DUDE WHERES MY CAR MOVIE
DUDE WHERES MY CAR DRIVERS

I have rarely ever carried that much cash, and definitely not with the minimal hourly pay I earned back then. When I eventually tracked down my car in a seedy riverside lot, I was told I’d need to pay $100 cash to get it back. Like anyone who’s had their car towed, I was befuddled and all I could think about was getting my vehicle back. I couldn’t have been away for more than five minutes, but when I got back, the first thing that went through my mind was a profane variation of “Dude, where’s my car?” If I remember correctly a quarter century later, I went to the police station in 30 Rock and was told that it had probably been towed (at which point my thought was, “How did that happen so fast?”) and I would need to go to some West Side yard to pick it up. Photo from NBCUniversal, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons 50th Street - I don’t remember which side of the building I parked on. I parked right near this famous sign on either W. I rushed back on the Long Island Expressway, through the Midtown Tunnel to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, put on my emergency blinkers, jumped out of my car and dashed upstairs to the third floor newsroom to get my resume. That’s when I realized I had left my resume at the office, and in the era before ubiquitous email, you had to bring a hard copy to an interview. After I awoke with hours to spare, I took the subway to the bus to my grandma’s to pick up my car. One day, I took a day off from work for a job interview across the Hudson River in New Jersey. I was living in Manhattan, but given my love of walking and the dearth and cost of parking in the city, I kept my car at my grandmother’s house in Queens. This mind-numbing and wallet-lightening process became part of my life story back in the ‘90s when I was working at NBC Nightly News.

DUDE WHERES MY CAR DRIVERS

Taking advantage of that inconsistency, and the knowledge that most drivers are unaware of the laws that protect them, predatory towing companies snatch cars and then create a gauntlet of financial and logistical obstacles to getting the vehicles back.

State and local towing laws, where they exist, vary widely in both their scope and their power.

Who among us hasn’t emerged from a store or mall into a packed parking lot only to wonder where the heck you parked? And I know many people, like me, have returned to where their car was parked and found it’s not there, having been towed away. I can’t be the only one who feels this way. It resonated with me at the time, and still does two decades later. While the trailer was inane, the title was a stroke of genius.

DUDE WHERES MY CAR MOVIE

In 2000, three of the biggest 20-something stars of the moment - Ashton Kutcher, Seann William Scott and Jennifer Garner - starred in a movie called “ Dude, Where’s My Car.” The film looked so stupid that despite my love of juvenile humor, I never had any interest in seeing it, and haven’t to this day.

Dude wheres my car