Gene Winfield, Whose Cars Starred in Film and on TV, Dies at 97

New York Times

16-03-2025

Gene Winfield, a hot rodder and prominent car customizer who built fanciful vehicles for 'Star Trek,' 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.' and other television series and for films like 'Blade Runner' and 'Sleeper,' died on March 4 in Atascadero, Calif. He was 97.
His son, Steve, said he died in an assisted living facility from metastatic melanoma. He had also been diagnosed with kidney failure.
Mr. Winfield began to attract national attention in the late 1950s with a two-door 1956 Mercury hard top called the Jade Idol.
According to the custom car website Kustorama, he transformed the Mercury for a customer by adding features like handmade fenders rolled in aluminum in the front end; headlight rings made from 1959 Chrysler Imperial Crown hubcaps; a television set integrated into a new dashboard; and a steering column taken from an Edsel.
Automobile magazine described the Jade Idol as having 'a sharklike presence that represented a new direction in customs.'
The car got its name from Mr. Winfield's inventive paint scheme: multiple shades of green and pearl white, with one color artfully blending into the other, using a technique that he developed. It became known as the Winfield Fade.
In a 2014 interview with the racing news website On All Cylinders, Mr. Winfield said that he began his paint experiments with motorcycles, followed by a white Chevy,
'I put purple around the chrome strips,' he said. 'When I got done, it was a little bit gaudy to me; it was different, though, and everybody loved it. So as I started to do the next one or two, I made it softer and started blending.'
Another famous custom job was a roadster, the King T, which he built in the early 1960s with Don Tognotti. They painted a Model T Ford lavender and added modifications like a Chevrolet V-8 engine paired with a four-speed automatic transmission; four-wheel disc brakes; and 15-inch chrome wheels with wood inlays. It won an award for 'most beautiful roadster' at the 1964 Oakland Roadster Show in California.
Mr. Winfield chopped off the tops of many cars that he customized — including hundred of Mercurys — and put them back a few inches lower to give the cars sleeker looks.
'He would go to a World of Wheels show and, with his crew, cut off the top of a vehicle with a blowtorch and put it back four inches lower; it was quite a spectacle,' said John Buck, producer of the Grand National Roadster Show and the Sacramento Autorama, to which Mr. Winfield brought his cars, charming the crowds.
Mr. Winfield's custom cars, if not his name, became widely known in the 1960s when they were seen on television and in the movies.
He towed the Reactor — a futuristic, low-slung, aluminum two-seater with a gold and green color scheme, front-wheel drive and a hinged roof panel — on a trailer to the 20th Century Fox studio in Hollywood in 1966, hoping to get it a screen role.
'I went up to the gate and conned them into letting me in to show my car to their transportation department,' he told Motorious, a website for car collectors and restorers, in 2017. 'From there, the transportation coordinator gave me the names and addresses of all these other studios, and for two days I took the car around and handed out my business card. Two weeks later, 'Bewitched' called me and said that they wanted the Reactor on their set.' It was the centerpiece of an episode called 'Super Car.'
The Reactor was then used on three more series: 'Star Trek,' 'Mission: Impossible" and 'Batman,' on which Catwoman (Eartha Kitt) used it as the Catmobile.
He did some of his TV work as a division manager for the model-car company AMT, for which he built the Galileo Shuttle for 'Star Trek.' Based on a design by Thomas Kellogg, it appeared in a few episodes. He constructed it in two units.
'One would be a complete exterior, full size,' he told the official Star Trek website in 2011. 'Then we built the complete interior. This interior had what we called 'wild' walls. What you do is you make the walls in four-foot sections on wheels, so you can put up one wall and they could film the actors sitting on the seats and whatnot.'
Robert Eugene Winfield was born on June 16, 1927, in Springfield, Mo., and grew up with five brothers and sisters, mainly in Modesto, Calif. His father, Frank, was a butcher who ran a wagon from which he and his mother, Virginia (Akins) Winfield, sold hamburgers and hot dogs for a nickel. After his parents divorced, his mother opened her own hamburger restaurant, where Gene started working at 10.
He was 14 when he opened his first shop, to which he brought his first car, a 1929 Ford Model A coupe. To it, he added oxtails, two antennas and a blue paint job. But his hope of hot-rodding it in the streets was soon dashed when it was wrecked in a crash with a taxicab. He quickly bought two more roadsters.
He served stints in the Navy, from 1944 to 1945, and in the Army, from 1949 to 1951. While stationed in Japan, he learned welding skills from an expert Japanese welder. Back home, his custom work got better, and he began to attract customers. He also began racing in the streets and on dry lakes in the late 1940s; in 1951 he took his custom-built Ford Model T coupe — which he called the Thing — and drove it 135 miles per hour at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
But what established his reputation were the cars that he customized — like the Maybellene, a modified 1961 Cadillac named for the Chuck Berry hit song and painted in cream and butterscotch tones — and the ones that he made for Hollywood.
For 'The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,' the cheeky spy series starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, Mr. Winfield built a gull-wing car, with mock flame throwers in the front end and a Corvair engine. For 'Get Smart,' the spy-spoof sitcom starring Don Adams as an inept secret agent, he designed a sports car with gadgets like a retractable cannon.
For 'Sleeper,' Woody Allen's 1973 science fiction comedy, he created a car with a bubble top over a Volkswagen chassis.
He also built 25 vehicles for the dystopian science-fiction film 'Blade Runner' (1982), based on designs by Syd Mead, a few of which were called Spinners. One of them was flown by the police officer played by Edward James Olmos.
One of the cars he built for 'Blade Runner turned up in 'Back to the Future Part II'
Mr. Winfield's son said that he preferred customizing cars to creating them for television and films.
'The movie cars were dictated to him, but his custom car customer would say, 'Gene, here's my car, do whatever your inspiration says,'' he said. 'That's how he turned out the Jade Idol.'
In addition to his son, from his marriage to Dolores Johnston, which ended in divorce, Mr. Winfield is survived by a daughter, Jana Troutt, from the same marriage; a daughter, Nancy Winfield, from another marriage, to Kathy Horrigan, which also ended in divorce; a son, Jerry Carrico, from another relationship; five grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Winfield said that he met with Ridley Scott, the director of 'Blade Runner,' every two or three weeks as he and his crew built the cars for the film.
'The only thing that I was unhappy about in the end results was that Ridley Scott had us do a lot of things that had to be absolutely near perfect as far as surface and shapes and colors,' he said in an interview with Blade Zone, a fan website. 'We went through hours, and hours, and hours of colors and all of this sort of thing, and then it was all filmed at night in the rain.'
With a laugh, he added, 'You don't see even half of what we did.'