Old Film

E

enoxemy

New member
Hi

Do any fellow oldies here remember a film from the 70s?

It was about a jugggernaut terrifying a small vehicle and was set in the US. There were some great shots set in some desert,

Long shot I guess.

thanks
 
Some intresting trivia regarding the movie from www.imdb.com

During the chase, a parked sedan resembling a squad car is seen, briefly raising Dennis Weaver's hopes, but it turns out to be a service car for a pest exterminator named Grebleips... "Spielberg" in reverse.


Lucille Benson (Lady at Snakerama Gas Station) also appears as a gas station attendant in Speilberg's 1941 (1979). Two other characters Spielberg reused in his other movies are the elderly couple in the car, who both featured as a couple in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).


There are seventeen notches on the headlight of the truck.


David Mann's car was a 1970 red Plymouth Valiant with California license plate 149 PCE.


Some of the scenes were later used as stock footage in an episode of "The Incredible Hulk" (1978). Obvious scenes used were the red Valiant slamming into the fence, the use of the same phantom truck in new TV footage, and the use of a similar Valiant in new TV footage.


The phone number Dennis Weaver dials to call his wife at the gas station is not the standard "555" movie prefix but, at the time, a valid number.


While filming the shot where the truck drives off the cliff, a piece of machinery designed to keep the truck traveling in a straight line without a driver failed. Instead of calling a halt, the driver, who had an important engagement the next day and didn't want to miss it, stayed in the driving seat and only jumped out at the very last second before the truck went over.


When Carey Loftin, the actor playing the truck driver, asked Spielberg what his motivation was for tormenting the car driver, Spielberg told him, "You're a dirty, rotten, no-good son of a bitch." Loftin replied, "Kid, you hired the right man."


It was Dennis Weaver's role in Touch of Evil (1958) that convinced 'Steven Spielberg' that he would be perfect for the role of David Mann.


Unhappy by the discovery that footage from the movie was recycled in "The Incredible Hulk" (1978), Steven Spielberg insisted that all his future contracts have a clause designed to protect his films from being used as stock footage.


Was shot in 13 days.


All of it was shot on location.


The license plate on the front of the truck are from the other cars he has destroyed. Spielberg says, "The driver wanted to destroy a car in every state."


According to Richard Matheson, he was inspired to write the original short story "Duel" after an encounter with a tail-gating truck driver on November 22, 1963, the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.


"Chucks Cafe" still exists today. A French Restaurant occupies the original structure a few miles south of Acton, California.


There is an elderly couple that drives by in a red car. The woman yells at the man to keep driving. A similar couple in a red car acts out the same ordeal in "Back To the Future," of which Spielberg was the Executive Producer.
 
Technically not his first - it was a made-for-TV film. His first feature was Sugarland Express.

Another piece of trivia - I think I heard Spielberg say this somewhere - that the T-Rex's roar in Jurassic park is the same sound effect that was used for the truck going over the cliff in Duel. But I might have heard it wrong.

The original story was written by Richard Matheson, who also wrote I Am Legend.
 
At the end of Jaws, the sound heard when the shark is sinking to the bottom of the ocean is the same sound that was used in Duel.
 
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