Hollywood is a land of plenty. It’s where the movies are made, and where a great deal of money eventually ends up. That industry has created all kinds of innovative solutions to weird problems, such as this oddball car-like thing Chris Hemsworth is driving. Or isn’t driving, as the case may be!
This week, an Instagram user named dnk530 took to the site to post a strange video. It shows a well-dressed Chris Hemsworth behind the wheel of a Chrysler 300C, which is absolutely covered in cameras. Only, his car is on some kind of strange six-wheeled dolly, which is apparently being piloted by a guy hanging off the side. Based on context, we can assume that the scene being filmed is for his upcoming film, Crime 101, due for release in 2025.
As it turns out, this is one of those unique Hollywood creations, designed to solve a very Hollywood problem. Meet the rig known as Biscuit Jr.!
Hollywood Problems
Here’s the thing about acting—it’s a complex task. Turning yourself into somebody else, delivering perfect lines, and conveying the relevant emotional states all takes a certain level of brain power. The problem? Driving is a complex task, too! Without a driver’s full focus and attention, cars tend to end up hitting walls or upside down, and that’s something nobody wants to see on a film set ( outside of preplanned stunts, of course).
Long story short, it’s bad practice to have people trying to act and drive at the same time. And yet, Hollywood needs to make movies that have actors getting up to all sorts of mischief in cars! A variety of solutions exist. For example, for scenes where characters are simply getting from point A to point B, it might be easy enough to just throw a car on a trailer, or do some creative green screen work. When it comes to automotive action scenes, though, with cars going sideways and all that jazz, that’s often not enough.
As covered by Filmmaker Magazine in 2013, this is the problem the Biscuit Jr. rig was built to solve. It’s the creation of Allen Padelford and Robert Nagle, an experienced duo who work on complicated vehicle action scenes. If you’re making a film, you can rent this thing out from Allen Padelford Camera Cars to shoot your action scenes as required.
At its heart, the Biscuit Jr. is a powerful six-wheeled platform, built to carry a car for filming action scenes. The actor(s) sit inside the car and do their thing. Meanwhile, a stunt driver sits on the side of the Biscuit Jr., controlling it from a small pod outfitted with pedals and a steering wheel. The stunt driver handles the driving, while the actor sits inside the car and puts their full attention on their performance.
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The Biscuit Jr. was behind some of the action in Baby Driver.
Originally, the rig featured a Cadillac Northstar V8 that delivered 400 horsepower to the front wheels. A surprising choice, perhaps, but it’s nice to see that the unloved GM engine finally found a home where it was truly appreciated. The rig features two axles at the rear to support the weight of the star vehicle on the bed, though an extra axle has been added at times for more capacity where needed.
Key to the Biscuit Jr. is its modularity. The driving pod can be moved around to various parts of the vehicle, allowing the stunt driver to be kept out of shot as needed. To facilitate this, all the controls are remote; for example, the steering wheel is hooked up hydraulically rather than by a direct mechanical link like a steering column.
The benefits of the Biscuit Jr. are its performance capabilities. “You can drive over 100 miles an hour with it,” Nagle told Filmmaker Magazine. “We can high-speed through traffic, we can slide it, we can spin it.” That’s a wild thing to say about a massive six-wheeled vehicle that’s hauling an entire car on it’s back, but this is what the Biscuit Jr. was built to do. “It’s heavy, not super responsive, but it handles extremely well … it’s very fast,” said Nagle.
The name comes from an interesting place. It’s apparently named after the original “Biscuit” rig, created by Padelford and used in the movie Seabiscuit. The original Biscuit was a drivable platform that carried mechanical horses, and it was used for filming actors in up close during horse-racing scenes – you can see it in action in the video below. That rig later played host to an aircraft fuselage for the XF-11 crash scene in The Aviator, before it was destroyed in a brush fire.
The video will jump to the Seabiscuit horse rig when you click.
The Biscuit Jr. isn’t for everything. It’s not used for exterior shots in an action sequence, as the rig would be obvious and get in the way. It’s for capturing the actor’s performance in the vehicle, and for shots from the inside of the vehicle, looking out.
If you’ve watched any car movies from the last decade or so, you’ve probably seen more than a few scenes that were shot with the Biscuit Jr. The rig was used heavily in the filming of Drive and Baby Driver, as well as titles like Live Free or Die Hard, Soldado, and Cowboys and Aliens.Â
Ultimately, the Biscuit Jr. is an obvious solution for a very unique problem. It’s enduring use in Hollywood is a testament to how well it works. It might be a weird and bulky thing, but if you want to capture an authentic performance in an automobile at speed, it might just be the tool for the job.
