Hunt Hollywood Housecar

The Hunt Hollywood house car was the creation of motion picture cameraman J. Roy Hunt, who won an Oscar for his camera work on Beau Geste and had a long career behind the lens. His last film, The Juggler with Kirk Douglas, was released in 1953.

Hunt built this vehicle in the late 1940s with the hope of manufacturing many more. That dream never came to pass, but many of his innovations were later incorporated by other manufacturers when motorhomes developed from one-of-a-kind vehicles to mainstream transportation.

The main deficiency of the Hunt Hollywood house car was its woefully inadequate power plant, a 1939 Mercury V8 95 horsepower engine (modern motorhomes have at least 300 horsepower). Those 95 ponies were hard pressed to push the 18-foot long two and a half ton house car up any significant grade.

A major restoration of the exterior skin of the Hunt was undertaken in 2005 by Monty Osborn, who spent over 300 hours sanding and polishing the Hunt to achieve a lustrous shine. The vehicle is from the Vince Martinico Collection.