Despite the high-technology of his Lexus, there is a shop called Cars with Class in his Santa Monica neighborhood that sells classic cars in mint condition. Several cars there seem to keep calling Ben-Victor back to window shop. "It's got the most, most beautiful, classic cherried-out cars. I go in there every once in a while and drool over a few of them. I want to get a classic, old-school 1967 Buick Skylark convertible to cruise around in. This year might be the year. That's where my heart is, old-school cars."
Ben-Victor laughs at his need for one of those cars, especially the gorgeous candy-apple red 1970 Oldsmobile 442 convertible he likes to revisit. "We used to laugh at the kids who drove those things in the 1970s because they used to zoom around in Brooklyn thinking they were tough. We used to call them hitters, synonymous with greasers. Now I'm going, 'Man, those things are beautiful.' I want one so bad," he says.
Car He Learned To Drive In
Ben-Victor initially learned to drive on his dad's lap through the streets of Brooklyn. "I drove around the block or in the country on the weekends. I was four or five and I was good."
By the time he was 12, he learned to drive in his dad's early-1960s Plymouth. "It had fins in the back, not shark fins like the late 1950s Caddy, it had some angular fin in the back, which was really cool."
First Car Bought
"The first car I bought was when I came out here to LA in the late 1980s, and I got some old lady's late-1970s Datsun. If it had four wheels I'd be surprised," Ben-Victor laughs. He paid $375 for the clunker. It had a stickshift, which he could handle because he learned how to drive a manual tranny on a yellow Hornet he co-owned with a friend when he was in college.
The Datsun lasted six months. "I left it at a gas station on Sunset Boulevard. I got a job and hit the road, and I left this car at a guy's gas station." As a struggling actor, he would go wherever the gig was. That job was 1988's "Pass the Ammo" with Bill Paxton. Later, Ben-Victor left two other broken-down cars, including a Jeep, at Hollywood gas stations in the early years of his career. "I left for a job, the guys would fix them, and I wouldn't pick them up. I would just tell them to keep the car."