HOLLYWOOD ON WHEELS.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

NORTH HOLLYWOOD - George Barris put together some of the world's most famous cars, but with his wrench, blowtorch, paint gun and wild imagination, he created something much bigger.

This is the man who built the Batmobile, the Monsters' Koach, the Knight Industries Two Thousand. He was the go-to guy for the Rat Pack, for Marvin Gaye, for Elvis Presley himself. He could turn a car into a piece of art, make it faster, more extreme, more shiny, more exuberant.

If Hollywood wanted something crazy on four wheels, it called up the Kustom King of Kar Kulture.

This man, this little man with his crazy hair, giant, gold glasses and mad stories, could have been a waiter in a Greek restaurant, if only he hadn't fallen in love with a 1925 Buick and bolted gold knobs on the grill, just to make it a little fancier. A friend dug the crazy look, so he slipped Barris a $10 bill to put cats-eye tail lights onto his car to make it a little showier.

"We started out with that $10 set of taillights in 1940," he said from his North Hollywood showroom. "Now it's a billion dollar industry."

That $10 payment transformed him from George Barris, small town boy and would be restauranteur, into George Barris, kreator of kustom kars.

His kreations would be so wild, so out-there, he couldn't even bother with konventional spelling, changing letters in a manner that drove his English teacher krazy.

He grew up in Roseville, a little town outside Sacramento. In the early '40s, he and his brother Sam knew they had to get out, get to the action. Sam went into the service, George headed for Los Angeles. Sam got out in '45 and they went to work, fixing up cars, chopping their roofs, channeling the bodies to get them snug up against the wheels and low to the ground.

"We were militants, we'd race in the streets with our '32 Fords," Barris said. "They'd chase us in the streets. It was hard to convince the police and the parent-teacher-association that we were just young kids who loved cars. We didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't do drugs. We just loved those cars - and girls. Those were the two bad habits."

He'd come to call this the Five Point Rule, where you'd knock out the first three vices, monkey with cars and then the girls would just naturally follow. He started out in South Los Angeles, before a shop fire pushed him to North Hollywood in 1957. From his store front location on Riverside Drive, he'd cook up curvy, thick-tired performance rods in wild colors.

Word got out.

In '58, he got a call from some guys at MGM, who were making a picture called "High School Confidential" and needed a chopped deuce coupe like the kind he used to race for pinks down the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley. Could he do it? You got it, he told them and went to work. The Barris legend was born.

Soon he was doing movie cars like mad, turning a '22 Oldsmobile into the Beverly Hillbillies' Ozark wagon, morphing a Lincoln concept car into the Batmobile, transforming a coffin into a hot rod called Dragula. Kandy flake colors, rocket fins, flamethrowers, nothing was too wild for the Kustom King.

Ten carburetors on an engine? A needle nose like a rocket? Pistol grips for the steering wheel? Everything, everything fell into his krazy realm. Sure, the Batmobile was a little extreme with its rocket launchers, gas gun and smoke screen shooters, but in the diminutive Greek's garage, it really wasn't that out of place.

He once cut the scales off a sardine's belly and mixed it up in paint to get the perfect shade of pearl. The smell was godawful, but the results, the results were something else.

"The movie industry let us express ourselves worldwide," he said. "We weren't just a kustom hot rodder in North Hollywood. We exposed the car culture to the world. Racing, girls, thrills, crashes - whatever you wanted to call it. The industry created it for the guy back in Oklahoma City who'd never seen anything like this."

And people took notice. Tom Wolfe, when he was just a magazine writer with a sharp eye and distinctive way with words, came out to write a magazine piece titled "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby" that likened Barris and his competitors like Ed "Big Daddy" Roth to fine artists like Picasso and Mondrian. It became a book - in a way, George Barris made Tom Wolfe too.

And then he was set, man. People didn't just want a tricked-out ride, they wanted a George Barris Kustom Kar. Barris, Roth, the crazy Von Dutch with his intricate pinstripe designs, they took design out of the realm of greasemonkeys and speed-fiends and into fine, American art.

This seems foreign today, where there are TV shows and clothing lines devoted to fancying-up cars and the Petersen Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, right in the middle of L.A.'s Museum Row.

But the Petersen would have never been there without Robert E. Petersen publisher of Hot Rod Magazine. Everytime he put a Barris kar on the cover, he sold out the issue. In this roundabout way, Barris brought kustomizing into high culture.

Ford begged him to work in-house, but he preferred to be independent. He fixed up snowmobiles, bikes, motorcycles, licensed his designs for kids' toys, made bolt-on kits for the home enthusiast. The Beach Boys, the Monkees, a trumpeter named Alpert whom Barris called Herbie, they all showed up. James Brown came in every year, three days before Christmas and told Barris to build whatever he felt like. Elvis would drop by and he was just the most polite young man ever, calling everyone mister and sir and asking about their kids, about their families.

The interesting thing about Barris is that he never quit. He's 80 years old now, a tiny old man in sweat pants with big brown eyes, but he's still got the showman's flair. When he's got to turn it up, he puts on those big ol' glasses and a gold jacket and suddenly, he's the King once again. Rather than cruising along on the reputation he and his brother created a half-century ago, he kept evolving.

Today, he's still sharp as ever, running shops in Santa Ana and San Diego where his team relays their designs to the old master with digital pictures.

They've created a Kustom Prius, made Pontiac's new GTO into a snazzy convertible with vertical doors and rear-facing cameras instead of sideview mirrors. He's currently fixing up a Dodge Magnum, competing with his son, daughter and his 16-year-old grandson, to see who can do the most exotic fix-up.

He's made a nice living off this, not the life of a millionaire, but enough to have a home in Encino and first-name relationships with some of the world's biggest stars. All because he knew that if you took an everyday item and made it just a little bit fancier, you could change the world.

"It's like a lady who goes to the dance and says, I don't want the same thing another gal has on. Same thing with guys - one wants a Mustang with big wheels, one wants a Camaro, one wants a Dodge with that big Hemi engine.

"You go in to buy a car, you don't care if it's got a rubber band for an engine. You care how it looks first."

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Photo:

(color) George Barris is creator of the Batmobile and hundreds of other movie and TV cars. He is an icon of car customizing in the Valley at Barris Kustom.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer