So because I’m Geeky McGeekerson, Mayor of Geekville, I decided to throw Atlanta and Texarkana into Mapquest whilst watching Snowman barrel through the Cop Oldsmobiles at the Southern Classic.
Easy as can be – Jump on 20 W, take 71 N, pick up the Coors, reverse direction, sing “East Bound and Down” and collect the cash – and according to Mapquest, with over 7 hours to spare!
So my questions (to be clear, I already know about the Coors thing):
Was I-20 done at the time? From some of the scenes in the movie, it looks like some pieces of some interstate were brand new and others were brand spanking new. But of course there’s no guarantee they shot the thing on the actual route.
What was a reasonable trip time from Atlanta to Texarkana back then? What kind of speed would you have to do on the open highways to do it in 28 hours?
What was the alleged route in the movie?
The Southern Classic trucking/dirt racing/all around good-ol’-boy event during which the movie takes place – does it exist? Where (like, what fairgounds)? Far enough east of Atlanta to make the trip worth Big Enos’ bet?
From this Wikipedia article, it looks like I-20 was complete during the time of the movie although some minor changes have been made since. I grew up fairly close to I-20 in Louisiana and I always got the impression that it was there long before I was born in 1973.
A co-worker watched some of the filming when he was a kid in Atlanta. He tells me that a lot of the interstate scenes were filmed on I-285, the loop around Atlanta and it wasn’t opened to traffic yet.
Huh. By that route it’s only 665 miles downtown to downtown. I realize Smokey wasn’t exactly a documentary, but couldn’t they at least have shortened the time or introduced something to keep them off the interstates?
Ah, Atlanta’s beltway, Jplacer. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.
Weren’t they on a LOT of two lane backroads? IIRC they spent more time on those than the Interstate. That would add a whole bunch of time to the trip. Plus the speed limit was only 55 back then.
My completely uneducated WAG, is that it wasn’t illegal to transport Coors beer that route, but illegal to transport any large shipment of alcohol across state lines in that fashion. Alcohol is both state and federally regulated.
To my knowledge, Coors beer was available to the Western states by choice of the brewer, not by law.
Going to point out that there’s other hazards on an interstate for a trucker: Weigh stations. The Snowman’s rig was probably a bit overloaded. Also, there’s no reason that the movie had to take place in the time it was filmed. The Dukes of Hazard was based on a 1970s movie… but the story the movie is from was one that was repeated time and again in the '40s. Junior Johnson and all that.
My Mom was at the University of Georgia back in the early 1970s and she actually went on a few “Coors runs” back then.
It was one of those lazy rainy Sundays and the only thing on TV worth a damn was Smokey and the Bandit. I was around 14 or 15 at the time. I’d seen the movie before, but was at that point finally old enough to wonder what the big deal with Coors beer was. She told me about the beer runs and how maybe two cars would drive to Texas and pick up all the Coors that could be fit into the car or van or whatever.
She said that Coors (by choice) didn’t sell its beer east of the Mississippi back then, so even though it was just another crappy beer, it still held a certain cachet, as it were. I can’t remember how much she and her friends were able to sell it for, but I remember that it was enough to pay the rent if money was tight.