Chasing the Bullitt

Steve McQueen's classic car chase in San Francisco

Bob Seinfeld has just acquired a new car, but not the usual San Fran
runaround you might expect for a 36-year-old IT manager. Instead it is
a Highland Green Ford Mustang GT Fastback that rolled off Lee
Iacocco's Detroit production line some time in early 1968. An
identical car - same shade, same year - featured in the movie car
chase to end all movie car chases. Yes, in a nine-and-a-half-minute
undisputed classic of the genre, Steve McQueen drove at breakneck
speed through the streets of San Francisco in a car just like
Seinfeld's.

'I wasn't born when Bullitt came out,' he confesses with a glint in
his eye. 'But I saw it about 10 years ago and I have been kinda hooked
ever since.'

Thanks to a dedicated bunch of film fans, visitors to San Francisco as
well as people like Bob can now follow in the screeching tyre marks of
the famous Bullitt car chase. The route takes you up and down the
hills of the Bay area and out into the countryside on the Guadalupe
Canyon Parkway in as near an approximation to the cinematic pursuit of
1968 as is geographically and legally possible.

But when I arrive in Sausalito, on the north side of the Golden Gate,
to check out our wheels for the day, Seinfeld's Mustang is jacked up
on the drive. He explains that he has still got a bit of work to do on
it - tuning mainly, not to mention getting a new set of bumpers from
the Mustang Owners Club. Then there are the bearings and a bit of
tinkering with the manifold. I had to confess to feeling the crush of
disappointment, but Seinfeld does the decent thing and lets me sit
behind the steering wheel to make up for the mechanical woes.

The dashboard has one of those horizontal speedometers, there is a
spindly steering wheel and the plastic-and-chrome trim is pretty
tacky. 'They were stripped of frills to keep the price down,' says
Seinfeld. 'The basic model was just $2,300, but most people piled on
the extras.'

I ask Bob if he can at least start the engine up. The ignition switch
is dodgy, so he jump starts the engine from his pick-up. The V8 sounds
a little cranky and there is the whine of a loose fan belt to add to
the mix, but when I press down the accelerator, there is no mistaking
the trademark growl: like a Kansas whirlwind channelled through a set
of Venetian blinds.

We leave the Mustang behind and 10 minutes later we are heading off on
the 10-mile Bullitt tour in a noiseless hire car that has leather
seats and air conditioning. The angriest it gets is a discreet pinging
noise when you start the engine and forget to buckle up.

For serious film fans, though, Bullitt is more than just a car chase.
It is a snapshot of San Francisco in the late Sixties and, as a
result, it makes for a fascinating 'then and now' road trip. There are
no Haight-Ashbury hippy chicks or 'Jefferson Airplane Loves You'
bumper stickers in sight, just the harsh beating heart of the city
with its noisy freeways providing the arteries.

In the film, a smarmy politician (played by Robert Vaughn) is keen to
gain electoral publicity in a mob show-trial and enlists Lieutenant
Frank Bullitt (McQueen) to protect state's witness Johnny Ross. The
story mixes local politics with police corruption. McQueen plays a
maverick loner battling to keep the right side up and protect his
designer girlfriend (played by Jacqueline Bisset) from the true horror
of homicide.

The action starts at the famous Mark Hopkins InterContinental on the
corner of California and Mason, where the mob are on the tail of 'the
squealer' Ross. It is an ideal starting point. Today, the rooftop
cocktail bar has some of the most definitive views of the city and,
when the early morning fog starts to clear, up pop the instantly
recognisable profiles of Alcatraz, Angel Island, the Golden Gate and
the distant hills of Berkeley. After downing a fortifying whisky and
ginger and working out how to operate Seinfeld's portable DVD player,
we are off, gunning the mid-range hire car as much as a mid-range hire
car can safely be gunned.

Using route directions printed off the internet, and stopping and
starting the DVD, we soon warm to our task. First we get to Grace
Cathedral, where Bullitt's boss rows with the Robert Vaughn character,
then we swing by Frank's apartment at the junction of Taylor Street
and Clay (painted pale blue in the film, but now a dull grey). We have
less luck with the seedy hotel where Bullitt first encounters Ross. It
was demolished some years ago and in its place is the gleaming new
corporate HQ of Gap Inc.

