Can you build a car to test racism?

but the dog is what everybody freaked out about [Music] back when i did film cars in new york city for creative film cars we'd work for different organizations film television editorial but some of the tv shoots were a lot of fun and the ones that i kind of enjoyed because i got to be an observer were for abc news the what would you do show they would set up some kind of social experiment where they set up some things happening and they would film normal people walking through their daily lives to see what they would do and occasionally they would do them outside with with cars and they would call us for the cars so one of the episodes we did it was a setup with a car accident and myself and my friend linda jones who's a great actress uh played the two people in the episode and we set up and built a jaguar xj6 because we're trying to think of a car we could get relatively cheaply but looked expensive that would be believable if it just fell apart so jaguar perfect and back then they still had mechanical bumpers before all the wrap stuff so we had that and we rented a ford mustang convertible so the i conceit was that the jaguar is parked in a spot and it's affluent neighborhood there's a cafe nearby and things like that and one of us drives in with the mustang backs into the jaguar the requirement was you had to be able to reset the entire front end of the car in under 45 seconds so i had to build the front of the car so we could reassemble the whole front end the grille the bumper everything fell off and we could just slide it back into place so it was one of my favorite builds because it looked great and it set up great so all you do is back in a little bit and the whole thing just went it was completely unbelievable we didn't hit it that hard and then we'd just walk away and we'd see people whether they would stop us or not like not write a note or not doing anything and we'd make excuses like oh i had a job interview and i really gotta go and like you gotta do this so all of these shows were based on like what the public is gonna react to now they couldn't shoot in new york because you have to get a signed release from everybody in the background so we always shot in jersey or connecticut that was fun another one we did in jersey was old man we got a cadillac north star because we can get again we need a kind of grandpa card we can get cheap but we get beat up north star nobody wants him it was going to blow up in a day anyway so we bought off a used car a lot in jersey and brought in the shoot and then we got a i think it was a nighthawk motorcycle and the idea was the motorcycle was parked old man backs in and just knocks it over and runs it over and we had to build it so that he could run over this motorcycle repeatedly so we got bars for it and we had all kinds of things rigged up to it that wouldn't break in half and a great old actor and he just would come in he's all like dude he backs in and crushes the motorcycle and people are like and then he just acts lost like ah and people come over you okay he's like i don't know how to get home like he'd make up something new every time somebody said something he was fantastic he's like have you seen my children and then they brought a little boy and they're like i'm gonna take my grandson home and they're like you don't you can't drive and each of these shoots was a full day or two days of shooting so we got to see all kinds of crazy reactions one of my favorite reactions was another jersey went like a 95 degree day it was actually my volvo station wagon we brought it to this kind of town square area lots of foot traffic and we parked it and they put a baby in it with the windows rolled up and a dog so the baby was fake and it looked real it was terrifying it was one of these real baby doll things and it it breathed and the eyes would move they took it out of a plastic bag your immediate reaction was like what is wrong with that baby it was that real they put that in the back seat of the car and they actually put a speaker in the front seat so you could hear them from outside the car and people would walk by and see if they would do anything i actually bought an extra rear window for my car because i was expecting somebody to smash it nobody smashed it in fact most of the people just walked right by the dog on the other hand was real and it was 100 something degrees in the car we put a thermometer on the floor of the car that the camera was on so you could actually see how hot it was in there that's 100 and something degrees we put a home air conditioning system in the back of the station wagon with cover to look like a present and we ran wires at the bottom of it and we ran at home ac inside of it to keep it cool enough because the dog had to be in there but the dog also had if its trainer had to be in there and this poor guy had to lay down in the foot well of the back of a volvo 850 station wagon covered in a blanket and it's 120 degrees in the car and the car and the dog is panting and sitting on the seat we start that shot and immediately somebody's like there's a dog in a car and this fire truck just randomly came through and was pulling through and this woman ran over the fire truck was like you gotta help this dog this dog's in trouble i guess the assumption was that somebody was gonna come back for the baby like the parents are around but the dog is what everybody freaked out about this was like a two-day shoot but when they put the finished product on television the episode i think they skewed it to be more about the baby than the dog i don't think the results were actually accurate they wanted to see have people more helping the baby than the dog but it was definitely the dog people freaking out but the dog and that i don't know what they paid that trainer in there but that guy deserved every dollar to lay in that car for i mean half an hour at a time or 45 minutes at a time and we shot all day like that then we did one in connecticut and it was an audi a4 that was my that was alex richter from the 2904 i was his car and the conceit was a person who's had a dui has a car and it has a breather in it that you have to breathe to activate