so much emotion. The car is super cool, too. That one was a little tricky because we weren’t sure. Do we use the one that they made and raced, or do you do the one that was kind of like the fantasy version with the glass hood or Pyrex hood? We kind of used both.
Lisa: Well, thanks for not using the flying version.
Chad: Yes. [laughs]
Lisa: I thought that was a bizarre end, and how Grease 2 had the motorcycle.
Chad: The motorcycle. Yes.
Lisa: There are, by the way, some awesome motorcycles in there, including some sci-fi ones, the Tron.
Chad: Yes.
Lisa: Oh, my gosh.
Chad: Oh, yes. The Lightcycle.
Lisa: The Lightcycle.
Chad: I have a funny side story on the Tron Lightcycle. The Tron Lightcycle is-- we used both. We used the original one from the original Tron and then the new one that was done. The one time my mother ever really got super mad at me was we were at a Chuck E. Cheese in Maryland, and I was visiting my camp counselors. We would always go there for this teacher’s conference break. It was in the fall.
My mother’s like, “We got to go.” We’re at Chuck E. Cheese, and I’m playing Tron with the Lightcycles. I’m like, “Mom, I’m getting a high score.” She’s like, “We got to go to the airport.” We were flying People’s Express. I don’t know if you remember People’s Express. I think it only flew to Newark or whatever. You paid on the plane with your credit card. My mother’s like, “We got to go.” I’m like, “No. No. I’m getting a high score.” I’m with the Lightcycles and Tron. We missed the plane. I did get the high score.
[laughter]
Chad: I got my high score, at least, which was probably nowhere near the real high score. That Lightcycle got me in a lot of trouble. It’s just so interesting. That was the first time, actually, that computer graphics was ever used in a movie, or the integration of live action with computer graphics. It’s really an interesting story.
Lisa: It’s also interesting that a lot of the movies that you picked are now being remade. There’s a new Tron coming out. By the way, I heard that they actually interviewed Fei-Fei Lee as part of it. She has a part who’s an AI iconic researcher.
Chad: Incredibly talented, those guys, the way they used, as architects, the way they used the computer to tell stories. Really beautiful.
Lisa: Oh, I know. A couple of things. One is F1, the movie that just came out.
Chad: Incredible.
Lisa: Unbelievable. We definitely need a sequel.
Chad: Totally. Yes. I know. We were thinking about doing that, including that, but it was just like, “Can we get Brad Pitt? Can we get Joseph?”
Lisa: That story about technology is an awesome segue to some questions I’ve collected ahead of time. This one comes from someone who is actually with us tonight, my dear friend Nathan Shedroff, who is the founding dean of the MBA in design strategy, a visionary, an author in his own right, particularly writes a lot about design and science fiction.
Nathan wants to know. Technology and science fiction have had a symbolic relationship for a very long time. This came up in some of the research that he did in his own book called Make It So, which is fantastic. He’s curious about your thoughts about the relationship between technology and cars and how they’ve really influenced science fiction, influencing science facts, and just the relationship between that book in particular.
Chad: There’s a lot to unpack there. My work as an architect is very inspired by a lot of science fiction that I read, including Three-Body Problem that inspired a resort that we did on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. In terms of cars, the technology that I think inspired me was things like the Lotus Esprit Turbo and how that car just turned into a submarine. That was one of the ones that I had the Matchbox car for. That was in the bath every night. That thing was like my sister. It was through her legs.
It’s funny because we found the car. My mother saved all these cars. I think she gave it to my son. Then my daughter was like, “I want one.” We had to order one. Now, you can find everything on eBay. That type of technology, like Q-Lab, it was just so incredible. Then there’s something I’ll speak of. Of course, the technology of the assault vehicle in Stripes.
Of course, the DB5, which really set off. I wasn’t there when it happened, but my parents, and speaking to them and other people who grew up at that era, to see that Aston Martin, when you’re seeing all American cars growing up and whatnot, that just blew. Then the ejector seat, the oil spray, the machine guns, the license plate. It was just like, “Gee.” That’s unbelievable.
Of course, we could have done a lot more. James Bond cars, which also in Lair, we could have done many, many more. James Bond. I think the car that most inspired me technologically, and if this book sells, if you guys all buy one, we might do the-- but it’s the cars of television. That was the next book. At one point, we’re like, “Should we merge them?” Then we’re like, “No, because the movies are one thing, but--” Kitt, Knight Rider, was like, the one that-- that was another thing I watched with my father religiously, it was David Hasselhoff, Germany’s most sexy man alive.
[laughter]
Chad: The French love Jerry Lewis. The Germans love David Hasselhoff. Nevertheless, Kitt and Knight Rider, just that light and the sound. [onomatopoeia] The dashboard. I want to know who the voice of Kitt was. That’s an interesting-- because that voice was like, “Michael, we have a problem.” [chuckles] That car, technologically-- I was in the Waymo last night, I’m thinking, “This is not too far from Kitt.” We’re waiting to do the cars of television, which there are a lot of really good ones.
