Dillinger’s car will be in 2009 movie
When Mike Patton of Galesburg saw a pristine 1935 Hudson Terraplane for sale on the Internet, he thought it was the find of the century.Little did he know, a few thousand miles away, movie executives at Universal Studios also were eyeing the same rare car. And on top of that, one of the biggest names in Hollywood, Johnny Depp, already had been shown pictures and fallen in love with it.
Patton, who has a dozen or so cars from different eras, decided to pay the price asked by the Bay City Motor Company in Bay City, Mich., knowing this was a chance he couldn’t easily ignore.
“It was really a neat-looking car,” Patton said of the beige-colored vehicle. “It’s the only Hudson Terraplane that I had found anywhere on the Web, much less for sale.”
So he wired the company the money on a Monday in December. Late in March, he received a phone call from David Cotten, founder and partner in the Bay City Motor Company.
“They really want the car,” Patton recalls Cotten saying of the Universal representatives who contacted him. “They want to work something out and said they had to have that car or there wasn’t going to be any shooting.”
The Universal representatives wanted the Terraplane for a new movie starring Depp as 1930s gangster John Dillinger, which was about to commence shooting. Set to release sometime in 2009, the movie also stars Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent who led the manhunt for Dillinger; Channing Tatum as Pretty Boy Floyd; Stephen Graham as Baby Face Nelson; and Academy Award-winner Marion Cotillard as Dillinger’s paramour, Billie Frechette.
The crew has spent the spring filming in Wisconsin, Indiana and Chicago, where Dillinger was shot to death outside the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Avenue.
The film is based on Bryan Burrough’s 2004 book, “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34.”
So why was it so essential that this new film have that exact car?
“Apparently Dillinger had quite a few cars, but his favorite car was the Hudson Terraplane,” Patton said.