STAR CINEMATIC VEHICLES; SUN VALLEY MAN'S CLASSIC AUTOMOBILES FIT MOVIES' BILL.

Byline: Dave McNary Daily News Staff Writer

A self-described car nut from Sun Valley has turned his passion into a profitable one-man business by supplying hard-to-find cars for studios when they need a Rolls Royce, Bentley, Stutz or Jaguar.

Michael Hoback, owner/operator of Cars on Camera, has supplied cars for dozens of films and television shows, including ``Batman & Robin,'' ``Batman Forever,'' ``Spawn,'' ``Money Talks,'' ``Flubber'' and ``The Odd Couple II.'' He usually splits the fee, which typically runs from $800 to $1,500 a day, with the owner and stays on the set if he's needed to drive the car.

As a result, Hoback has appeared in about 20 different movies and TV episodes, usually as a chauffeur. His most recent role? In ``Spawn,'' with a 1965 Rolls-Royce Phantom V parked in front of a Gulfstream jet that blows up.

``When I was at Van Nuys High, I just had a thing for classic cars,'' said Hoback. ``I was always cutting class so I could be at the Ferrari dealership in Hollywood when the new Daytona models arrived so now my business is truly everything I ever wanted. I wake up and I'm surrounded by my toys.''

Dozens of Los Angeles area companies supply cars to movie producers for use on sets. Several are dealerships with entertainment shoots as a secondary business, such as Marina del Rey dealership Chequered Flag International, specializing in European convertible sports cars such as MGs, Triumphs, Austin-Healys and Jaguars.

``Working on supplying cars to movie and TV sets was sort of a natural evolution for us after we'd been in business for a while,'' said Chequered Flag President Neal Jaffe. ``We usually get a call every week but we'd like to do it more.''

Chequered Flag's credits include ``Mrs. Doubtfire,'' ``Independence Day'' and ``Speed.'' In the latter, a Jaguar XKS was returned minus one of the doors. ``They could never figure out what happened to it,'' Jaffe said.

Hoback's star-studded client list has included Shelley Winters, Dale Robertson, George Kennedy, Jan Berry, Goldie Hawn, Tom Jones, Ned Tanen, Alice Cooper, Richard Donner, Jerry Bruckheimer and Scott Rudin. For his part, Hoback admits he wound up in the business very much by accident.

He started in the early 1970s by polishing and cleaning cars - what is now known as detailing - on weekends as a sidelight to his jobs at auto dealerships, first at a Cadillac lot, then a Mercedes-Benz dealer and finally a Ferrari outlet. His first brush with Hollywood came one day in the early 1970s when he was hitchhiking and was picked up by Quinn Martin in the TV producer's 1970 Cadillac Coupe de Ville.

``Quinn Martin could tell that I was genuinely interested in his car, so I wound up working on his car on weekends,'' Hoback recalls. Before long, he was working on cars for Sonny & Cher, Martin Scorsese, Pat Boone and Lucille Ball's husband, Gary Morton, who had 14 Rolls-Royces. Soon, he was working on one of Morton's cars nearly every weekend.

By 1979, Hoback had started his own limo service along with managing and maintaining exotic cars, many for celebrities. Four years later, he made his first foray into the world of the movie studios, supplying the producer of ``Cloak and Dagger,'' starring Dabney Coleman, with a Mercedes Pullman 600 limo.

The work then came in occasionally, including an appearance on the final episode of ``Miami Vice'' thanks to supplying a 1985 Ferrari Testarossa. But the real breakthrough came three years ago when Joel Schumacher held a ``casting call'' for Val Kilmer's car in ``Batman Forever,'' specifying a dark European model from the 1950s or 1960s.

Hoback was chosen almost immediately after showing up driving a two-tone 1962 black-and-blue Bentley that had been owned by Nelson Rockefeller.

`` `Batman Forever' really opened the gates for me,'' he recalls. ``I had come up with exactly what they wanted.''

Hoback also supplied the car used by Uma Thurman's Poison Ivy character in this summer's ``Batman & Robin'' - a bright red Mercedes Pullman 600 limo, formerly owned by Barron Hilton and currently the property of Newport Beach real estate investor Conway Chester.

Hoback believes his business has benefited from celebrities having become less willing to drive rare cars in public. That means they are more likely to entrust such vehicles to someone like himself and only use the cars occasionally.

``Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when you saw a Rolls-Royce Phantom, you knew it was probably some star that was driving it,'' he said. ``Nowadays, stars just want to drive a Lexus or a Jeep.''

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--Color) Michael Hoback, owner of Cars on Camera, provides studios with classic cars such as this Mercedes Pullman limo.

(2--Color) Hoback sits in the back of his plush red upholstered Mercedes limousine.

Bob Halvorsen/Daily News