Lisa: Again, I think it’s like we see these images, and they have a huge impact-
Chad: Totally.
Lisa: -on us, whether we realize it or not. A big thing that we’re trying to do with the podcast and with my class and anything that I can write and share is to help us imagine better futures so we can build them and not just react to the futures happening to us because it’s just so critical to pay attention to that. There’s a lot of people that want to know what your favorite car is.
Chad: Oh, my favorite car?
Lisa: Two things. What is favorite car in the book, and your favorite car or favorite ride you’ve ever been in?
Chad: I would say it had to be the Lotus Esprit in the James Bond film, just because it was just so cool. The shape of that car, it’s like this really elegant wedge, and then it turned into a submarine, and he pulls up on the beach, and he’s like-- Roger Moore was my James Bond. My mother grew up, she’s like, “Roger Moore.” Like, “Sean Connery, come on, this guy’s like a clown.” I’m like, “Roger Moore is so cool.” He’s so quirky, and he pulls up on the beach, I guess it’s in Sardinia, and he has a fish, and he drops it out of the car. There’s just something about that that I love. I guess, real cars, even though that was a real car, but you couldn’t get those options at the dealer.
Lisa: [chuckles] Not yet.
Chad: It had to be the Lamborghini Countach from Cannonball Run. Just seeing that, and we have an incredible section about Lamborghini and the design and the sketches and so forth, but just seeing that car, it was mind-boggling.
Lisa: I think that answers another question, which was very curious. Lamborghini, Ferrari, where do you sit? I think we just forgot [crosstalk]--
Chad: Well, it’s interesting. Today, I don’t know where I would sit, but growing up, it was definitely Lamborghini just because it was so exotic. Although once again, another car movie, cars from the TV show Magnum P.I., the Ferrari. He was just so cool. Tom Selleck driving around with the Hawaiian shirt and the Ferrari. If you just think about it, a lot of these shows and movies, they really made a tremendous imprint in all of us. It’s like the nostalgia, the excitement, and the choice of that car. The choice of all these cars are very specific and very important.
Lisa: Important.
Chad: Casting.
Lisa: It is. The casting and the congruency to the story, and to really get you to-- It’s amazing to think about, set aside everything for two and a half hours to be in a movie theater and take in a narrative.
Chad: Totally.
Lisa: You think about that. Are we going to get there? The Fast & Furious franchise.
Chad: I think I’m more Ferrari now than Lamborghini.
Lisa: Oh, sorry. You switched? You can [crosstalk]. You can [crosstalk]
Chad: Lamborghini became like Crypto Bros show. I’m more about handling. Kit, who’s a friend of mine here tonight, we used to race cars together. Now I’m more about handling and speed than looks-
Lisa: Yes, getting into the functioning.
Chad: -and flash. Yes.
Lisa: I’ve got a great question here that we also crowdsourced from folks not here. This comes from Gabrielle, who is an eight-year-old in Canada, who is a huge Fast & Furious fan. Her mom said she had a lot of questions. “How do you make flames come out of the back? Are they really driving? How do you make it so exciting?” What she really wanted to know was how does one select a particular car for a certain character, particularly for the girls in this series? There’s definitely a lot of male energy in there.
Chad: Yes. For sure. It’s interesting. In the book, I also interviewed Dennis McCartney(ph). He is the one who designs and builds all the cars for Fast and the Furious. I don’t think he did Fast and the Furious 1, but he did pretty much every other one. He’s built 100 Fast and the Furious cars. We had to pick one. We picked the original car from the original film and then a modified off-road version, which was my favorite.
I also wanted to include, from Tokyo Drift, some of the Japanese JDM, or the Japanese Domestic Market cars, and then some of the cool cars in other films. I forget which one where this Japanese girl that was so spunky. She had this cool pink JDM car and stuff like that. Dennis McCartney is incredible. His showroom is in-- not showroom, but his workshop. He has some of the cars there.
Basically, the way they cast him is they give him a budget, and he just picks the cars for the characters, which is interesting. He’ll be like, “Oh, Terese needs this car.” He’ll like, “The Mercedes with the six wheels,” or whatever. There’s so many interesting stories that he has in the interviews of how he selects the cars for the characters and makes them, which is even cooler. They’re all modified, too, for jumping.
Lisa: Yes. You give some beautiful shout-outs to people in the industry, which is also some of the questions.
Chad: These people are just hidden, and no one knows about it.
Lisa: Yes. There’s a whole industry, and that was incredible. I think you were saying for Blues Brothers, there was 400-
Chad: Exactly.
Lisa: -cop cars that were-
Chad: We were talking to John Landis-
Lisa: -destroyed especially.
Chad: -because he came to the opening party that we did in Los Angeles at the Peterson, but he went to the after-party. He was reading a lot about that, and he was talking about the amount of cars. Even the hero car, there’s always a bunch of them. Michael Bay tells the story of the car from Bad Boys, the Porsche. There’s a lot of really funny stories. Michael’s incredibly descriptive in a lot of these things.
