Roanoke Times • July 1, 2005
The Secret is out and he's coming to town.
by Staff


Eddie Paul may be the most interesting movie "star" you've never heard of. Don't feel bad. Until recently, he was the best-kept secret in Hollywood, too.

Paul builds stunt cars and motorcycles for movies "among other things," and chances are, if you've been to a theater in the past 20 years or so, you've seen his handiwork but not his face. Or you've seen him drive as a stuntman on TV in "Dukes of Hazard" and thought he was one of the Duke boys or a member of the law chasing them.

Get ready to meet Eddie Paul, face to face. He will be in Roanoke Monday, July 4, 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., as the special guest of Star City Motor Madness's car show on the City Market. He will be appearing with two stunt cars he built for major motion pictures and will be available for questions, autographs and photos.

The two cars with him, a 1950 Mercury used in the 1986 movie "Cobra" with Sylvester Stallone and a 1967 GTO that appeared in "XXX" in 2002 with Vin Diesel, are owned by a Virginia businessman, who wishes to remain anonymous.

The Mercury comes with a particularly interesting story. It is one of four Mercurys Paul built for the movie, an action-thriller that involved a lot of gunfire and wreckage. In the movie, the car was used in a highspeed highway chase scene in which a stuntman made a spectacular 180-degree spin backwards and then spun it back around. Bullet holes were shot into the trunk during the scene. The movie subsequently took it to Venice Beach, Calif., where it was used to jump canals.

"It took some pretty bad abuse," Paul said.

If that wasn't enough to destroy it, consider what happened after the film. Someone bought it off a junk yard, restored it and ran it two years in the Carrera PanAmerican race in Mexico, one o€ the most grueling races in the world. At same point, it also went to the harsh Bonneville Salt flats for land-speed trials. Paul said he believes it once was in the hands of the Hell’s Angels also.

“It’s been all over the country. I’m amazed he tracked it down. I know I knew I was never going to see it again.”

The business man had seen one of the four cars in 1986 but couldn’t buy it at the time. After 16 years of searching, a friend alerted him in 2002 that one of the Mercs was being offered on Ebay, and he jumped at the chance. He flew to Washington state, where the car had been garaged for 12 years, looked it over, had it authenticated and bought it.

Later, he met with Paul and arranged for the car to be put back in movie condition. After nearly 20 years, Paul couldn't remember all the details that went into building the car, so the businessman sat down with a copy of the movie and examined it frame by frame and made notes and photographs.

"A funny thing I tell people it took two weeks to make the Merc for the movie, 10 seconds for them to wreck it and me two years to put it back together again," Paul said.

The car is chopped 1 ½ inches, has a roll cage and a 350 Chevy supercharged, nitrous powered engine that can churn out over 600 horsepower. The engine was shot when Paul started rebuilding the car, so the businessman had a new one made from scratch in Lynchburg.

Paul was skeptical when the studio making "Cobra" wanted 1950 Mercurys for the film. He wasn't sure he could find four 36-year-old Mercs, but a buddy who has a junk yard on the West Coast had them in the driveway of Paul's El Segundo shop in about two days.

Paul finished rebuilding the car in early June and had it shipped to Virginia. Its appearance at the car show on the Market will be its first public viewing ever as the "Cobra" car or "Awsom 50 car," as it is also known because of the movie license plate - AWSOM 50.

"The movie makes it look virtually indestructible, and this car has actually been virtually indestructible," its owner said.

The history of the "XXX" car is somewhat less colorful. Paul had to scour the country to find five 1967 GTOs.

"We put 350 Chevy engines in a couple of them ... that's what [the businessman] has ... beefed up the front suspension, modified the frame and gave them a special paint job." The paint the studio wanted wasn't available, so Paul had to have it custom-mixed.

The businessman first saw the GT0 in Paul's shop when he went out to look at work on his Mercury right after the filming of "XXX." He tried unsuccessfully to buy it from its owner, who subsequently outbid the businessman for another of the GTOs on eBay. The owner eventually put the car up for auction in Arizona, and the businessman bought it in January of this year.

Paul's behind-the-scenes career in Hollywood has been going on for more that 35 years. The former stuntman has customized cars and motorcycles for more than a 100 films, and he's an author and special-effects innovator.

He and a crew of 20 also have built cars for "Grease," "The Fast and The Furious," "ZFast ZFurious," "Taxi," "E.T." and "Gone in 60 Seconds," just to mention a few. They did 48 cars for "Grease" and 220 in two months for "Fast and Furious."

For "Streets of Fire," Paul's shop built 60 motorcycles, and he signed on as stunt coordinator for the film, as well.

"I was supposed to teach bikers how to ride," Paul said. "Oddly enough, instead of using stuntmen to ride Harleys, I talked the studio into letting me hire bikers to do the stunts. All those clubs ... I didn't know they didn't get along and I had them together at one time. I think we lost only one person. I never asked about him again."

When he isn't creating roll cages or tricking out cars, Paul takes to the ocean to explore another of his passions, sharks. As a longtime diver himself, Paul has worked with Jean-Michel, son of famed underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, created sharks for the IMAX feature, "In Search of the Great Sharks" and recently built a mechanical shark that Cousteau's grandson got into and swam with the Great Whites.

Paul also founded E.P. Industries Inc., where he engineers and develops innovative designs in compressors, engines, electronics, camera movements, animatronics and more. Circlescan, which brings 4D to the movies, is one of his inventions. 4D goes into the screen, creating depth. It works with only one camera, shooting the scene from different points in a circle.

A television show called "Deadline" also is in the works for Paul and likely will debut this summer on the Discovery Channel.

"I proposed it as a real reality show," Paul said. "Reality shows are faked, you know. I insisted on this one being real ... that whatever happens happens. Like if a UPS guy makes a delivery, we don't tell him to go out and come back in again. The thing about the Mercury will be on one show. Jay Leno came in four times about, the motorcycle we're building for him. That will be on the show."

In addition to movie projects in the` works, Paul is writing another book, "Extreme Chopper Building" to go with two he's already written, "Cars of the Fast and Furious," and "How to Build the Cars of the Fast and Furious." He also has produced a DVD about, himself, "The Best-Kept Secret in Hollywood."

"I work with the [studios'] transportation coordinator who gives me most of my work," Paul said, explaining the title of the DVD. "I found out just recently that no matter how good a job we'd do, he never told his friends about us. I never understood why. And what it was - he finally told me that he kept me secret because he didn't want `to let everybody know what you're doing and how fast you're doing it ... they'd use you and you'd never be available for me.'

"He's retired now. He brought us a lot of work over the years, but I always wondered why nobody else ever called."