Car Customizer Shifts Gears to Personal Project : Adventure: George Barris will create on film a re-enactment of the high-speed collision that killed his good friend, actor James Dean, in 1955.

“(George) Barris is the biggest name in customizing . . . a kid who grew up completely absorbed in this teen-age world of cars, who pursued the pure flame and its forms with such devotion that he emerged an artist.” --Tom Wolfe, in “The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby.”

For nearly 50 years, George Barris has been crafting some of the wildest, most hopped-up, streamlined, decked-out automobiles ever made. He is a one-time street racer who became a Hollywood legend, a Michelangelo in his glitzy but esoteric world of chrome pipes, tail fins and upholstered interiors.

He has customized hot rods and roadsters, Corvettes and Rolls-Royces--thousands in all.

At Kustom City, the faded North Hollywood shop where he played center stage to Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism of the 1960s, the elfin, curly-haired Barris has assembled wheels for the likes of Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Sylvester Stallone and Zsa Zsa Gabor. His crowded garage contains a gold-plated Cadillac convertible commissioned by Elvis Presley, completed years after Presley’s death.

Now Barris is changing gears, devoting his time to a more personal project: creating a high-speed re-enactment of the rural highway crash in 1955 that killed his good friend, actor James Dean.

The work is expected to provide the climactic scene in “The Legend,” a $15-million film of Dean’s life scheduled for release next summer by United Artists. Produced by Lorann Pike, the film is being billed as a true account that will dwell for several minutes on the violent collision between Dean’s Porsche Spyder and a Ford sedan near Paso Robles.

Barris is responsible for coordinating the risky, 85-m.p.h. crash stunt, which will be filmed early next year using two helicopters and five ground-based cameras surrounding the exact place of Dean’s death.

“It’s going to be very, very dangerous, believe me,” said Pike, an independent film maker. “(But) I know it’s going to be done right because George Barris is involved. I’m very impressed with him.”

Work on the film is already under way. On Sept. 30 at nearly 6 p.m., the anniversary of the crash, cameramen shot the deserted intersection of California 41 and 46, capturing the angle of the sun as it was setting on the collision scene 34 years ago. Barris has begun building six replicas of Dean’s two-seat Spyder, and in coming weeks he expects to meet with his two top industry stunt men--Jerry Summers and Jack Gill--to work out the complex calculations and precautions necessary for the stunt.

Those details, known in the stunt trade as “rigging,” are 90% of the success of any high-speed stunt, Summers said. In this case, the stunt must be rigged so that the two cars collide and the Porsche Spyder spins as it slides off the road--a tricky chain of events, Barris said.

Barris’ stunt experience is relatively limited. He contributed to the James Brolin film “The Car,” in which an automobile was flipped five times, and he has produced several car-oriented action pictures, including “Disco Fever” and “Mag Wheels,” he said. But he is known best as a customizer.

His selection for the Dean film was largely the result of his friendship with the actor. He became obsessed with Dean’s death. The 64-year old Barris keeps a poster of Dean on a wall of his office, and his files are filled with photographs of Dean, his cars and the death scene. Barris, in fact, painted the ill-fated Spyder with racing stripes and the insignia, “Little Bastard,” a reference to the actor’s rebellious nature, only hours before Dean was killed.

Barris said he had “bad vibes” about Dean’s trip north--feelings that were shared by two of Dean’s friends, actress Ursula Andress and singer Eartha Kitt. Dean had just finished filming “Giant” and was anxious to get away and try out his new sports car at a race in Salinas. They asked him not to go.

“(The car) was much more powerful than anything he had before,” Barris recalled. “To take off and go to Salinas--boom!--just like that. We all had funny feelings about it. Ursula said before he left, ‘I feel something about it. Don’t go.’ (But) he had ants in his pants; he wanted to go race.”

Dean hauled the car on a trailer for part of the trip, traveling with two racing companions. But before reaching Paso Robles, Dean decided he wanted to drive, and he and a mechanic, Rolf Weutherich, took off in the Spyder. The actor was ticketed for going 65 m.p.h. outside the small town of Cholame.

Less than three hours later, traveling at 85 m.p.h., he was killed.

