The original “The Fast And The Furious” (not the new Folgers-themed film) tried its best to be a very accurate movie about tuner culture, and sometimes it did a passable job. The rest of the time the movie did substantially worse — we all remember Brian’s floor falling off in that first big race — but one moment has always stuck out as particularly egregious. Brian rolls up to Dom’s shop with a Supra on a trailer, and everyone is stunned that this A80 has a 2JZ-GE engine under its hood: the only engine we got in that car, and the boring non-turbo version to boot. As it turns out, though, there was an earlier draft of the movie where this scene made perfect sense.
The orange Supra was famously a personal car of Craig Lieberman, credited as the “import car consultant” for “The Fast And The Furious,” but the original script for the film never called for a Supra. In fact, it never called for anything 2J-powered at all. Back in the script’s “Blue draft” of May 2000, Brian’s hero car was a Nissan 240SX pulled from an LAPD impound lot — a 240SX with a six-cylinder Skyline engine swapped in. No sh*t indeed.
‘Omigod. A Skyline motor.’
Had Brian rolled up to Dom’s shop in an already-swapped car — an idea eventually reused for “Tokyo Drift,” where Sean Boswell crashes Han’s RB26-swapped S15 Silvia and eventually reuses its engine in his Mustang — the line would make sense. No one expects to pop the hood on a 240SX and see a Skyline’s RB sitting there. A KA24, sure; an SR20 is neat but expected. An I6 out of a Skyline is neat, regardless of which mill from the line it ends up being.
By the time of the script’s next revision just two weeks later, according to Lieberman, Brian’s final hero car changed to a Mitsubishi Eclipse. Neither the Eclipse nor the 240SX had enough open space in the roof to make Brian’s rescue of Vince really work, though, so Lieberman’s Supra and its targa roof ended up getting the hero role instead. For some reason, the engine-surprise line was left in, and we got the nonsensical scene that remains in the final movie. But at some point, early on, that line did actually make sense.
