#Bullitt timing movie#
#Bullitt timing full#

Once he recovered from Kiernan’s revelation, he asked if his filmmaking partner could see the car. “The car you’re talking about,” he said to Wallace, “the one that’s been lost forever? It’s sitting in my garage. I felt him in the truck with us.” And suddenly Kiernan knew what to do. It was actually the first time I had felt my father’s presence since he had passed away. “And then,” recalls Kiernan, “I had this overwhelming feeling.

#Bullitt timing movie#

What were the chances that a fellow paint salesman who happened to be Kiernan’s boss also happened to be in the movie business? And that that same person also happened to be trying to make a film that happened to be about the Bullitt Mustang that Kiernan happened to own? “Um, damn near exactly like it,” Kiernan answered, stunned. “How close is your car to looking like the Bullitt Mustang?” asked Wallace. Wallace, who lived in Atlanta, was taking advantage of his trip to Nashville to speak with a potential investor while he was there. Wallace and Horstmann were working on financing their movie venture. Bad guys arrive and separate the kids from the car. It revolved around two 18-year-old friends discovering the Bullitt Mustang in a barn and what happens after they buy it for a few thousand dollars from the owner, who doesn’t know what it once was. They’d been trying to get an action-adventure movie made that Horstmann had written several years earlier. Wallace explained to Kiernan that he and his best friend, independent film and video director Ken Horstmann, were partners in a film-production company called Spyplane Films.

What Kiernan did not know about his boss was that Wallace had a side business. How the hell did he know anything about Bullitt?” “He barely knows how many tires are on his truck. Was the family secret blown? Kiernan knew Wallace was no car guy. His father liked the idea that it had been used in a movie, “but the big factor was that it handled amazing and had huge amounts of power, especially compared to an MG.” “You have to remember that, at the time, ‘movie cars’ were not really sought after,” says Kiernan. Bob Kiernan had purchased it in 1974 from an ad in our sister publication, Road & Track, to replace the family’s only car, an MGB/GT. Kiernan, 36, inherited the Bullitt from his late father. The movie car’s trip to the auto-show stand actually started in earnest in December 2015, according to its owner, Sean Kiernan. It took 30 seconds for the Bullitt Mustang-in original, if dilapidated, condition-to rumble onto the stage at Detroit’s Cobo Center, but it took a village to make it happen. And yet it largely was.Īs those involved tell it, the Bullitt Mustang never would have resurfaced in Detroit had it not been for a coincidence of cosmic proportions, the sheer luck of fortuitous timing, and, especially, the efforts of a determined coterie of emotionally invested volunteers. The synchronicity of the car’s breaking cover in the same year as the Bullitt movie’s 50th anniversary, and at the same event where Ford revealed its 2019 Mustang Bullitt tribute model-the third since 2001-is just too perfect for it to have been happenstance.

#Bullitt timing full#

So when the Bullitt Mustang suddenly appeared at a Ford press preview at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on January 14, 2018, the assembled journalists, car nuts, Ford execs, and Mustang fans went full geek. Certainly not by Mustang aficionados, who speculated on its whereabouts for almost four decades, titillated by the occasional internet post or word of a spectral sighting. The ominous-looking pony car with the barking 390-cubic-inch V-8, which starred in one of the greatest chase scenes in movie history in the film Bullitt-with McQueen doing the driving in many of the shots-may have been lost, but it was never forgotten. Steve McQueen’s Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT fastback vanished 38 years ago.