Before we get to the interview, let's jump over to Mr. Cox's site and read what he has to say about the central theme of Repo Man:

Nuclear War. Of course. What else could it be about? And the demented society that contemplated the possibility thereof. Repoing people's cars and hating alien ideologies were only the tip of the iceberg. The iceberg itself was the maniac culture which had elected so-called "leaders" named Reagan and Thatcher, who were prepared to sacrifice everything — all life on earth — to a gamble based on the longevity of the Soviet military, and the whims of their corporate masters. J. Frank Parnell - the fictitious inventor of the Neutron Bomb - was the central character for me.

Yes, the Greatest Car Movie Of All Time wasn't even about cars! As a nuclear-war-obsessed 18-year-old gearhead equipped with a fleet of wretched hoopties rattling with Suicidal Tendencies and Stooges cassettes Repo Man was a Tzar Bomba dropped right into my skull. Lately, what with all the rumblings about Cox's recently-finished non-sequel, Repo Chick, I was inspired to email Mr. Cox and ask him the Repo Man car questions I've had for him all along. Even though he's swamped with Repo Chick-related work these days, he got back to me right away and was kind enough to provide detailed answers to my ranting, obsessive queries. Here we go:


MM: Let's get to the most obvious one first: why a '64 Chevelle Malibu sedan for J. Frank Parnell? One can easily imagine him coming home after a long day designing enhanced-radiation physics packages, easing the car into the garage attached to a wholesome Los Alamos ranch-style house, etc., and a Chevelle 4-door would have been just about right for a successful young bomb designer in the mid-to-late 1960s; unpretentious and practical, yet with a certain amount of sportiness not found in the lower-end Chevelle models. He's still driving it in the early 1980s (or he's just obtained it), and that must mean something. I've always imagined his family leaving him in '69 or so, as he proceeds with his downward spiral, with the house and car kept unchanged as a creepy shrine to happier suburban times, but some of my car-geek friends feel that J. Frank just stole the car at random (due to its easily hot-wired pre-steering-column-lock ignition) when he grabbed whatever the hell is in the car's trunk and fled New Mexico.

AC: I think you answered that one very well. I just liked the boxy aspect of the '64 Malibu: it seemed very sinister to me. What I didn't realise was how similar it was to the Impala, which the Repo Man drove. So maybe they are two sides of the same coin, too.

MM: Every time I watch Repo Man, I'm amazed by the excellent vehicular casting of the film, and the fact that most of the cars actually used in the film are as specified in the screenplay shows that vehicle selection was very important to you. How is it that an Englishman, living in Los Angeles for just a few years, could have developed such an eye for the nuances of American cars and their cultural overtones? Most Americans, even serious car freaks, would be at a total loss if they tried to do the same with British cars; you'd probably get 1979 London heroin kingpins driving Humber Sceptres, or worse. What was your crash course in American cars?

AC: I knew people who owned those cars. My motorcycle mechanic had the Malibu; our casting director drove the '73 Impala: we bought it from her for the film, then I drove it around for a couple of years until it passed away.

MM: That leads straight to the next one: What kind of car did you drive while shooting the film? For that matter, what did you drive while you were studying at UCLA?

AC: I wasn't a car person at that time. I had motorcycles: Hondas, old BMWs, and a 750 Norton Commando which was the coolest of them all, on the rare occasions when it ran.

My first four-wheeled vehicle was a Toyota pickup which I bought to transport the motorcycles when they broke down. Then came a beloved 68 Chevy Impala convertible (305 cu in) which I bought in Tucson Arizona and drove for many years until an actor borrowed it and wrecked it. For many years I had a 1986 Isuzu Trooper and my current, and I hope final, ride is a 96 Trooper. It is a fine vehicle as long as you don't drive at more than 70 or turn too many corners.

