“BEST GODDAMN CAR ON THE LOT”

For a few hours on a Saturday afternoon last summer, the streets of Los Angeles were crawling with repo men. Fifty vehicles prowled the desolate districts south of downtown L.A. in search of a luminous 1964 Chevy Malibu. But these weren’t your ordinary repo men: they were participants in a scavenger hunt organized by the Alamo Drafthouse, an offbeat Texas theater that had literally taken its show on the road by embarking on a 6,000-mile odyssey across America to show eleven classic movies on a giant forty-by-twenty-foot inflatable screen in the places where they were filmed. They screened Once upon a Time in the West in Monument Valley, Utah, and It Came from Outer Space in Roswell, New Mexico; but Englishman Alex Cox’s 1984 film Repo Man was an odd choice for a film to represent L.A. With a cheerless landscape of junkyards, industrial lots, and makeshift skid-row shelters—what Cult Flicks and Trash Pics describes as “a place that appears to be crumbling before the camera”—we’re a long way from Sunset Boulevard. Compared with the palm-studded, chlorine-bleached L.A. of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Repo Man feels like it was shot in another galaxy.

The search for an elusive gold 1964 Chevy Malibu drives Repo Man’s plot, so Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League bought one off eBay for about $3,000 and offered it up as the grand prize. On one of the hottest days of the year I took the Harbor Freeway downtown and made my way south toward the graffiti-blasted concrete corridor that constitutes the L.A. River. I parked at the dusty lot at Third and Santa Fe where the film freaks were lined up at the registration tent two hundred deep, sweltering in the heat. Tim, a fair-skinned ­red-headed Texan, had the look of a man who spends all of his time in the dark enclosure of the projection booth and was slightly stunned to find himself in this shadowless place where the sunlight slanted crazily in the smog. He agreed to “embed” me with one of the fifty teams lined up to pay fifty bucks a pop for a chance at a forty-year-old Chevy.

What I didn’t tell Tim was that I am a Repo Man expert in my own right, and as a frequent visitor to Union Station, I know my way around the ass end of downtown better than most Angelenos. What’s more, I had a secret weapon up my sleeve and no intention of keeping my expertise to myself. Journalistic objectivity be damned, I was going to...