This week’s Fast Film Friday has very little to do with a movie, but everything to do with a car in the 1959 movie ‘It Started With a Kiss‘. Back in the 1950s, car companies demonstrated innovative designs and showcased new styling trends through ‘concept cars’. These were one-of-a-kind, purpose built ‘cars of tomorrow’ intended to gauge public opinion and display the creativity of Detroit’s automakers.
Ford encouraged their designers come up with the most futuristic, space-age ideas. Designer Bill Schmidt from the Lincoln division proposed a vehicle with with aggressive, shark-inspired lines, organic-looking grill and tailfins which would become a epic concept car; the 1955 Lincoln Futura.
Lincoln sent a chassis and a 368 cubic inch V8 to Italian coachbuilder Carrozzeria Ghia to hand-craft the complex body. The Italians even developed a pearlescent white finish by mixing fish scales into the paint! With its double-bubble canopy and futuristic looks, the Lincoln Futura was the darling of the 1955 Chicago Auto Show.
The Lincoln Futura remained on the car-show circuit for several years, was extensively covered by national car magazines, and influenced the design cues of the Lincoln Premiere and Lincoln Capri. After retiring from public appearances, the fully functioning vehicle was borrowed by MGM film studios for their new movie ‘It Started With a Kiss‘.
The Lincoln Futura was still incredibly popular with the public, and instantly recognizable. But it’s pearl white finish didn’t work well in Cinemascope, so movie producers gave the Futura a splashy coat of red paint and introduced it to co-stars Debbie Reynolds and Glenn Ford.
In the film, Glenn Ford plays a penniless Air Force sergeant in his forties. He falls in love with showgirl Debbie Reynolds who is only interested in marrying into money. She’s working at a charity event, selling raffle tickets for a snazzy new car, and he spends his last dollar to buy a ticket and talk her up. Oh yeah, keep an eye out for the B-movie blonde Joi Lansing from ‘Hot Cars’ in an uncredited part as a hat check girl.
Since the movie was filmed in 1959 and the Hays Code was still in effect, our two protagonists don’t just have a one night stand; they get married first! The plot moves quickly as Ford’s Air Force squadron is shipped off to Spain, and Reynolds soon follows her husband to Europe. She brings with her the Lincoln Futura that he unwittingly won with his $1 ticket. The car plays a central role in the film as it always draws a crowd, turns the couple into celebrities and ignites a series of events that make up most of the plot. It’s a fun, silly movie that hammers home the message about how important it is to own a cool car!
When filming wrapped, the red Futura even went on a promotional tour to advertise the film which was actually quite successful, making $4.7 million at the box office against a $1.8 million budget.
The car was essentially forgotten until 1961, when custom car builder George Barris convinced the Ford Motor Company to sell him the car for $1 (legend has it). The idea was to build a wild custom out of the Futura, but the project never launched, and the Lincoln languished for years parked out back behind Barris’ shop just rusting away.
Then in 1965, George Barris was approached by TV producer William Dozier, whose upcoming Batman TV series needed a Batmobile before filming started in a scant 3-weeks. With no time to design and build a car from the ground-up, Barris dusted off the Futura and modified it to look more like a bat than a shark.
The fenders were flared out, as was the popular style in the mid 1960s. The classic stainless grill with its horizontal slats was covered by a pointed fiberglass nose, and the elegant tail end was hidden by cartoonish bat-wings and a phony jet engine made out of (one assumes) a re-purposed garbage can.
Glossy black paint with red outlines covered over the original fish-scale white and harlot’s lipstick red repaint. Despite the incredibly short notice, the Lincoln Futura was transformed into the Batmobile in time for filming. The series was an instant hit and Barris’ breathtaking Batmobile would become even more famous than the Lincoln Futura concept car it started life as.
The original concept car cost $250,000 to build in 1955. Supposedly, George Barris paid only $1 for the old Futura in 1961, then spent $15,000 customizing it. By 2013, then 87-year-old George Barris auctioned off the iconic Batmobile at Barrett-Jackson for $4.6 million.
Not bad for a 60 year-old used car that once appeared in an MGM romantic comedy.
Fascinating story! Where do you find this stuff?!
There’s a channel called Turner Classic Movies, which I get with my cable package. They run truckloads of old racing movies.
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They ran a commercial for the upcoming broadcast of ‘It Started With a Kiss’ which sounded like a stupid romantic comedy … then I saw the red Batmobile!
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I always knew that the 1966 Batman TV series car was not originally created for the show, but I had to do a bunch of reading on IMDB and Letterboxd to learn the Lincoln Futura’s storied history.
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PS That car, the Futura/Batmobile is actually for sale right now in Arizona for only USD $5,000,000 at Barrett-Jackson Auctions.
Holy cow. Not being a car guy, I barely noticed the cars in Batman. My wordy self was more captivated by the comic book words that illustrated the sounds of the battles. Kapow! Sploosh! Sock! Bam! Zok! Great story you have told here, as usual!
As a child of the 70s, that old Batman TV show seemed silly and I could never get into it.
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I read car magazines, not comic books, so all that POW! ZAP! stuff went over my head. What a different perception we each had.
Well, in the 60’s there wasn’t much to watch! You know, three channels and all. I think it’s cool that even as a kid you were into cars. My exciting equivalent is my fascination with words lol. Loved to read, prided myself on my spelling. Dad taught me how to spell incomprehensibility when I was in 3rd grade. Did I know what it meant? Nah but I could spell it like a champ.
Wow! interesting post👍. I did not know this, amazing and interesting. I do remember, however, getting a toy 10-12″ one of these when I was about 8 for Christmas, I loved it, could stick my bendy Batman & Robin in it & cruise around! All this started with a junked concept car…who would have thought it!
Yes, that Batman merchandise was in my toy box, too!
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This car has one of the most interesting histories. Like, it’s lived different lives over the past 70 years.
But I gotta tell you…if I had an extra USD $5 Mil just lying around, I would buy the vehicle and ship it back to the original coachbuilders Carrozzeria Ghia in Turin, Italy and pay them to restore it to the ORIGINAL 1955 incarnation. Detailed right down to the fish scales in the paint.
This is such a fascinating story, especially for me, who was a huge fan of that silly TV show when I was a little kid. A couple of years ago, I found a Hot Wheels 1966 Batmobile and I just couldn’t resist it.
A couple months ago, I got a channel called Turner Classic Movies specifically for the purpose of watching the 1936 Jimmy Stewart classic “SPEED”
https://demaras.com/2024/02/02/jimmy-stewart-in-speed-1936/
This combined my love of racing with my daughter’s crush on Jimmy Stewart. I never cancelled the channel, so every week I check if there’s an Indy 500 movie coming up. I stumbled across ‘It Started With a Kiss’
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Just based on that title I would never have watched this movie … but it was actually pretty cool. A red Batmobile driving around Spain!
How many people have the same experience you did? Loved the show when they were little, and now have a model as reminder of how they first fell in love with custom cars? And to think that the car started off as a Lincoln concept car way back when…what a history.