David Tinsley
Twenty-five years ago, David Tinsley didn’t really have any connection to the film industry. He knew a lot about cars and was working in collision repair. But things changed one day when he was driving to work in his 1964 Pontiac GTO.
“I was driving a GTO to work, and a guy pulled me over — he was blowing his horn, saying, ‘Pull over, I want to talk to you!’” says Tinsley. “So I pulled over and he said, ‘Man, we love this car. Can we use it in a music video?’”
The stranger was a broker who sourced cars for music videos — and he wanted to feature Tinsley’s GTO in Brooks & Dunn’s 1999 video for “Missing You.” That was Tinsley’s gateway into the industry and what would ultimately become Ragtop Picture Cars.
Talking to the Scene from a replica service station he built on his Lebanon property, Tinsley, who’s soft-spoken and polite with a neatly trimmed Vandyke beard, gestures toward autographed headshots that line the walls. Nicole Kidman, Taylor Swift, Randy Travis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Carrie Underwood — all people he’s worked with in some capacity. He moved his operation to this property in 2007 and built the mock gas station, which doubles as his office, to look like something right out of 1950s Route 66 Americana. A handful of big names have come out to shoot there, including the American Pickers guys, Ashley McBryde and Alan Jackson. (Jackson, Tinsley explains, touched down on the six-acre property in a helicopter about 15 years back, much to the surprise of the neighbors.)
David Tinsley
But Ragtop’s real bread and butter isn’t the service station — it’s Tinsley’s many vehicles. He’s got a warehouse with a few dozen about 15 minutes away, but most of his inventory is right here on the property. Old Pontiacs and Buicks, a 1947 Studebaker, a strange little turquoise Nash Metropolitan and an orange 2018 McLaren 570S that looks like a rocketship. There are loads of Crown Vics — a popular cop-car model, naturally — as well as a fleet of yellow taxis and several vehicles outfitted to look like ambulances and news vans. He’s also still got the ’64 GTO that earned him the Brooks & Dunn gig.
Pickup trucks from the 1950s and ’60s tend to be popular rentals, especially in Nashville-shot music videos. But Tinsley has sent vehicles as far as South America, and they’ve been featured in everything from the AMC series Dark Winds and 2018’s Robert Redford-starring The Old Man & the Gun to CMT’s Still the King, ABC’s Nashville, the James Brown biopic Get On Up and 2018’s Oscar-winning Green Book. As a matter of fact, Green Book director Peter Farrelly insisted on buying a 1959 Ford Wagon off of Tinsley, one of 13 Ragtop vehicles featured in the film. (“I still kinda wish I wouldn’t have sold it,” he says.) He’s also got a few smashed-up vehicles around the property. Every once in a while, a director will need a car that looks like it’s been in a wreck — even though it pains Tinsley to smash up an otherwise perfectly good car.
Then there are the specialty replicas: a Dukes of Hazzard-style General Lee, a Back to the Future-style DeLorean and the pièce de résistance — a gleaming, black-and-red Batmobile built on the chassis of a 1976 Lincoln and featuring all the campy bells and whistles of the 1960s Adam West series. These cars, Tinsley explains, mostly rent out for events, parties and car shows.
David Tinsley
As successful as the business has been, Tinsley is looking to wind down. He sold 90 cars to his friends Kevin and Katelyn Hanson of the newly launched Picture Car Company in February of last year, bringing his inventory down to his current 146. (The most he ever owned at once, he reckons, was 248.) He’s hoping to fully retire from the film business at the end of this year so he and his wife can focus mostly on car shows like Gulfport, Mississippi’s Cruisin’ the Coast and what are known as cruise-ins — informal car events where folks show off their rides and talk shop.
“When I retire completely I’m going to keep about 20 cars,” he says, before the Scene asks if he has a favorite.
“Nah, I like ’em all.”
Photographed by Eric England on Tinsley’s Lebanon property
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