(Today’s COAL was kindly submitted by Charley Connolly)
When I was 24-years old I met the woman I would marry. At the time I was driving this 1982 Buick Riviera, a car to this day she chides me about calling it an “Old Man’s Car”. Much to my delight, the other night we watched “La La Land” on Netflix and Ryan Gossling’s character, “Sebastian” drives a 1982 Buick Riviera.
Sebastian’s Riviera was a convertible while mine was a hard top but seeing one of the leads in a big Hollywood movie driving the same year, make and model of car I once did was, through my foggy goggles, vindicating. And it was delicious.
I bought my Riviera in January of 1988 after I wrecked my 1975 Chrysler Cordoba on an icy morning just after Christmas. I really wanted a Camaro, Trans Am or Mustang, but with my driving record chock full of speeding tickets and accidents, I couldn’t touch the insurance payments on anything remotely construed as a performance car. In hindsight, I should have bought some inherently practical four-cylinder whatever, but young turk I was, not unlike Sebastian in “La La Land”, I couldn’t drive no stinkin’ economy car. I had my standards. As misguided and\or convoluted as they may have been.
My Riviera and Sebastian’s were part of the sixth generation of Riviera’s that were all new for 1979. Sharing its chassis, body shell and much of its running gear with the also new-for-1979 Oldsmobile Toronado and Cadillac Eldorado, Motor Trend magazine thought so highly of the turbocharged, sport suspension tuned Riviera “S”, they awarded it their highly sought after, “Car of the Year” honors. Encompassing the spirit of the magnificent if not seminal 1963 Riviera, the 1979 Buick Riviera foretold a future full of blue skies and sunshine for General Motors through the 1980’s and beyond. Spoiler alert, like Sebastian and his love interest Mia’s (Emma Stone) future that once shined so brilliantly, GM crashed and burned. My wife and I fared much better.
In a major motion picture, “car casting” doesn’t happen by accident and can be a most important set design element. In “La La Land”, producers, undoubtedly, were looking for the automotive equivalent of Sebastian – something big, unique and flashy. Whether they realized it or not, seeing what a heartbreaker that generation of Buick Riviera was, trust me on that one, it fit Sebastian perfectly in more ways than they probably ever thought possible.
What’s more, the differences between a big, gas swilling old Buick and the Toyota Prius Mia drives underscores the vast differences between the two of them. As opposites do sometimes attract, these two self-absorbed dreamers worked as a couple. That is, until their dreams get in the way of “them”.
There are some parallels between Sebastian, Mia and my wife and I too; my wife is more than happy to say she’s “just like Mia”, and I wholeheartedly concur. Whereas I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit I have more than my fair share of Sebastian in my DNA. Well, what can I say? We both drove a 1982 Buick Riviera.
I think fondly of my Riviera now although, frankly, I know I love the idea of it relative to my life at the time more than the car itself. My Riviera was slow, handled like a bathtub full of water, was sloppily assembled and broke down so often I was on a first name basis with the counter people at Hertz and Avis. Still, much like at the end of “La La Land” when Sebastian and Mia ponder what their lives would have been like together “for the long haul”, it being the car I had when I first met my wife, my getting another one is wonderful to think about. And if I was to get another one, it’d be a red convertible just like Sebastian’s.
Further reading:
Curbside Classic: 1983 Buick Riviera Convertible – The Rare Ragtop Riviera
Curbside Classic: 1985 Buick Riviera – A Ray Of Light In The Darkness
In the first picture of Mr Gosling driving the Riviera, there’s an easily noticed pet-peeve which is seen in movies. He’s cruising in a relaxed state, very little stress… because the shift lever is in PARK!
I’m now doomed to look out for that in every movie I watch for the rest of time!
DG, That’s the first thing I noticed as well. It’s sort of an obsession with me as I notice this error in many movies and TV shows.
DG: Funny that you said that because I immediately noticed that, but didn’t put the 2 + 2 together. When I read your comment, it hit me like a lead balloon and realized what I did in fact see.
Same here. But it’s the other way round. Almost never the shift lever is anywhere but in Park.
That’s so obvious – now that you mention it.
“GM crashed and burned. My wife and I fared much better…”.
To fare much better over the long haul makes you and your wife winners.
No matter what you drive.
This seems like another very regrettable call my Motor Trend’s Car of the Year choices.
Not as regrettable at Motor Trend’s Car of the Year for next year who was the Chevrolet Citation.
A whole series could be made on MotorTrend’s regrettable-in-hindsight COTY selections (in fact, I think they did just that).
My personal favorite is the 1997 Chevrolet Malibu. A car that was a design facsimile of the 1992 Toyota Camry–arguably with worse build quality–and that otherwise excelled at nothing, on a revamped version of the lackluster N-body platform when what they really needed was a clean-sheet platform? And they chose to make it COTY? Laughable, really. Unlike the Citation, it wasn’t even ambitious.
I think they were just so relieved to see GM make what looked like a decent, serviceable, and reliable homegrown intermediate car in the modern era. That or some bucks exchanged hands behind the scenes.
Laughable indeed. Surely a car can’t honestly be Car of the Year unless it’s better than everything else in it’s class? Wheels in Australia infamously withholds their award unless there’s a vehicle which raises the bar in several areas. Or does MT only mean “it’s the best of this year’s crop”?
I think I read on this site that the automotive journalists were given cars test cars that were virtually hand-built and were utterly incomparable to the cars that would come off the line.
I remember these as good and very popular cars until the paint went bad and began flaking off at about three years making then dirt cheap to buy, re spray and service then re sell at good profit .