Image credits: via YouTube screenshot, dnk530 via Instagram screenshot
Best rig I’ve seen was made for Alfonso Cuaróns Children of Men with not only a dummy driver but two camera operators on the roof shooting a12min single take inside a car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBfsJ7K1VNk rig is shown at 2:20
That’s really cool. A few months ago I got to be a featured extra in a film as “the driver.” My scenes didn’t have anything like this but the passenger seat had a camera and the whole back seat was taken out and filled with gear, lights as well as another camera and operators. The car was an early 00’s Buick that needed an AC recharge and it was the hottest day of the year.
I also had to drive, stop on a mark and deliver my lines, without wearing my glasses as well, which is why I would have been happy to ride around in that. When I signed up for the gig I thought it was for something minor like an online advertisement or something unimportant. I didn’t realize there were some big names attached.
I defer to Jim Jefferies on the difficulty of acting.
I remember a few recent movies (does 2010 still count as recent?) where I’ve seen the reflections of these things on the car windows or in passing vehicles. I always thought it was camera rigging — those big metal frames on training wheels they clamp to the car’s fenders — but it turns out no. It’s an entire tube frame vehicle.
Yes, driving and acting at the same time is a daunting task, but I don’t imagine that acting while at the wheel of a car that is moving at speed with someone else in control is much easier!
Sure, but the stakes for screwing up are much lower.
Memo to Hollywood: If you’re going to use one of these things on a car with a column shift, put the goddamn lever down into Drive. I’m so sick and tired of seeing the shift lever poking over the top of the dash in the Park position when the car is “moving.”
Also, maybe have the steering wheel point straight, and actually turn when the actor turns the wheel! Drives me nuts haha.
Or its analog, when the driver is sawing away at the wheel out of sync with the movement in the background!
Yeah, the need a remote link between the Biscuit driver steering wheel and the actor’s car.
And for manuals, shift the thing an appropriate number of times, not the F&F 25spd transmission.
This just makes me think of the extended Van rig they used in the original Fast & Furious
mic-rig-1683933917633.jpg (842×627)
Mind Your Own Biscuits and Life Will Be Gravy
It also gives me an appreciation for old movies like Bullitt or (the very underrated) the Seven Ups where the stunt driving was done by the actual drivers in the cars.
There’s a cool little featurette that WB put out with Bullitt that shows a bunch of footage of McQueen and the various stunt drivers at the track, practicing for what we’d eventually see in the movie.
I was just thinking “Steve McQueen wouldn’t approve” as I was reading this.
I’ve always enjoyed that Bill Hickman isn’t really an actor (his characters never even seem to get names), but became one b/c they needed a driving ace to do the stunt work.
Here is a neat video somebody made about Frankenheimer and Ronin and Grand Prix. I think you’ll like it whether or not you’re familiar with either move. It’s a little long and a tiny bit too hosted, but very well-executed and compelling.
I’m still watching this. I know Ronin and it is amazing to see Frankenheimer invented most of the techniques 30 years earlier.
Yeah but to be fair there wasn’t any acting taking place during the chase in Bullitt… or much of the movie for that matter.
Cowboys vs Aliens was so bad that I actually watched it twice.
I recall thinking that at least $1,000 bucks was spent on the special effects.
That there Chrysler 300 sure does look contained, captured even. A captive Import from Detroit… So a Mitsubishi?
On Jay Leno’s Garage, you often see the camera car in the background.
I am hoping that they eventually do a show about the Camera cars
A lot of people thought the car scene in Airplane! was done in front of a green screen but it was actually an early prototype of the Biscuit Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrktxWUgcyA
All that driving was absolutely real. Yup.
It takes a keen eye to see that but you are 100% correct.
Ooof Cowboys and Aliens, what a piece of shit that movie was.
When you look at Biscuit Jr.’s resume it doesn’t even list *Cowboys and Aliens* among its credits.
Edit- I am too stupid to make italics work.
This thing is awesome. I get the feeling they got a Northstar on the cheap because nobody wanted it, but were able to get the power they needed for the rig out of it so they dealt with it.
I was wondering if it was based on a DeVille/DTS platform made heavy-duty for funeral work.
I’m guessing they wanted big power, enough to make what is essentially two cars go fast. They also wanted a FWD drivetrain to keep the flatbed flat and low.
As counter intuitive as it seems I’m betting FWD works best in this application. They also probably need torque/HP, without a ton of noise
I completely forgot that DTS/STS of the 90s were FWD with these things. It makes actually a lot more sense than just “run what you got.”
That’s likely part of it. Packaging a transverse engine and transaxle is easiest here and there aren’t a lot of options that also have a broad and fat torque band and are readily available. GM did have those transverse small block FWDs, but they’re rarer and ate transmissions even in their lighter OEM applications.
They probably went Northstar because it was powerful enough to carry a full vehicle and could be had as a compact FWD engine/trans package.
Probably a lot easier to repair without bodywork in the way also.