Ted Moser would love to say that no muscle cars were harmed in the making of “Duster,” a new series from J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan, premiering on Max on Thursday. But Moser, the picture car coordinator for the show, knows better.
A homage to 1970s series like ”The Dukes of Hazzard” and “Starsky and Hutch,” “Duster” cruises around with Jim, played by Josh Holloway, a driver for a Phoenix mob boss. The show is set in 1972, when the cars were wide, the engines were big and the seatbelts were mostly decorative.
Cars play a role in nearly any period piece set in the last century or so. But in “Duster,” which derives its name from a fastback Plymouth coupe with a logo inspired by the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil, they are very much the stars. Four different vehicles play the title car and scores of other makes and models are sprinkled throughout the series. Moser and teams of mechanics and scenic artists source these cars, then restore, modify and in many cases wing, ding and faux-rust them until they are period appropriate. A few are subsequently crashed, even totaled.
“Yeah,” Moser said in a recent phone interview, “that always makes me sad.”
Television doesn’t lack for scene-stealing vehicles: the General Lee, KITT, the Batmobile, the Mystery Machine. Sometimes these vehicles are built wholesale or, in the case of cartoons, simply imagined. More often they need to be sourced.
Because most studios no longer maintain dedicated car lots and warehouses, producers hire picture car coordinators to source and supervise a fleet. These men (they are almost always men) are car aficionados with deep networks among retailers, collectors and hobbyists. Like casting directors, they know how to find a star, albeit one with four wheels.
Moser got his start in the industry as a mechanic on “Die Hard 2” and then spent many years as a transportation coordinator, moving cast and crew members on and off sets. But producers realized that he had a vast knowledge of vehicles and parts and began hiring him to find cars for movies.
Over three decades, he has built a cross-country network of car contacts. (When those contacts fail, the internet fills in.) In 2004, after finishing a job on “2 Fast 2 Furious,” he founded Picture Car Warehouse, a depot in the San Fernando Valley that houses between 500 and 1000 vintage cars at any given time. He has since sourced cars for period shows and films like “Argo,” “The Deuce” and “Tales of the City.”
When Moser is presented with a script, he roughs out a budget for autos, labor and various tuneups. Because picture cars are rarely driven when they’re not on set, even those in good shape typically require extensive overhaul.
“The seals dry out; the gas goes bad,” Moser said. “You basically have to restore the car.”
He also has to make them period correct, which often involves trading out tires, hubcaps and windshield wipers. Moser then presents that budget to the producers. Sometimes when he knows that particular cars will be too expensive or too tricky to source, he will suggest alternatives. For example, a “Duster” scene written originally to include Audis now features BMW Bavarians.
Many viewers don’t pay particular attention to a show’s cars. But for others, the wrong car will interrupt the story. The right one, by contrast, will enrich it, in ways that even a casual watcher might appreciate.
In “Duster,” there is an obvious symbiosis between Jim and his vehicle. The Duster and how Jim drives it tells us who Jim is. “It’s his right hand; it’s his best friend; it’s the thing that gets him out of trouble when he needs it,” Morgan said.
An early model Duster was chosen for the series pilot, which was filmed in 2021 in Tucson, Ariz., before Moser was hired on. (Later episodes were filmed in and around Albuquerque.) Morgan was enticed by the relative rarity of the Duster, which Plymouth produced for about seven years starting in 1970, and by its speed and maneuverability.
“It is really fast, unassumingly fast,” Morgan said. This felt right for Holloway’s Jim. “It has a little bit of a charm, which of course Josh Holloway has in spades, and a lot of swagger,” she said.
Holloway (“Lost”), who learned to drive before he was 10, was drawn immediately to the Duster. “You can make it do things that now computers [in modern vehicles] won’t allow you to do,” he said. “You can spin that sucker, throw it any way you want.”
As soon as he had the role, Holloway enrolled in a stunt driving school. At a California racetrack, he trained on a rusted, lime-green stunt Duster. “I’ve never driven that fast, like squealing around the curve within inches of another car,” he said enthusiastically.
Holloway performed many of his own stunts in “Duster.” Others were achieved by Corey Eubanks, a career stunt driver who got his start as a teenager on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
“If it was really cool, I did it,” Eubanks joked.
Eubanks appreciated the Duster’s sloppiness, its give, its lack of a speed limiter, of fuel injection, of nonskid tires. “It was reckless,” he said. “It had its own character to it. The only thing it didn’t have was a voice.” Then he thought for a moment. “But the engine’s the voice,” he added.
One Duster was used as what’s called the “hero car,” a picture-ready vehicle beautiful enough, inside and out, to be shot in close-up. The other three were stunt cars, retooled with automatic transmissions and designed to accommodate camera placements. They were joined by more than 250 other vehicles, including a replica of Howard Hughes’s Lincoln “Aero-Mobile,” a vintage Jaguar, a Ford Thunderbird, various trucks and the Plymouth Belvedere driven by Nina, the F.B.I. agent played by Rachel Hilson, the other series lead. (That Jim and Nina both drive Plymouths suggests a potential friendship.)
When a script required Moser to bang up these classic cars, even wreck them, he found it hard.
“Well, there’s a finite amount of them,” he said. “Every one you destroy is one less.” For crash cars he goes out of his way to find what he called, “a real rust bucket, something that wouldn’t be restored anyway.”
It’s easy to imagine a version of “Duster” that cuts corners, or screeches around them, with cars that perhaps aren’t quite of the era or that dare a plastic windshield wiper or a radial tire. Moser won’t stand for it.
“Cars are a form of art,” he said. He intends to honor that. It’s why he worries as much as he does about the interiors, the engine sounds, those wipers.
“It’s about people looking at that show going, ‘Yeah, they got it right,’” he said.
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
The post In ‘Duster,’ the Cars Are in the Driver’s Seat appeared first on New York Times.
