RIP Peter Yates

Happy Easter everyone. Sorry I didn't post more this week, but I was out of town and didn't have my computer. I heard Movie director Peter Yates died recently at age 81. If your not a film buff, he was the director of "Bullitt" the Steve McQueen classic that has spawned 40 years of car chases in action movies. "Bullitt" was based on a novel called "Mute Witness" by Robert L. Pike. Even though the chase is only 11 minutes of the two-hour film, everyone knows about it. The reason it still stands up more than 40 years later-(regardless of how many hubcaps the Charger loses, or how many times they pass the same VW) is because Yates and McQueen demanded to the letter police, hospital and morgue procedures be shown. And in the chase, McQueen, Stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, and stuntman Bill Hickman-who drove the Charger, and the Grand Ville in another classic chase-"The Seven-Ups"-insisted on realism. No speeding up the camera. They were sometimes going 115 mph through the streets of San Francisco. If not for Yates and McQueen's vision and committment to excellence, we might not have had classics like "Vanishing Point" - incidentally, Carey Loftin was the stunt coordinator on that flick as well, or "The French Connection", "To Live and Die in LA" or even camp like "Smokey and the Bandit, or Fast and Furious 5 coming out this summer. May he join Steve McQueen in Valhalla! Mastermind