-Nate.
Although I’ve never owned one, I’ve driven many miles in them. I was selling for a dealer who had Buick from 1988 to 1997 and again 2007 to 2011. So I never sold this vintage new, but we had a lot of them traded in. They were very good cars, were not very powerful but did the job. The road like a dream and were great looking, especially in certain colors. But my all time favorite thing about them (and Eldo, Seville, Toro) was that totally flat floor with the bench seats. Those things had 800+ miles per day comfort unlike about anything sold in today’s world. Most vehicles today you would be lucky to get 400 miles before you have to stop.
I have a bit of a history with the sixth-generation Buick Riviera. My grandmother had a 1985 one in triple-brown (brown paint, brown landau top, brown leather). Of course it had the dog-slow-but-reliable Olds 307. And it’s the car I was first brought home from the hospital in. It’s also the car that got me into cars, so I owe a lot to that Riviera. And then her father (my great-grandfather) had a 1984 Riviera T-Type, white with a blue velour interior. And someone else in the family had a Riviera with the Olds 350 Diesel, though it was understandably converted to gasoline at some point.
Regarding “La La Land,” at the very end, Sebastian swaps his Riviera Convertible for a contemporary Eldorado Convertible. I don’t know if anyone else noticed that, but I definitely did.
As far as the sixth-gen Riviera itself, it’s interesting that it was the only generation to get the Unified Powerplant Package (UPP), GM’s odd-but-functional longitude-FWD arrangement, where the Eldorado and Toronado had the UPP all along.
The original Riviera had its own body (a rare thing at GM that really highlighted how much faith the company had in the car).
The second-gen model was when the Eldorado and Toronado came in as siblings, and they had the UPP, along with a shortened frame that terminated prior to the rear wheels. But the Riviera retained a traditional full frame and RWD. What’s more, it was the cruciform (X) frame that had otherwise been retired at GM after 1964.
Since the E-body would again get enlarged for 1971, the Riviera’s design team allegedly envisioned the boat-tail design of the third-gen model on the A-body platform, but management didn’t go for it. Instead, Buick was told that if it wanted to maintain RWD and a full frame (this time, a perimeter frame), it would need to use the B-body platform and share glass with the LeSabre, in order to save costs. As far as I can tell, the B- and E-body platforms were somewhat related during that time, anyway. The third-gen Riv was designated an E-body, but it was not an E-body in the same way the Eldorado and Toronado were. The fourth-gen was basically a reskinned third-gen. I guess it was a sort of B/E hybrid?
The fifth-gen Rivera was a short-lived model that was entirely a reshaped LeSabre Coupe, and officially designated a B-body.
The sixth-gen was when the Riv finally joined its E-body siblings, on what was the last iteration of the UPP, before everything went transverse-FWD in the mid/late 80s. It also got a cousin in the second-gen (bustleback) Seville, though that car was designated a K-body (it does not escape me that if the Seville as such existed today, it would be called a “four-door coupe”).
I owned an ’86 Riviera T-type briefly as a teen back in the mid-90s. Different generation from the feature car. Similar to the author, I actually really liked mine. It was a fairly taut handling machine in T-type guise and had decent punch with the injected 3.8 V-6. The digital touchscreen dash was also an interesting novelty at the time.
A girl I was interested in back then similarly referred to my Riviera as an “old man’s car”…so I knew my time with the car would be short!
That was still a very nice, and relatively new car for a teenager. Of course, I say this as someone whose first car was a 1990 Honda Accord. And I was a teenager in the 2000s/2010s. The car was 21 years old when I got it!
As for your Riviera specifically, by all quantifiable measures, the downsized 1986 E-bodies were better than their forebears. Went better, stopped better, were safer, were better put together, used less fuel, had more interior volume where it counted. But GM flubbed the styling, and that was the whole point of buying one of the personal luxury coupes.
I specifically remember buying it for $3,500, on finance, from a large dealership near me. I think this was about early 1996 or so. It’s funny…you’re entirely correct in that it was a relatively new car at the time…but to me it seemed like a just an “old” ’80s GM relic. Definitely not as old as your Honda experience, though! I actually kinda liked the styling of the downsized Rivs as opposed to their predecessors…at least in sporty T-type trim…but I agree that they definitely lacked mass market appeal.
I kept it about a year before flipping it for an ’86 Mustang GT that I equally regret selling. I lived in constant fear of the Buick’s fancy touchscreen dash going south on me, but I had zero problems with the car during my limited experience.
I own a 64 Riviera big block V8 wild cat 12 miles to the gallon highway. The 82 should have been called a skylark or something not a Riviera and it is sad that GM did not make a convertible in the first generations 63-73
https://www.throttlextreme.com/buick-riviera-boattail-last-great-buick/
Old Man’s car, my Ass!
I lost interest in the movie after 15 minutes.
I wonder what percentage of the non-GN Buick turbos are still on the road.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever owned a car that had any presence in a movie except maybe in the background of a street scene. That makes this Riv pretty special. I have not seen this movie by the way.
It wasn’t very good.
Now you must watch Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Rebel Without a Cause. If you are not already familiar with them you will understand why when you see them. And they are both great in their own very different ways. And both include a lot of period car stuff.
CC effect, film version: I’d never heard of Umbrellas before yesterday afternoon, when someone on another site posted a vid of young Catherine de Neuve “singing” its famous tune, covered by many in English, “I will wait for you,” which I had heard as a kid. In the movie, she didn’t.