MM: The mirror-shade-wearing government agents drive AMC Matadors, at a time when most cop types would have had Ford LTDs and Chevy Caprices. The inept-yet-sinister effect comes through nicely with the off-brandedness of AMC products, but at the risk of overemphasizing the inept side. Were you influenced by the Matador driven by Stacy Keach's Sergeant Stedenko character in Cheech & Chong's Up In Smoke when you selected the Matador as the agents' car?

AC: No, I liked the Matador for its weird shape and for its name. But even it pales into insignificance beside the AMC Gremlin, perhaps the ugliest motor vehicle ever, prior to the Hummer at least.

MM: It's impossible to imagine Harry Dean in anything other than a '71 Impala sedan, of course, but did you consider other cars for the Bud character when getting vehicles for the production? If so, what cars?

AC: Wasn't it a '73? Anyway, it was always his ride.

MM: That Impala sure looks like a '71 to me (the '73 didn't have the turn-signal lights on the fender leading edges, and US government regulations mandated monstrous 5 MPH crash bumpers on '72 and later models, while the car in the movie has the pre-72 bumpers). Of course, the full-sized Chevrolets of that era were pretty much all the same under the skin, so it could have been a '73 that got wrecked and had '71 body parts bolted on; that way all the registration paperwork would have had "1973" all over it.

AC: I bet you're right about that Chevy. I never even looked at the paperwork, just thought of it as the '73'.

MM: How much thought did you put into choosing the cars that got repo'd during the film? Did you agonize over the cars with less screen time, such as the '78 Cutlass Salon Coupe ripped by Otto in his first-ever repo? Or were those cars selected more on the basis of what was easily available within budget?

AC: Those were based on what was hanging around the set. I think the Cutlass belonged to one of the Teamsters.

MM: I've had a nice PR lady from the Car-Freshner Corporation, maker of the "Little Tree" air fresheners, send me vast quantities of free trees to give away at races and so on, because of the exposure they got from my series of "you'll find one in every car" junykard-photography posts. Apparently the employees of Car-Freshner were totally unaware of their products' role in your film.

AC: Nonsense! They have forgotten now, or perhaps your contact wasn't there then, but Car-Freshner sent us a whole bunch of air fresheners WITHOUT the scent, which is too horrible for anyone, even an actor, to endure for long. This, plus the generic goods from Ralph's Supermarket, was the extent of product placement in the film.

If you've been around Jalopnik for more than a few days, you know we're no strangers to the bizarre, but we're having a hard time writing at the moment because this whole thing is so utterly ridiculous we're laughing like idiots just thinking about it. A Michael Jackson-inspired dance throw-down ahead of kicking a very large repo man in the taint? Really? You have to see it to believe it below. It's around 1:50 in when the taint-kicking occurs.
Sweet mercy, we need some air or we're gonna pass the hell out from laughing. Let's just say we never imagined when we went into the auto-blogging business, there would ever be a need for a "kicked in the taint" tag. Whether real or not, it's really hilarious. [StupidVideos]

Mr. Popovich is not your typical repo man scouring the streets in a nondescript Super Duty F-250 with lynching chains on the back. Instead, he spends his time traveling the globe in search of the next big treasure. That treasure? Millionaire's winged play things.

Popovich has kept his multi-million dollar repossession firm running for twenty plus years with his wife Sage and he's collected quite the bounty over the years. His biggest catch has been the 747, of which he's nabbed 1,300 over the years. With the rest of his crew from Sage-Popovich they've managed to capture 2,000 delinquent airplanes from crooked French businessmen, South American arms dealers and everything in between. He's spent time in jail because of this job and he's almost been killed multiple times.

One of the largest single jobs he and his firm have tackled was the repossession of a fleet of corporate helicopters from flight school chain, Silver State, netting him a nice six-figure payment. They captured all of them using 125 flatbed trucks to haul out the 240 helicopters from 51 different Silver State locations as well as everything else they could grab including spare parts, computers and furniture.

