“I like to watch”
Andrew Mora sent me this picture asking me the identity of the car in the tv. I thought it was a rather odd photograph, but then realized it was a still from the movie Being There, one of my all-time favorites. So can you tell us the car that Chance/Chauncey is seeing?
Here’s a clip from that movie with lots of CCs:
I’m going with 1978 Bonneville
I’ll second that.
Third. That looks like a Pontiac grill to me, and a GM B-body. I’m not familiar enough with the model year differences to determine the year from the picture, but 1978 would seem most likely based on when the movie was made.
Yup – this.
The split grille does kind of shout Pontiac, my first thought. But the windshield looks too tall and narrow, rather like an early Panther. I remembered the Marquis has a split grille as well, so my guess is 1979 Mercury Marquis.
It is not a ’79 Marquis, since there are no front fender extensions, with the large turn signals. Is also not a ’79 LTD.
78 Pontiac B body, Bonneville most likely.
Seconding the Pontiac, but it could also be a same vintage Olds 98 due to what looks like a thick chrome panel between the grille nostrils (or that could just be a trick of perspective.)
The 98 has parking lights under the headlights; the headlights/parking lights stack is the same height as the grille.
Either 78 Bonneville or Ninety-eight.
Yep- ’77-79 Bonneville. One thing bothers me on the clip. At 3:04 there’s distinctly a 1980 Grand Marquis backed into a parking space. The ’79 had smaller tail lights, the ’80 went all the way across as I recall.
I don’t think the Marquis got the full-width taillights until ’83 when it became the Grand Marquis.
Are you talking about the car at 1:38 backed into the parking spot? That looks like Fairmont Futura to me, not a Marquis. There is no car at 3:04 (that’s the end of the clip).
Yep- good catch. Still adjusting to my new meds lol.
Being There is a great film and really should have been Peter Sellers final movie instead of the lame The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu. Plus, from a CC perspective, some really great shots of seventies’ cars.
The only thing I noticed was the MISSING foreign cars. VWs and Toyotas were common everywhere in 1979, and a wide variety of other foreigners had been common in NYC for decades. Presumably the producers were trying to make a point by eliminating the foreign cars? This neighborhood is so uncool it doesn’t have the RIGHT kind of cars?
While movies are not always filmed in the city called out in the script, “Being There” was set in Washington D.C., not New York. Given the many recognizable D.C. buildings, I assume the street scenes were filmed there.
While I’m unfamiliar with the mix of domestic/imported vehicle in 1970’s D.C., I’d guess most of the politically connected folks on both sides of the aisles went with domestic to cater to the the “Buy American” vote.
I lived in suburban DC (Maryland) with my grandparents in the summers of ‘72 and ‘75. I commuted into the District almost every day to work at my grandfather’s store in the heart of downtown, in 1972, and my aunt lived in the about-to-be-famous (in ‘72) Watergate Apartments. I recall a lot of imports in DC then, and my perspective was coming from Berkeley where by this time imports outnumbered domestics. Maybe the cars in the movie weren’t local cars, but brought in, along with the extras, into areas that were controlled for the filming … perhaps loaned by local dealers for product placement.
I don’t know. The first car seen when Chance steps out of the townhouse is a junked Cadillac with no wheels/tires sitting on the pavement at the curb. My take was it was a very lower economic area of DC so one might expect to see nothing but older domestic cars from the early seventies and sixties.
I saw a VW bus and a Corolla.
Having visited Baltimore often in the late 70s, in poor inner city neighborhoods, foreign cars were still quite uncommon.
This was a great movie. I agree with everyone here, 77-79 Pontiac B-body for sure. It’s hard to see the grille detail but to me it looks like a ’77 Catalina with the large openings.
No mention of the Mustang with too many tail lights?
No such thing as too many taillights.
I agree.
That Mustang (’67-’68 fastback) with too many taillights is the reason I suspect those were real street scenes, maybe shot with a hidden camera. I can’t imagine a movie car company supplying a car that looked like that.
I swear I have seen another just like that from footage of a different movie, I just wish I could place it.
Never heard of the movie but he is watching The Price Is Right. The first episode of the Bob Barker version gave away a Vega.
They gave away a Comet one time I know of.
Since we morphed to the topic of game show giveaways, here’s a CC-worthy excerpt from the lyrics of my favorite song of about that era The Tubes’ “What Do You Want from Life”:
“a new Matador, a Maverick, a Mustang, a Montego, a Merc Montclair, a Mark IV, a Meteor, a Mercedes, an MG, or a Malibu … a Maserati, a Mack truck, a Mazda, a new Monza, or a moped, a Winnebago — Hell, a herd of Winnebago’s we’re giving ’em away!”
….and second prize was two Vegas!
Can’t fathom why someone was watching a satire like this in current times.
Great film, great and strange actor, great director. Hal Ashby made The Last Detail, one of my favourites. (And Harold and Maude, which isn’t, not sober anyway).
In the spirit of the film, the car Chance saw on tv was an illusion.
For the car on the TV screen, I’ll go with ’78 or ’79 full-sized Pontiac, but I think it is a Catalina. The Catalina’s grille was simpler than the Bonneville, with a bit less chrome and a slightly more horizontal pattern–which is how this shot looks to me. Plus “The Price Is Right” mostly gave away “value” (i.e. cheaper) cars.
“This is just like television, only you can see much further.”
” I like to watch”
Me too! And I just fixed that caption. Thanks.
“Do you know Rafeal?”
One of the funniest bits was the out-take over the end credits of Peter Sellers repeatedly trying to retell his profanity-laced encounter with the young, black street thug who pulls a knife on him, to which Chance responds with his television remote.. He couldn’t get through it in the slow, Chance manner of speaking without breaking into laughter. It’s not on all copies of the movie but is on youtube.
Thanks, rudiger. I just looked that up on youtube. Very funny!
There’s an old pcc car turned into a shelter where the kids are playing basketball.