These LA-Based Artists Re-Created the Graffiti-Covered 1955 Cadillac Hearse from 'The Warriors'

Car and Driver

19-07-2025

The cult favorite movie The Warriors was notable in part for the 1955 Cadillac hearse driven by a gang called the Rogues.
At Dave Shuten's Los Angeles hot-rod shop, graffiti artist Risk and Shuten gave a Cadillac hearse a fresh paint treatment in front of a live audience.
It's not the movie car—they found a similar '55 Cadillac with the Meteor-built hearse body for sale at a museum—but the graffiti is a faithful reproduction.
When The Warriors came out in 1979, moviegoers complained it incited violence, glorified gangs, and encouraged vandalism. In the parking lot outside of Dave Shuten's Los Angeles hot rod shop in 2025, only the last complaint would be valid. On a warm Monday evening, Shuten and famed graffiti artist Kelly Graval, better known as Risk, proceeded to tag up a 1955 Cadillac while the movie played on a projector screen to a rapt party of cinema fans.
Does it still count as vandalism if the spray cans aimed at Andy Bollas' Caddy hearse were by request of the owner? "I've wanted this car since I was, like, seven," Bollas told me while we watched Risk and Shuten spray red over a quarter-window. "I'm 50 now, so I've waited a long time for this."
Elana Scherr
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Car and Driver
The Warriors is a cult classic, one of those low-budget films that failed to be a commercial success but left an outsize mark on the culture. It's been referenced in The Simpsons, has a video game variant and a board game, and it has inspired countless references to the villain's creepy clinking beer bottles and well-delivered line, "Warriors, come out to plaaaay."
Directed by Walter Hill (who also directed one of my personal favorite car films, The Driver, and perhaps more famously, 48 Hours), The Warriors is set in a gritty futuristic New York—which at the time of its release in 1979 was perhaps not that much more grubby than the real city. It begins with a gang conclave that results in the death of the main gang's leader. Wrongly accused, the titular Warriors must run a gauntlet across New York to get safely to their territory.
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Car and Driver
It's a chaotic and often nonsensical film, but the costumes are fantastic, the city looks incredible, and one of the rival gangs—the Rogues—drives a menacing primer-black Cadillac hearse covered in early-style spray-can graffiti. It was this car that caught a young Andy B's imagination so much that when he saw a similar '55 Cadillac with the Meteor-built hearse body for sale at a museum in central California, he stalked the listing until it came down in price and then lowballed the seller. "I offered him half," he says. "I was like, 'It's in a million pieces. You're never gonna do anything with it. It takes up so much space. It's huge.'"
All of these negatives were also true once Bollas owned the car. Our mutual friend Shuten was kind enough to store the body, while Bollas kept the trim and interior parts in a van in his back yard. Things might have continued that way for a long time, but Shuten hired a new assistant at his shop and wanted to give him a project to work on before setting him loose on the rare car restorations that Shuten heads up for Galpin Motorsports' Beau Boeckmann. It's not that the Cadillac was a sacrificial lamb, but its rat-rod styling in the movie made it a good car to test the skills of a new hire without risking damage to an irreplaceable Roth custom or chopped Mercury. "Andy brought down this Sprinter van with all the shit that had been sitting in it for two years, and we just dumped it all over the parking lot, dug through it, and just started throwing parts at it."
Elana Scherr
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Car and Driver
Once it started looking like a car, it seemed like they might as well paint it, and once they planned to paint it, why not make a movie-night party out of it? It was Shuten's idea to invite Risk to help out. Both are artists who cross over between outsider and gallery, and they'd worked together on other projects, including a Polestar painted with galaxies that turned heads at the Los Angeles auto show in 2021. "We'd worked together in the past on some stuff. He's a fantastic artist. I think he's probably the most famous graffiti artist right now. And he's a good friend, so I shot him a picture and said, 'Hey, are you down to help me wreck this hearse?'"
Risk was so down. It helped that he's a fan of the movie too. "Huge fan," he said when I asked him. "I dressed as characters from the different gangs on Halloween when I was a kid. Most memorably, some friends and I dressed like the Baseball Furies." The Baseball Furies were not main players in the film but inarguably had the coolest look, so much so that musician Jesse Hughes showed up to the party on roller skates, bat in hand.
Elana Scherr
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Car and Driver
Shuten jokingly referred to the paint job as wrecking the hearse, but it took a surprising amount of planning to re-create the swirling chaos of the movie car. "All the trim had to go back on because we had to paint it in reverse of what I normally would do," said Shuten. "We had to assemble a car, tape it off shitty, paint it black, untape it, and then spray all the graffiti after it was assembled. Windows in, trim on like somebody tagged a real finished car."
All of that was done before the guests arrived, but there was still the process of figuring out what the graffiti on the car said. The party goers were a mix of custom car folks, artists, and musicians, so everyone was on board with the idea and eager to help.
Elana Scherr
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Car and Driver
A whole group of us pored over printed stills from the movie, arguing over whether a fender said "Love" or "Louie," "66" or "GG." Deciphering the blurry scrawls in the still images proved a bit of a Rorschach test, with one person seeing a stylized name and another swearing it was a dick drawing. (It was me. I thought it was a dick, and I still do.) Because the car belonged to the bad guys, many of the tags were rude, but some were coded references to the actors, or just gibberish that looked good on film. After all, it was just a prop. The tags weren't even done by period artists, but by the art department on set, themselves trying to copy an emerging graffiti style.
"It was unexpectedly a challenge," said Risk. "I've spent my whole life developing hand style and can control, but with this project we had to throw all that out the window and travel back to the '70s when it was just in its infant stages. It's hard going in reverse!"
Elana Scherr
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Car and Driver
Shuten laughed when he told me that Risk's wife came up during the painting and asked why he was doing "such a shit job." The guys were having fun, but they still took it seriously. "Risk showed up with a book of '70s graffiti style so he could see how the tags were in the day," said Shuten. "It was really fun to watch him do shit really shitty on purpose, knowing how really great he is."
Elana Scherr
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Car and Driver
From the audience's viewpoint, both Shuten and Risk looked confident and practiced as they circled the big car, adding flourishes and the occasional artistic license to a particularly abstruse layering. "Once the ice was broken with the first spray," Shuten said, "Everyone's like, all right, it's on."
The movie played on the screen, and everyone clinked bottles when the Rogues came into view. As for what Bollas is going to do with the Cadillac now, well, it's only a few months till Halloween, and then it's "Warriors, come out to plaaaay."
Elana Scherr
Senior Editor, Features
Like a sleeper agent activated late in the game, Elana Scherr didn't know her calling at a young age. Like many girls, she planned to be a vet-astronaut-artist, and came closest to that last one by attending UCLA art school. She painted images of cars, but did not own one. Elana reluctantly got a driver's license at age 21 and discovered that she not only loved cars and wanted to drive them, but that other people loved cars and wanted to read about them, which meant somebody had to write about them. Since receiving activation codes, Elana has written for numerous car magazines and websites, covering classics, car culture, technology, motorsports, and new-car reviews. In 2020, she received a Best Feature award from the Motor Press Guild for the C/D story "A Drive through Classic Americana in a Polestar 2." In 2023, her Car and Driver feature story "In Washington, D.C.'s Secret Carpool Cabal, It's a Daily Slug Fest" was awarded 1st place in the 16th Annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards by the Los Angeles Press Club.
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