There are many more wild stories that Popovich tells in Salon's article which you can read HERE. (Hat Tip To Less Lincoln!)
[via salon] Image credit: Flickr

Nothing highlights the story of increased repossessions than the story of 67-year-old railroad retiree Jimmy Tanks heard a commotion outside his mobile home bedroom window in his mobile home in Halsell, Alabama at 2:30 AM. Tanks grabbed a gun, walked out the back door and confronted who he thought was a thief trying to steal his Chrysler Sebring. In reality it was a repo man and two helpers trying to tow off the Chrysler Sebring. After shots were fired, Tanks wound up dead. It may be the only known case of a man killed over a Chrysler Sebring.

The man, there to repossess the car, Kenneth Alvin Smith, is now awaiting trial on a murder charge. Although Alabama's a state considered a Wild West territory even by the standards of an industry that's largely unregulated nationally, the AP claims it's representative of a rise in dangerous confrontations correlating with a rise in the number of repossessions nationally:

"With the U.S. dealing with an economic slide that has cost millions of jobs, the number of vehicle repossessions is expected to rise 5 percent this year. That's after it jumped 12 percent to 1.67 million nationally in 2008, said Tom Webb, chief economist with Manheim Consulting, an automotive marketing firm. That followed a 9 percent increase in 2007, creating more opportunities for bad outcomes in an industry where armed confrontations and threats happen every day."

Mostly the increase in violence appears to be coming from dropping untrained thugs into the repo-man ranks, something more states could regulate if they wanted to. Our thought is initially not to get in the middle of a question of deadbeats getting in the way of two-bit thugs trying to take back what's rightfully the property of a bank taking our taxpayer dollars — there's just too many hoops to jump through. But we will say repo men should be trying to take cars during the daytime whenever possible. Because if you're trying to take a car, even legally in a repossession, in the middle of the night, bad things'll happen. Like a guy getting killed over a freakin' Chrysler Sebring. [Detroit News]

Photo Credit: Joe Raedle / Getty Images News

Newer, more expensive vehicles are making up a larger share of the repossession business this year also, adding to the loss incurred when a loan goes bad. Full-size SUVs and luxury vehicles are more common than ever on repo lots according to the report, with many of those vehicles coming from folks who had excellent credit.

Recent cutbacks in the number of loans granted and the discontinuation of leasing by many lenders are expected to cause more lean times ahead for repo men — even during the worst economic downturn in recent history. Guess it's true that no one's safe. [Automotive News, Sub. Req.; Image Credit: Cinematical]

Yes, more Little Tree air fresheners! I've got 25 of these pleasantly-scented little fellas ready to ship out to whoever thinks up the best name for our soon-to-dominate-the-world transmission. And why do I have such a wealth of Little Trees? Well, the Car-Freshner folks were so impressed by my Little Trees In Junked Cars gallery that they decided to help us out with our 24 Hours of LeMons effort.


So, next thing I knew, they'd shipped us a big box of trees, in a variety of scents. We figured, hey, we'll pass 'em out to all the teams at the race, thus bribing them into thinking Black Metal V8olvo = your friend on the track.


Sure enough, the trees were a hit and just about everyone was sporting a brand-new Little Tree in their race car by the time the action started; here we see Team Make:Way with a Sour Apple tree hanging from the mirror.


The Black Ice trees were quite popular, as were the checkered-flag Victory Lane trees... and you'll have a couple of each if your transmission name is the best! With a couple hundred trees and only 90 cars in the race, I've got some leftovers.

So, here's the deal. You think up a cool transmission name- and we know you can do better than Crypto-Slumgullion Octo-Shift 999- and you write it up in a comment. We'll take the best few tomorrrow and put 'em up for a vote. Automatics, manuals, crashboxes, whatever- it's the name that matters!

