George Barris obit

George Barris, California King of Customized Cars, Dies at 89

 

He was not on the list.

In 1965, producers of the “Batman” television show needed a supercar that Adam West could wield to battle the Joker and the Riddler.

There was just one man for the job: George Barris.

“I saw the script and it said, ‘Bang,’ ‘Pow,’ ‘Boom,’ ” Barris told The Times in 2012. “That’s exactly what I wanted the car to be able to do. I wanted it to be as big a character as the actors themselves.”

It took 15 days and $15,000 for Barris to transform a 1955 Ford Lincoln Futura into the iconic midnight black and fluorescent-red-pinstriped Batmobile with plexiglass bubble windshields — “bulletproof,” of course. He didn’t forget the Bat Ray, with its dual 450-watt laser beams for obliterating obstacles, the Bat-O-Meter for identifying the bad guys, or the oil squirters for repelling evildoers.

Barris, the Southern California custom-car legend who created many of the most memorable and outrageous automobiles ever seen on film and television, died Thursday at his home in Encino. He was 89.

The cause was cancer, said family spokesman Edward Lozzi.

A man nearly as flamboyant as his cars, Barris also designed special vehicles for many of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson and John Wayne.

For his everyday use he drove a Toyota Prius that was tricked out in true Barris fashion — sprayed gold with emerald green metallic accents and doors that opened upward, like a Lamborghini.

“George Barris could take a vehicle and with a minimum of modifications turn it from something ordinary to something grand and exciting,” said Leslie Kendall, chief curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, which has exhibited many Barris cars over the years.

“Most people thought that to customize a car you had to go to a coachbuilder and spend a lot of money to do it. He said, ‘No, I can do this with a few simple modifications and not a lot of time and money.’ He made customizing accessible.”

He also was credited with helping to turn cars into art.

He was “a good example of a kid who grew up completely absorbed in this teenage world of cars, who pursued the pure flame and its forms with such devotion that he emerged an artist,” Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” his 1965 book celebrating custom car culture.

“It was like Tiepolo emerging from the studios of Venice, where the rounded Grecian haunches of the murals on the Palladian domes hung in the atmosphere like clouds. Except that Barris emerged from the auto-body shops of Los Angeles.”

The son of Greek immigrants James and Fanicia Salapatas, Barris was born in Chicago on Nov. 20, 1925. Only a toddler when his mother died, young George was sent with his brother Sam to live with her brother, John Barakaris, and his wife, Edith, in Roseville, Calif. His uncle Americanized the family name to Barris shortly after the boys arrived.

Car-obsessed from an early age, Barris resisted pressure to work in the family restaurant. By age 7 he was making model cars out of wood. At 13, he and his brother restored a 1925 Buick, scavenging items such as the knobs from Edith Barris’ dresser to customize the grille.

By his teens he was rushing to sweep floors at a local auto body shop as soon as the last school bell rang. Before long, he was wielding a blowtorch on the immense metal auto bodies of the era.

At 18, after a brief time in junior college, Barris moved to Los Angeles, the capital of the emerging 1940s teen car culture.

He and other teenagers showed off their flashy custom cars at drive-ins and hamburger stands across Southern California. He made his 1936 Ford roadster a standout with a custom silver paint job, and removed the door handles and running boards to streamline it. He also shaved the fenders to make the front end pointed.

“I had just come from Sacramento, and I wasn’t supposed to know anything,” Barris told Wolfe. “I was a tourist but my car was wilder than anything around. I remember one night this kid comes up with a roadster with no handles. It looked real sharp, but he had to kick the door from the inside to open it. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw mine — I had the same thing, only with electric buttons.”

With his savings, Barris and his brother opened a shop in Compton and quickly gained a reputation for daring and imaginative work.

They called the business Barris Kustom. “Because I was Greek, I spelled it with a K,” Barris said. “I wish I would have trademarked that. I’d be a millionaire.”

To get the right look, Barris would try almost anything. He cut a car’s suspension coils so it would ride lower in front and be kicked up in the rear. He’d “french” the headlights, meaning he’d mold them into the body to get a smoother look on the car. Once, to attain the ideal shade of pearl, he grated the scales off a sardine and mixed them up in paint.

He fashioned tail fins and bubble-tops and lowered the body, “things Detroit didn’t do until years later,” Wolfe wrote.

In 1948, when Hot Rod magazine publisher Robert E. Petersen mounted the first custom car show in Los Angeles, he included a Buick transformed by Barris. Before long, Hollywood took notice of Barris’ talents.

He put “diamond-dust” paint on the Bobby Darin Dream Car. He transformed a 1965 Mustang for Sinatra’s ad executive character in the movie “Marriage on the Rocks” into a racy European-style sports car, with a television inside. He welded together three Model T bodies and added casket handles and a blood-red velvet interior for “The Munster Koach,” the family car for the Munsters TV family. He reupholstered Liberace’s Cadillac convertible in the pattern of a piano keyboard and added a candelabrum in the back.

He was the producer and director for the film Juke Box Racket and Juke Box.

Filmography

Features

 

   High School Confidential! (car modifications - uncredited) - 1958

   Cinderfella - Builder: 'Golden Sahara' car – uncredited – 1960

    Batman — car designer, The Batmobile (uncredited) (1966)

    Supervan — King of the Customizers (1977)

    Smokey and the Hotwire Gang — Billy The Kid (1979)

    Jurassic Park — car modifications (uncredited) (1993)

    Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie — car customizer (1997)

    The Batmobile Revealed — Video documentary short, as himself (2001)

Actor (4 credits)

 1979 Smokey and the Hotwire Gang

Billy The Kid

 1978 Mag Wheels

Shop Owner

 1969 Pit Stopbuilder

 

Television

 

    The Munsters — technical advisor — 1 episode, Hot Rod Herman (1965)

    Batman — car designer, The Batmobile, 120 episodes (1966–1968)

    Mannix — car customizer, Mannix Roadster (1967)

    The Banana Splits Adventure Hour — car designer, 5 episodes (1968)

    The Beverly Hillbillies — car designer, 3 episodes (1962–1963); production assistant, 1 episode (1968)

    The Bugaloos — car designer, 14 episodes (1970–1971)

    Bearcats! — car, Bearcat, 13 episodes (1971)

    Banacek — modified AMX-400 (1972)

    Starsky and Hutch — car designer, "striped tomato" Torino (1975–1979)

    The Dukes of Hazzard — car modifications (1979)

    Knight Rider — car designer (1982–1986)

    The Late Show — episode dated April 28, 1988, as himself (1988)

    Biography — episode, The Munsters: America's First Family of Fright, as himself (2003)

    TV's Greatest Cars — TV movie documentary, as himself (2004)

    TV Land's Top Ten — TV series documentary — episode, Top 10 TV Cars, as himself (2004)

    The Jace Hall Show — episode, Pow! Biff! Kaboom!, as himself (2010)

    Totally Tracked Down — episode, Holy Batman!, as himself (2010)

    The Batmobile — TV movie documentary, as himself (2012)

    G4 Presents Comic Con 2012 Live — TV movie, as himself (2012)

    American Pickers, episode "California Kustoms"— as himself (February 25, 2012)