Burbank native is the driving force behind ‘Furious 7’ cars

When the plot called for dropping cars from a cargo plane in the latest installment of the “Fast & Furious” franchise, the crew dropped cars from a cargo plane.

When it called for launching a $3.4-million Lykan Hypersport — one of the most expensive cars in the world — from one skyscraper into another — well, some of that was computer generated.

“[But] there’s far less CGI than you imagine,” said Dennis McCarthy, a longtime Burbank resident and picture car coordinator on the film.

PHOTOS: Behind the vehicles in “Furious 7”

Aside from the moments when the car is sailing through the air between buildings, McCarthy said, the elements of the action set-piece involved real sets and a real car — one of several Hypersport replicas used in the film that debuted with a record-breaking $143 million this month and continues to lead at the box office. The sequence even included a crane drop.

“We really dropped one to the ground,” McCarthy said, adding that it was a movie version — “the same basic car on the outside,” but not the same high-end equipment under the hood.

McCarthy supplies filmmakers with their automotive needs, whether that’s coordinating military vehicles and other autos to give Arizona the look of a Middle Eastern locale for a movie like 2005’s “Jarhead,” or producing custom hot rods and other vehicles for a gearhead’s dream like “Furious 7.”

He grew up in Burbank and graduated from Burbank High in 1985. He honed his automotive skills for more than 15 years before taking them to Hollywood, with early jobs at Gregos Automotive, Glendale Speed Center and Thomson Performance before opening his own shop, McCarthy Automotive, in 1990.

Thanks to its history as home to companies like Lockheed, Burbank has always been “one of the greatest places in the world to build cars,” he said.

His original shop is still there on Burbank Boulevard and Sparks Street, but he sold it in 1998. He had planned to take a vacation, but he ended up filling an emergency vacancy at Burbank High as the auto shop teacher, but he eventually left in 2001 to focus on a second shop he opened in about 1999.

Out of that shop, called Vehicle Effects, McCarthy started out doing “really high-end custom builds,” but within a year was supplying cars for the movies, which gradually became a bigger part of the business. However, teaching is still his retirement plan, he said, noting that he still lives blocks from Burbank High.

Some former students now work at his shop in Sun Valley, near Bob Hope Airport. Logan Sigston took a few of McCarthy’s classes and stayed in touch after graduating from John Burroughs High in 2003. While McCarthy was working on the 2009 “Fast & Furious,” he offered Sigston, then a mechanic at an auto dealership, a job with more money and “10 times more fun.”

Sigston, who is in Atlanta working on “Captain America: Civil War,” said, “It’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle” that includes long hours, lots of travel and occasional “dry spells” with no car movies, like the 15-month one he experienced after working on the fifth “Furious” movie.

He said, however, he’s grateful for the job, which he called “awesome.”

“I don’t take it for granted,” he said.

About 15 workers are building cars “nonstop” at the moment, McCarthy said, but for “Furious 7,” he estimated he had twice as many working to meet “insane deadlines.” He’s not allowed to discuss the budget for the cars in the film, he said, but the budget for cars on the previous installment reportedly broke eight figures.

Each “Furious” film gets bigger, with “more cars, more action,” he said, and the latest seemed to skip a few notches — he estimated more than 350 cars were used and more than half of them destroyed in the process — but he said the car budget is still “a lot less money” than what a lead actor in a “Furious” film makes.

McCarthy said the work is “a lot of fun,” but he admitted that sometimes it can be painful to put three months into building a car, like the Charger that Vin Diesel’s character, Dom, drives out of the cargo plane in “Furious 7,” only to see it be destroyed in a moment.

“When I see the movie, that’s when I’m like, ‘It all paid off,’” he said.