The offbeat comedy “Little Miss Sunshine” stars Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, Alan Arkin and Steve Carell. But a scene-stealing, central role is filled by a surprising, uncredited cast member: an old, yellow-and-white Volkswagen bus.
The movie is about members of a dysfunctional extended family from Albuquerque, N.M., who hit the road so the young daughter can compete in a kiddie beauty pageant in Southern California. They take the family car, a VW bus from the mid-1970s with a sticky horn and other quirks, which sets up some of the movie’s funniest moments.
In a running gag, the clutch cable snaps and they’re forced to get out, push, run like mad and jump back in once the bus starts running. They do this -repeatedly – all the way across the desert and into Redondo Beach.
It’s a neat metaphor for a family struggling to get itself back on track, and it’s only one of the VW sightings at the multiplex this summer. “Cars,” the Pixar-animated stop-and-smell-the-cactus-flowers ode to Route 66, has an all-car cast. One of them is a hippie VW van named Fillmore, voiced by George Carlin, who spouts big-oil conspiracy theories.
The hippie bus makes another appearance as the symbol of the 2006 Sawdust Art Festival in Laguna Beach. With a little help from his friends, festival artist Troy Poeschl painted his ’63 VW van with peace signs, flowers, a portrait of John Lennon and other psychedelic symbols to mark the art show’s 40th anniversary and its counterculture roots.
“Most people are flashing the peace sign,” said Poeschl, 44, of Laguna Beach, who uses the van as his everyday car. “People spend 20 minutes looking at it. There’s so much to see.”
Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it’s the functional design. It may even be the noisy, bumpy ride and the breeze-in-your-hair lack of air conditioning, or the way the front end looks sort of like a benign, smiling face. For whatever reason, everyone’s on the (VW) bus this summer.
Jonathan Dayton, who co-directed “Little Miss Sunshine” with his wife, Valerie Faris, has a thought about the VW’s renewed appeal.
“I think that the VW bus is part of a general approach to automaking where the owner could participate in repairing the car, and in the life of the car,” he says. “When a bus breaks down you feel like you have a fighting chance of repairing it.
“Today, cars all have computers in them. When they break down, you just wash your hands of it. It’s dead.”
Both Dayton, 49, and Faris, 47, grew up with VW vans. Dayton’s first car was a used camper van, and Faris’ family owned a bus when she was in high school.
“I loved driving it,” she says. “It feels like a tin can, but you have a 360 view. It’s a beautiful, panoramic view.”
During filming, the wide-screen aspect of the van’s windshield came in handy. The open-road scenes were shot on the road, at highway speed, with actor Kinnear at the wheel doing much of the actual driving of a “bread loaf” or “bay-window” van.
“It was very important for us to capture the feeling of being on the road and in the car,” Dayton says. “Like any family car trip, there’s a certain feeling that you can’t fake. The feeling of being trapped.”
Likewise, the actors themselves got out and pushed the van, running alongside and hopping in at the last moment. There were no stunt doubles, Faris says, but there was a veteran stunt coordinator, Tom Harper.
“He worked on ‘The Fast and (the) Furious,'” she says.
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The attention from Hollywood is new, but the van has always had its ardent admirers.
Scott Moore, an artist from Laguna Beach who shows his work at the Sawdust Art Festival, has driven Volkswagens all his life. His first car was a 1962 VW Bug that he used mainly to get from his family’s home in the Bellflower-Downey area to the beach so he could surf. He bought a Squareback VW, and then a brand-new bus in 1978.
Five years ago, he sold that and bought his current car, a 1963 Deluxe Microbus. Also known as a Samba, his model is popular with collectors. It has unusual features, including a cloth sunroof, a row of vista windows across the roofline and Safari front window panels that hinge open at the top.
He restored it in exacting detail, even spotting a hard-to-find spare part in the background of a photo on eBay, contacting the seller, and making the purchase.
He says the appeal of the bus is its classic design.
“There’s nothing on it I would change. It is what it is,” he says. “As much as everybody laughs at them for their slow speed and their breadbox looks, I get a good feeling when I look at them.”
He doesn’t even miss the smoother ride of new cars.
“When you’re shifting and driving, you feel like a kid driving a go-cart. You feel like you’re doing everything but pedaling it,” he says.
Gary Rubel, 46, got into Volkswagens almost by accident. In 1999, his father-in-law was restoring a Ford Thunderbird, so Rubel bought a 21-window 1964 Microbus intending to restore it and use it to carry his surfboards and gear to the beach.
“At first, it was just a project, and then it got out of hand,” says Rubel, a businessman who lives in Laguna Beach. “It’s too nice now. It’s just not practical.”
He paid $6,500 for it, and estimates its worth at nearly $40,000.
He had it up for sale last year, but he balked when it came time to turn it over to a potential buyer. It took him a year to put it back on the market.
“I’m OK with it now. I’m pretty much OK with it now,” he says.
That sort of devotion was part of the reason Volkswagen engineers at the Palo Alto-based Electronic Research Laboratory picked a 1964 VW Microbus as a demonstration vehicle for the newest of the new technologies.
Nicknamed “The Chameleon,” it’s an all-electric car powered by lithium polymer batteries and solar energy from flexible panels on surfboards that are mounted on the roof. It’s also outfitted with cutting-edge technologies such as speech-activated controls on an MP3 player; a digital bumper sticker that can be programmed with custom messages, and a rear parking camera with wide-angle viewing.
“It has such a nostalgic pull, and it’s got a big following and lots of cult recognition,” says Vickie Chiang, an engineer with the project. “It was the juxtaposition of this retro classic with these technologies of tomorrow.”
The bus is a big hit.
“What we hear all the time,” Chiang says, “is ‘Nice bus. Can I buy it?’ “
Contact the writer: 714-796-6087 or vtakahama@ocregister.com
