Motorcycle Forum / General / Sportbikes / April 2005

Here I thought this was a movie all about Buells.  No wonder it failed
at the box office.:-)
Regards

Mike

 Some info here

http://familyscreenscene.allinfoabout.com/movies/torque.html

Now you have me intrigued, but only slightly. I've ridden all over
southern California, and have probably been on every road that the film
was shot on. I wouldn't be getting my hopes up about any particular
road being *all that*, just because it was in some Grade B movie. The
camera lens distorts reality, just like the story does...

Like, somebody said there was a scene in Smokey and the Bandit where
Burt Reynolds and company drive through the streets of the little town
of Ojai, CA, where I went to high school. If you know just when to
look, you'll see the Arcade and the Pergola and the Foster's Freeze in
Ojai where the high schoolers used to hang out after school. Blink and
you'll miss it...

Some of the opening scenes in the original Lone Ranger TV series look
like they were shot in a box canyon in the Arizona, New Mexico, or
Texas desert. But they were actually shot just one mile from where I
used to live in Hollywierd, in an abandonned rock quarry...

That same rock quarry was supposedly the Bat Cave from the TV Bat Man
series. You see the Batmobile rolling, apparently out of a little cave
it could *never* fit into. Then you see the Batmobile making a rapid
right turn out of a road that's only half a mile from the Bat Cave, but
would take you half an hour of driving to get to---if you knew where it
was...

Both the Lone Ranger and Bat Man had scenes filmed in Griffith Park.
Good luck on figuring out what road the movie Torque started on...

What you need to understand is that California cities all go whoring
after the movie studios' money. They charge the studios a few thousand
dollars for a permit, and the studios go in and annoy the crap out of
residents, blocking off streets and roads, and even the
police force gets a piece of the action, because the cops can wear
their uniforms and moonlight for some extra cash, as if they weren't
making a wad from their city jobs already...

Some neighbors really pissed me off. They own a million $ Craftsman
cottage in Hollyweird, down the block from me. One day, I came out and
found my car had been towed away, because those a$$holes had rented
their house out to Volvo to film *interior* shots for a commercial that
gave the impression it was *snowing* outside. In southern California.
Right...

The Mojave desert and streets of Lancaster, California, and along the
new stretch of the 210 Freeway east of Pomona, Palm Springs, and
Blythe, that's nothing spectacular. But there are six scenic canyons
connecting Los Angeles to the high desert towns. It's not that they are
*fa-a-a-st* roads, but they are a nice ride through the canyons that
sportriders (and the cops) know about...

Lake Hughes Rd., San Francisquito Canyon, Bouquet Canyon, Mint Canyon,
Soledad Canyon Angeles, Angeles Forest Highway are all nice rides. If
you go too fast, you'll eventually meet The Man...

Down in the low desert, there is a well-known twisty road running south
out of Palm Desert, called Palms to Pines Highway. The sportriders like
to play on Seven Level Hill. The sportrider know about Seven Level
Hill, it's a series of switchbacks up the mountain. The cops know about
what the sportriders like to do. They tell each sportrider they stop to
tell their friends to stay away...

But you can keep going over the hills on Palms to Pines Highway and
come out in Idyllwild, a little forest community. You can decide
whether to head south and explore the Inland Empire down towards Mount
Palomar, where the locals hate a$$hole sportriders who terrorize the
local roads. Or you can head north out of Idyllwild and take the
twisties toward Banning. It's all a nice ride, keep your eyes peeled
for the cops, they are onto us, and have been for the past 20 years,
since the first Interceptors and Ninjas started terrorizing Inland
Empire Roads...

There are lots of palm tree oases in the Coachella Valley, but the one
movie studios have used in well known films is at Thousand Palms, where
the baby Moses was found floating in a basket in "The Ten
Commandments"....

"Perhaps the most fun segment to film was the biker rally welcoming
Ford home. Filmed in Piru, California, the small farm community was
tranformed into a type of street fair."

(Everybody's gotta get into the act. Heck, I even did a speaking bit in
an impromptu filming at Griffith Observatory. The park rangers came and
ran the low budget film crew off before I got my name in credits. But
somebody saw the movie and recognized me and remarked on it...)

Piru is just a little old town on the railroad that passes through a
long narrow valley full of orange trees. The whole valley was once
owned by the Catholic church, it was the extended land grant of Mission
San Fernando, which later became Rancho Camulos, the site that inspired
Helen Hunt Jackson to write her novel "Ramona" in the 1880's. Mary
Pickford was in the first silent movie version, in the 1920's...

I remember another Grade B or even worse movie that was filmed in Piru.
Lloyd Bridges (Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges' father) played the part
of a space alien who looked just like a human being in a three piece
suit was chasing Angie Dickenson around with his ray gun that looked
just like a plastic water pistol...

There's a little travelled agricultural road on the other side of the
valley from Piru. South Mountain Road. It's not that it's a "sportbike
road", it's just a scenic way to avoid all the heavy weekend traffic on
the main road through that valley. Sportriders and Harleys take it easy
on that road....

If I was going to ride from Hollywood to Ojai, the route I would take
is through the San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley, across Grimes Pass
or Balcom Canyon Road to that isolated ag road called South Mountain
Road, pick up Hwy 150 out of Santa Paula into Ojai. At Ojai, I could
choose to take Hwy 33 up to Maricopa and taft, or I could continue on
Hwy 150 up to Carpinteria and on to Santa Barbara. It's not that any of
those roads are all that fast for sportbike riding. They are scenic
though, and that's why I take them instead of riding 90mph on the
freeways...

"Another party was set in a motorcycle factory. The Southwest Marine
facility of the San Pedro docks proved to be an ideal location."

The San Pedro docks are far from scenic. But some inner city bikers
have talked the Port Authority into letting them use the huge paved
parking lots for drag racing on two different occasions...

That would be assuming that any real HUMAN saw the worthless film....

That would be an incorrect assumption.