‘Sons Of Anarchy’: Meet the Man Behind the Motorcycles

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/28/sons-of-anarchy-meet-the-man-behind-the-motorcycles/ ‘Sons Of Anarchy’: Meet the Man Behind the Motorcycles By Jonathan Welsh

FX Proper bikes for a motorcycle gang, found, fixed and styled by Chris Gorden and John Landon. If you are building a television series around a motorcycle gang, and you want the bikes to be as authentic as the characters, where do you start? In the case of “Sons of Anarchy,” which is in its third season on FX, you might start by watching the Adam Sandler movie “Bedtime Stories.” Sure, it’s a children’s movie, but it includes a bunch of cool cars and one fantastic motorcycle jump where a rider, a passenger and a Harley-Davidson sail though the open doors of a freight-train boxcar. And according to Chris Gorden there were no blue screens or trick photography to help out, at least not with the jump itself.

“I had a stunt man and a stunt woman who actually did that jump through the train,” says Gorden, who handled vehicle acquisitions for the film and now wrangles motorcycles used in the FX series.

He says there’s a lot more to his job than just buying a bunch of motorcycles. After getting the call to work on “Sons,” he and John Landon, a mechanic he has worked with for years, had just two weeks to find nine bikes that would be appropriate for the show.

“Television is nothing like the movies,” Gorden says. “When you’re working on a feature film you get lots of money and time.” For the TV series he had little of either, so he started at a motorcycle shop frequented by motorcycle club members. You don’t say “gang.”

While Gorden and Landon are pretty happy with the motorcycles they assembled for the show, there’s still plenty of work. Certain actors fall a lot, bending and breaking handlebars, clutch levers, and bodywork. While he hates to see a bike get banged up, Gorden is sympathetic. After all, some of the actors only recently learned to ride. “I understand that they have to memorize pages of dialog and then try to remember how to ride motorcycles that may be unfamiliar,” he says.