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“I’ve been in love with cars since I was five-years-old,” says Gino Lucci, the founder and president of Picture Cars East. “I come from three generations of deep-sea divers, but that work never appealed to me—automobiles did. I live and breathe automobiles.” Lucci, 59, has turned his passion into a thriving business: His company customizes and rents all kinds of vehicles to film, TV, advertising and video productions. “We specialize in everything the industry needs when it comes to vehicles,” he explains.

Lucci is a true son of Red Hook, having opened a body-repair shop there in 1970. “Everyone knows me and I know almost everyone in the neighborhood,” he says. “Most of my employees are local people. A few were out of work, on welfare; they now have families, checkbooks. I got to know the good people, the bad people, the people who hang out on corners doing nothing all day. So we took some of them in, and they became pretty good citizens.”

After expanding into the movie business in the mid-1970s, Picture Cars East started eating up Red Hook real estate for its permanent fleet of 250 to 300 cars (Lucci also has a network of dealers and collectors from whom he can rent vehicles). Recently, the company also got city authorization to use Pier 11 for additional storage. “The film industry has vehicles that need to be housed somewhere while they’re not shooting,” Lucci says. “They had to go as far as Bayonne, New Jersey, in order to be housed overnight, and it became very costly because the drivers are all teamsters, and on an hourly basis they’re very, very much up there. When you need to return a vehicle to a garage and it takes two or three hours to get there, there’s an awful lot of additional expense. Now if a movie comes in to shoot in New York for three months, they can drive their trucks into the warehouse on Pier 11 at the end of the day.”

In addition to the rental fleet, Lucci has a personal collection. “I have some cars that I purchased six or seven years ago that I’ve been offered probably in excess of ten times what I paid,” he says. “Those vehicles I try not to expose to the film industry, because anything can happen, and when something is original, it’s only original once.” Still, he makes exceptions, as when Tom Cruise requested a classic Mustang for War of the Worlds and ended up driving Lucci’s own pristine 1966 model.

Picture Cars East can usually fulfill the most out-there requests. “We once did a Law & Order shoot where we supplied them with a $5 million Ferrari,” Lucci recalls. “I would think that’s pretty exclusive. The rental fee depends on the value of the car and what it has to do. If you need a Ferrari for a photo shoot and the car is parked with maybe a model inside it, that would be one fee. But if you want to race the car down the street and into a wall, that’s something else. Compliments of Mercedes, we just blew up a 2007 S-Class worth $117,000 for The Devil Wears Prada—and before we blew it up, we cut it in half. We handle anything mechanical, bodywork, paint; anything like that is done in-house.”

Picture Cars East can supply drivers as well, including Lucci himself. “I’ve been in the Screen Actors Guild for 25 years,” he says. “My specialty is precision driving. The trickiest movie I’ve done was The Thomas Crown Affair. I needed to drive a 24-foot truck through an archway in the back of the New York Public Library, and the truck had less than a two-inch clearance on either side.”

Still, this is nothing compared with the stress of being in the spotlight after so many years behind the scenes: Lately, Lucci & Co. have been filming episodes of a new weekly reality series called Shooting Stars, which is due to debut on the Speed TV network late this summer. Will the Red Hook crew do for cars what the American Chopper dudes did for hogs?

Picture Cars East, 72 Huntington St between Henry and Hicks Sts (718-852-2300, pixxcars.com)