G'day Dave - terrific post. Years ago I ran into Paul Naylor in Sydney, who'd just come back from the Daintree Rainforest filming The Thin Red Line. He said the director, Terrence Mallick (Badlands etc) was an absolute nut on detail , in particular paint colour for vehicles and he'd been consulting an expert, I think an ex-marine, at the museum at Fort Knox, Kentucky. I don't know what the colour was exactly, but Mallick had gone to great pains to match it with the Fort Knox recipe and all the vehicles were required to receive this colour - whatever it was. Paul also told this story of Mallick desperately needing a Diamond T wrecker and they located one way up in the sticks on an aboriginal mission. They negotiated a fee for it and spent ages getting it going - fitting with a Falcon motor or a Holden motor if I remember correctly - trucking back to the Daintree, giving it a coat of Fort Knox green and it appears in the film as a tiny, blurry speck on a distant horizon on an airfield for a millionth of a second. It's at least 10 years since I heard this, so I might be a bit rubbery on it's exactness but this is pretty much what I remember...
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