We break for a snack at Enrico's Sidewalk Café, founded in 1958 and
something of a San Francisco institution. It is at one of their
outdoor tables (Broadway and Kearny Street) where Bullitt meets the
informant Eddie in order to find out who is after his witness. Today
Enrico's is very much the heritage eatery, but it has bags of
atmosphere, live jazz and boasts hipsters, geeks and goons among its
clientele.

After lunch, we move on to the car chase itself. Sadly, the film's
continuity has little respect for the fan who wants to recreate the
exact sequence of that dramatic drive. Sections were shot and cut up,
taken out of order or reversed, and there are all manner of
geographical howlers. The route map, however, bunches the scenes
together well. It provides a starting point in the area around Russian
Hill - this is where the early car battles take place and where the
Charger gets its first prang.

In 1968, the chase sequence took two weeks to put together, with
McQueen and stunt drivers meticulously choreographing hand-brake turns
and intersection swerves. Director Peter Yates remembers that, when
they were filming some of the most dramatic turns, McQueen liked to
lean out of the window just a few inches to make sure the camera
picked up that it was him and not a professional stunt driver behind
the wheel.

At the corner of Larkin and Chestnut, we stop and watch the DVD. The
Mustang understeers badly and McQueen has to take the turn again. Bob
points out a long, black tyre mark on the road, but I'm not convinced
of its provenance.

He tells me the Mustang was chosen for the film largely because of a
deal that Warner Brothers had with Ford to feature their cars. Both
star and director, though, were serious petrol heads and drew the line
at the studio's suggestion that the central car chase should be a Ford
chasing a Ford. It was Yates who chose the Black Dodge Charger to do
the pursuing. Not only did it have a wild west name to complement the
Mustang (Yates still refers to the film as a sort of urban western),
but it also 'had an evil, sharky look that we both liked'.

We go north on Taylor Street, where one of the most famous sequences
of the chase took place - the cars at full tilt, humping over the
hills with all four wheels in the air and landing with the sound of
crunching sumps. There is a patrolman hanging around at the junction.
I resist the temptation to take a flier at the hill and make the drive
more sedately.

In 1968, movie car chases were not as commonplace as they are now, and
it was the fact that the cars in Bullitt were travelling at 175kmh
that made it so thrilling to watch and still draws plaudits 38 years
on. The fascination is such that in 2005 there was a unique
collaboration between the San Francisco Film Society and a local Arts
Centre to organise a treasure hunt rally around the scenes in Bullitt.
It ended with an open-air screening of the film in Washington Square.
'We had a Le Mans start and everyone had a great time,' says Bob.
'It'd be nice to do it again, but this time with everyone driving
either Mustangs or Chargers!'

Turning into Marina Boulevard, we head toward the Presidio Park area
and past the Safeway supermarket (as featured in the film). Originally
the filmmakers wanted to race the cars across the bridge, but the
logistics of closure proved too much for the SFPD. Instead they were
forced to end in the hills of McLaren Park.

The frightening scene where an oncoming motorcyclist loses control and
slews his bike in front of the Mustang was actually filmed on the
Guadalupe Canyon Parkway. Stuntman Bud Elkins pulled it off with
aplomb and later achieved even greater fame when he motorcycle-doubled
for McQueen in The Great Escape.

Having zigzagged over most of the Bay area, Seinfeld is keen to find
the gas station where the Bullitt chase ends in flames. It is at the
corner of Canyon Parkway and North Hill Drive. We pull in to watch the
gruesome denouement on the DVD player. The Charger careers into the
gas station and the baddies go up in flames. The real-life scene is
pretty mundane. There is a stall selling fajita wraps and a steady
flow of people pulling in to fill up. An old guy clocks what we are
doing, comes over and claims to have remembered being around when they
made the film. He cannot quite believe that two 30-something blokes in
a hire car are retracing the route 38 years later.

As we drive back to Sausalito, it is clear that Bob has really enjoyed
'doing the Bullitt'. 'Most people don't remember the story, but they
do remember the chase,' he says. 'But it is an incredibly authentic
film.'

He starts talking about the modifications he's going to make on the
Mustang and mutters darkly about milling the heads and cranking up the
suspension. He reckons it will take him 18 months to get the Mustang
into fighting trim. 'Yeah,' he says, 'and when it's done, why don't
you come back and we'll do the whole tour again.'