When you're talking cars from Repo Man, you're more or less required by law to start the discussion by bringing up J. Frank Parnell's '64 Chevy Malibu, with its trunkload of deadly cargo. Fortunately for those wishing to build their own replica of this car, J. Frank's Malibu was a four-door six-cylinder machine, which means you can get them pretty cheaply. For example, this 1964 Chevrolet Malibu 4-door (go here if the ad disappears) for just $900. Give it a paint job, put some pecan pies in the back and a bright light in the trunk, don your single-lensed sunglasses, and you'll be paying heavy-duty homage to one of the best car movies of all time! This one probably needs a fair bit of mechanical work to get to that point (the seller claims it's just a distributor cap), and we can assume there's rust, but it's cheap and simple- how bad can it be?

You figure everyone and his brother is going to go for the Malibu when putting together a Repo Man homage car, but maybe you want to be a little different. You could go with Duke's 1978 Corolla, or maybe the Government Agents' 1971 Matador, but: Harry Dean Stanton! Not only did Stanton play Bud in Repo Man, he played a hitchhiker in Two Lane Blacktop (which may well be the best car movie of all time), plus there's his unforgettable "AVENGE ME!" line from the ultimate Cheezy 80s Flick, Red Dawn. Thus, you need to pick up this here 1971 Chevrolet Impala 4-door (go here if the ad disappears) and recreate Bud's ride from Repo Man! Asking price is $1500... or maybe it's $2100 (depending on whether you go by the headline or the description), but either way you'll be able to do some negotiatin' with this motivated seller. The car runs, seems to look reasonably intact, and its Arizona locale is a likely indicator that you won't find much rust. Just give it a dark blue paint job, put a big whip antenna on it, and get ready for some fast driving in the L.A. River.

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Yes, it's the Mega Schwag Pack of Little Tree Car-Freshner® gear! Because the folks at the Car-Freshner® Corporation thought so highly of your suggestions for new Little Tree scents, they've sent me a big box-o-schwag to give away to our beloved readers (by the way, JayP71, I have it on good authority that your "Eu de Minivan" idea was a big hit back at Little Tree HQ). The first commenter to correctly identify the year, make, and model of the car in the photo above will receive a T-shirt, a baseball cap, a couple of pens, some keychains, playing cards, and an assortment of the air fresheners that you'll find in every car, kid! And there'll be plenty of additional Little Tree schwag left to give away even after we ship off this batch, so stay tuned for more nerve-wrenching contests rat cheer!

Of course, I responded to her email with my sure-to-be-a-big-hit suggestion for a new flavor of Little Tree: The "British Car Smell" Little Tree, which is printed with a Union Jack and smells like burning wire insulation, with a hint of mildewed carpeting. I also suggested a full line of "You'll Find One In Every Car" trees, each printed with a different "Repo Man" character. Imagine, you could have Bud, Miller, Lite, Otto, J. Frank Parnell, Los Hermanos Rodriguez, Archie... I know I'd buy 'em all! So, given that their product-development and marketing staffs will no doubt read each and every one of your suggestions, let's have 'em!

Since there's a prize involved, we've made this one a bit more difficult than the last couple. This car was photographed for an upcoming post in the Down On The Street series, so it's a car that was found parked on the streets of Alameda. Thus, you can be assured that you're not going to bust your brain trying to ID a ZAZ, Maepsy, SEAT, Proton, Fiero-based kit car, or some other never-guess-in-a-million-years machine. First commenter to correctly identify the complete Year, Make, and Model of the car in this photograph wins...



A genuine Little Tree Air Freshener costume, made from all-unnatural polyfoam! Imagine the possibilities! Next time you go to a Repo Man costume party, you'll stand out from all the unimaginative Ottos and Buds and J. Frank Parnells as you solemnly utter "You'll find one of me in every car, kid. You'll see." See, folks, when we give away a prize here on the Jalop, we give away a freakin' prize! Remember, it's not enough to get close, you need to nail down year, make, and model; e.g., if the car is a 1981 Pontiac Phoenix, you don't win if you say "OMG IT'S A PHOENIX ALL UR PRIZE R BELONG TO ME!" All that will do is clue in the other commenters, the quickest of whom will give the complete answer, then swoop in to snatch the Little Tree costume from your eager paws, condemning you to months of what-might-have-been self-torture.