the ignition these devices are tremendously expensive and so we had to build something so i got one of the battery-powered breathalyzers and tested it to see if it worked i mean purely from science so i had to experiment to make sure that it was working then we built like a cord for it and put it into the steering column and it looked legit and a little hook on it and some velcro then they had a male and a female actor come out of a bar and be like excuse me you you gotta breathe in this cause i have to go pick up my son at school and if i'm late if they'll be in trouble and each they had again a half a dozen different excuse i gotta go to court my favorite thing about the drunk chute let's call it that shall we with some of the reactions of the passer byes there were people who were former alcoholics we found out just walking by and they're like i want to help you and you need help and um i will drive you to your school or whatever excuse they have given or i could take you to court and we'll straighten all this out and the amount of people were like just beautiful the actors occasionally would be like listen i'll give you 20 bucks i'll give you 20 bucks and there was one guy who was like all right 20 up i'll take the 20 hell yeah what do you want blowing sure and it was too easy and it was like wow did you just do that like i'll blow in your cover you go drive drunk do whatever you want my friend like here's another drink and you're on your way it was fascinating i'm sure like the show on television is edited for you know some kind of narrative but watching it live and you don't know what's going to happen was interesting and having been one of the actors it is completely random you have no idea how any individual is going to react to these things and what we did with the crash in the car wasn't high stakes but a person a drunk getting into a car is high stakes a baby in a car is high stakes so for that one as far as like who responded in a socially desirable way 50 50 actually you know what i'm gonna push it more towards like 70 30 on the good side that people are good that probably 20 of them were neutral to the point that like if you don't take action you're part of the problem type people and then 10 were a problem the one that was pretty disturbing though was we had to get a car and it ended up being an old 80s crown vic i think and we had to bring it to a park in a nice very nice neighborhood in new jersey and park it and they were going to have vandals attack the car to see who called and they were going to spray paint the car and hit it with tire irons and things so we had to come up with some way of spray painting a car and then be able to clean it perfectly clean and then have the next group of kids spray paint it first we waxed the heck out of it and then we were looking at like like do we put alcohol on it and then spray it with really cheap spray paint because it's got to look like spray paint and what we tested a bunch of things we finally came up with hair color that you put in your spray your hair for halloween and stuff looks like spray paint cans are pretty big and look like spray paint and it comes off pretty easily the first few times so what was disturbing about the shoot was they had a bunch of white kids thug type skater kids up there and they're screwing around with it and people are like you know walking away and i think one person called in said something about it and they were obviously messing with this car and they we told them like okay take it up a level like make it worse it wasn't just them they're trying to break in they've got a slim jim in the window and people are like oh yeah while this was going on i'll never forget this we had a set of black actors that were gonna do the same thing and they or their friends or something was they were sleeping in a car at the other end of the parking lot waiting for their turn there were two or three 9-1-1 calls about them sleeping in their car as potential thugs or something than the actual kids screwing around with the car and we had in all of these we are in touch with the local police and they know what's going on so when they call somebody calls 9-1-1 they clarify the location of what's going on they're like oh we have somebody just being taken care of we were shocked when that happened the police were like do you know about what's what's going on we're like oh yes but nothing to do with our setup and when we did use the black kids as the villains it was i guess expectantly horrible and they hadn't even let set a foot on it or hit it yet but people cell phones were popping up and calling and this one woman came up and she was this was before they were karen's she was like karen 2006 or whatever it was she came right up and she was like you can't do this and i'm gonna call the police and and this is before they really got going so we had like the shot really wasn't started like there wasn't any real spray paint she was just being horrible with a little dog and you're like oh please just stop being so stereotypical and predictable i could sit in a studio all day long and watch models sit there that's great but to have something where you're actually you know enlightened by the situation well i love those shoots they were terrific and they're still going on today on abc news from what i know and we don't supply the cars anymore but when we did it was a lot of fun homeowners insurance may just seem like some boring thing that you have to have to get a mortgage but it can be a surprising way to actually save a lot of money policy genius is your advocate to do that they shop your policy and your insurance needs amongst all the major carriers and find you the best deal in fact every time it 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Channel: VINwiki

Views: 158,903

Keywords: John Ficarra, VINwiki, picture cars, car wrangler, cinema cars, car stories, volvo, racism, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Georgia, vehicle history, social experiment, ABC, What Would You Do?, Hidden camera, car rental, accident, breathalyzer, police, ethics, Jaguar, Mustang, sexism

Id: GpvBGMw05y0

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020