Background

In 1995 the hit comedy movie Tommy Boy was released starring Chris Farley and David Spade. After opening number one at the box office, the film directed by Peter Segal and produced by Lorne Michaels, went on to become one of the top ten most popular films in Paramount Pictures history on home video. And although Chris Farley and David Spade are the stars of Tommy Boy, there is another prominent character that shares space with them on the screen and even on the movie’s poster – the 1967 Plymouth Belvedere GTX. 

The automobile plays such a crucial role in the story that – according to Popular Mechanics, Axel Addicts, and other websites - it has become one of the top 50 most popular cars in movie history. The Tommy Boy GTX sits on many lists alongside the DB5 from James Bond, the Mustang from Bullet, and the Dodge Charger from The Fast and The Furious. Many of these lists illustrate how cars have become an integral part of our movie experiences.

For the filming of Tommy Boy, four identical cars were used for different scenes over the course of production. The producers could not afford four GTX convertibles, so they modified two convertible Plymouth Satellites, and two hard top Satellites. One of the Plymouths had to be given to the animal wrangler, who had to place the car in a deer corral for a month to help train the animal to feel comfortable climbing into it during feeding time. The car also became the deer’s bathroom, hence the producers decided they didn’t want that particular car back. The other three cars had various stages of damage to them as Tommy and Richard systematically destroyed the car along their journey to save Callahan Auto from bankruptcy.

Upon completion of principal photography, Segal was asked if he wanted to purchase one of the cars, but he declined – a mistake that would haunt him for the next 27 years. As the popularity of the movie grew over the decades, Segal tried tracking down one of the remaining cars – but to no avail. Finally, in 2019, one of the cars surfaced at a Barrett Jackson auction in Florida. It had apparently been sitting in a lot in California where it had been rented by many productions including the Katie Perry music video Teenage Dream, in which they changed the color of the car to silver.

Segal called Spade and told him he should bid on the car, which Spade did. Within days, the car that Spade and Farley sang along with the Carpenters in, the car that hit the beloved deer (which survived), crashed into the Prehistoric Forrest, and spun around on the highway after the hood flew up, was finally reunited with one of the stars of the film. Believed to be the stunt car from the film, the GTX had weathered poorly over the years sitting outside – exposed to the elements. Spade originally considered keeping the deteriorated barn find look, but then after realizing how much restoration needed to be done, decided to put the car back on the auction block in 2022. This time Segal stepped in with the winning bid, and now the car is in the hands of the film’s director who plans on bringing the car back to its original glory.

Follow us on these pages here as we transform the 1967 Plymouth back to what it was, and to its part of movie history.