Originally, he said-- That was his first film. He used to do commercials. He did the Got Milk? commercial. Somehow, Jerry Bruckheimer gave him the opportunity to do Bad Boys. The production guy, I forget what. “He didn’t believe in me. There wasn’t really a big budget. They wanted me to rent a Mustang for $500 a week.” He was like, “I’m not doing that.” He owned that Porsche, and he had it shipped over from LA. They used his own car in the movie for all the stunts and everything and whatnot. He was like, “Oh, my God.” Fires exploding. He’s racing.
At any rate, I guess it was like he said something like a couple thousand dollars’ worth of damage, and they fixed the car. Then later, I don’t know, it was like after, he sold it to one of the production assistants for I think $30,000 less than he paid for it. Then that guy sold it ten times what he paid for it. Then that guy sold it for like-- the car ended up selling for millions of dollars. Michael’s like, “I’m such an idiot.”
He always gets the cars in the Transformers. He buys them sometimes. He tells a really funny story about the Camaro in the Transformers and how he basically helped make that car into production. It wasn’t going to be produced, but he went into GM. He saw it. He’s like, “This would be really cool for the movie.” He modified it, worked on the design, and then it became the Camaro.
In Transformers, anyone know what the original car in Transformers was? Bumblebee? That’s easy. What would be Bumblebee? Volkswagen Beetle was in the comic and the cartoons. Yes. He changed it to this Camaro, which wasn’t even in production. Then the movie did so well, the car went into production that he helped tweak. He says he made GM billions of dollars for the sale of the car. When we designed his house, we put Bumblebee in the lower level of the house, where there was a prop museum on a turntable, because he said Bumblebee paid for the house.
Lisa: Chad, your stories are incredible. You’re giving an already vibrant book even more life, which is just so joyful. Of course, I have to close on a final question, which is like, what is next? We’ve clearly seded(ph) potentially Ride TV Edition.
Chad: There’s seven different ride books. One is Airwolf and cool planes. Another one is ride intergalactic, like spaceships, Star Wars stuff, like Landspeeder and stuff like that, because some of that was going to-- All these other versions, because they were in the book, and we had to edit them out.
Then there’s another book called Wear. I don’t know. I like the four letters. It’s all about the costumes. It’s all about the costumes of films because all these things, all these ingredients, if you take them all together, the architecture, the vehicles, the spaceships, and then there’s another one called Gear, which is all about the gear, like lightsabers and this stuff like that. Anyway, there’ll be none of this if these don’t sell, so please.
[laughter]
Chad: Please support Tra Publishing in there. [chuckles]
Lisa: Right. The Tra Publishing, Book Passage, all. Yes.
Chad: Yes. Thank you so much.
Lisa: What about Eats?
Chad: Eats? There actually was a talk about the food in movies.
Lisa: Yes. It’s huge.
Chad: The recipes to make that food, but yes, it could be. We’ll do that with you. Yes.
Lisa: Yes. It’s also worth saying that Ilona, who happens to be here with us tonight, which is amazing-
Chad: There she is.
Lisa: -is also a cookbook author herself.
[applause]
Lisa: We need to bake some of those. Chad, there’s so many more stories we could have talked about-
Chad: Oh, my God. Yes.
Lisa: -including one of my all-time favorite, of course, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and-
Chad: Oh, my gosh.
Lisa: -The Cider and all the rest.
Chad: Oh, my God. If you have the means, definitely pick one up. There’s just great lines. Of course, I don’t want to carry on too long, but Porsche, we mentioned Michael Bay in Bad Boys, but Risky Business. I still cringe as that Porsche goes into Lake Michigan. I’m like, “I can’t look. I cannot look.” I think that movie honestly made me never take my father’s car when they went out because I was like, “If any of this stuff happens, I’m in trouble.” Anyway, Porsche plays a big part in the book as well.
Lisa: Oh, huge. Well, I want to end with one of my favorite quotes from Ferris Bueller where he says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you may miss it.”
Chad: That’s true.
Lisa: With that, I want to say thank you for stopping around and making sure that we are not missing the finer details in the movies -
Chad: Thank you.
Lisa: -that we love, in the buildings that you design are so extraordinary. Elaine, I want to thank you again for allowing us to be here, and your team-
Chad: And crew.
Elaine Petrocelli: Our pleasure.
Lisa: -Zack, and our team that made this happen; Kaela, Erik, Alex, Franzi, Tony. Just incredible. Thank you for giving us a magical evening where we could both reminisce and imagine more boldly. Thanks, everyone.
[applause]
Lisa: A huge thanks to Chad Oppenheim, Ilona Oppenheim, Elaine Petrocelli, and the entire Book Passage team, and to everyone who joined us for this special night. If this conversation reminded you of a favorite movie, a beloved car, or a moment of childhood wonder, I invite you to hold onto that feeling this week and notice how it might be pointing you towards what you want to build next. I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening to How We Future.