“Now starts the trail of all these bizarre things that have happened after Jimmy’s death,” Barris said.

First, Dean’s house in Sherman Oaks burned down, Barris said.

Then Barris bought the smashed Porsche from Dean’s estate. When it arrived in Los Angeles the Spyder slipped from a tow truck and broke both legs of a bystander. Barris said he sold the engine to a doctor who was then killed in a crash. He sold the transmission to another buyer who crashed and was partially paralyzed.

The engineless, banged-up car body ultimately became part of a Barris exhibit at car shows around the country. An exhibit hall where it was shown in Fresno burned down, Barris said. Other, smaller incidents followed, all within a year or two of Dean’s death, and Barris began to talk of a curse.

“It’s very mystifying and very bizarre,” he said.

In those years, Barris was already a salient figure in his trade. He first came to Los Angeles in 1944, a teen-ager just out of auto shop classes at a Sacramento high school. He had customized his own car--a 1936 Ford sedan--and looked toward bigger things.

He established himself rapidly. In 1949, Clark Gable became one of his first Hollywood clients.

By the early 1950s his “kandy kolored” lacquers--as Barris liked to call them--and his radical designs were at the forefront of the craft. He later created the television version of the “Batmobile,” the Walt Disney “Love Bug,” the TV “Munsters” coffin-handled coach, the “Beverly Hillbillies” jalopy and cars for more than 100 films in all.

His high profile in Hollywood set him apart from his peers.

“George was doing work for (entertainers) like Dean Martin, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Liberace,” recalled Ed (Big Daddy) Roth, a customizer who gained fame with his 1960s Rat Fink designs. “George glamorized it. He’s the hood ornament on the custom car (business) . . . out there in front with his head to the wind, while the rest of us are scrambling around trying to figure out what’s going on. The guy’s just amazing to me.”

Barris had a wild side. In his earlier years, he took part in street drags, races in which more than one participant was killed or injured. The challenges would often be made at a drive-in burger stand, where souped-up cars would gather like angry hornets.

“Everybody would agitate one another to the point where you’d be in a frenzy,” Barris recalled. “We’d go out on the divided highway, on Sepulveda . . . going into San Fernando. This was at night, 11 or 12 o’clock. The cars would line up and shine lights across the road. We’d be barreling along at 120 or 130 m.p.h. by the time we got to the end of the lights.”

The wagers were heavy. “We’d race for pink slips; you lost the race, you lost your car.”

Police often broke up the action. A few times he was shot at by angry citizens, Barris recalled.

The film that made Dean famous, “Rebel Without a Cause,” contained just the kind of drag-racing scene that appealed to Barris--and to Dean as well. Barris met the actor while painting and customizing the Mercury sedan that Dean drove in the film and which became the actor’s trademark. The two men hit it off.

“We became car buddies,” Barris said. “I liked him because of his style and ingenuity and because he wasn’t a conformist. He really was not acting in that picture (“Rebel”)--that was him. “

Dean spent a lot of time at Barris’ customizing shop.

“Jimmy had the instinct, he had the feel of a car,” Barris said, holding an imaginary steering wheel of Dean’s old Spyder, guiding it through turns. “A car was to him his life; he could really maneuver it and handle it. It was like a baby to him.”

Dean’s death shocked but didn’t surprise him, Barris said. “He had a death cloud hanging over him.”

Untimely deaths befell other young stars of the “Rebel” cast: Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Nick Adams.

Dean’s battered Spyder is gone now, too. Barris last saw it in 1958, when he displayed it in Florida.

“They finished with the show, they put it on a truck. The truck comes out here, eight days later we open the truck, there’s no car. Gone.

“Even today, when I do (car) shows . . . people pull me aside and say, ‘I know where it is,’ ” Barris said. “I say, ‘What do you mean?’ They say, ‘The Dean car.’ They say it’s in a garage, (or buried somewhere) in the ground, or up in a hayloft, or put away inside a truck. I don’t care where I go--the littlest town or the biggest town--I’ll always have somebody come up and say they know where that car is hidden.

“We never to this day have found the car; we don’t know where it is.”