Dark Knight Cruises La Verne’s Streets

The Boydmobile is caught in a rare state of idleness on a California highway.

Did you ever think for a moment how the creators of ultra-realistic, street-racing video games like Project Gotham reproduce the sounds of high-performance cars? Their talent scouts search for cars – it’s a short list – and bring them back to a state-of-the-art sound lab to record their decibel-deafening power.

That’s how they found Boyd Marshall of La Verne, who owns a 2003 silver Lamborghini Murcielago, which sports a six-speed manual transmission and four-wheel drive.

A “car agent” who had spied his Murcielago and had heard the growl of its 6.2-litre version of the Lamborghini V12 engine, knew it emitted the perfect sound that the makers of the new Project Gotham video game were trying to capture.

Boyd drove his “Lambo” to Church Automotive in Wilmington, Calif., where it was promptly hooked up to its dynamometer, revved up to 7,500 RPMs and surrounded with a battery of microphones, getting more attention than Scarlett Johansson’s décolletage at the Oscars.

The money Boyd was paid was more than enough to fill up his gas-guzzling Italian star a few times. But when you’re in the Lambo club, it was more the attention than the money that Boyd remembered.

“Warner Bros. told me that they wished they had only found my car sooner for their last Batman movie,” Boyd said. That’s because when the Dark Night is not patrolling Gotham City as Batman, Bruce Wayne loves to drive around in his incredible Lamborghini Murcielago LP640.

Boyd might not be Batman, but last weekend he returned from a Vegas road trip with about 30 other high-performance car enthusiasts. They call their jaunt the “Paupers’ Run.” And just like movie stars, their cars received the kid-glove royal treatment, being carefully valet-parked behind the velvet ropes at the Bellagio Hotel on the Strip.

That’s not all. The paparazzi turned out to photograph this rare assembly of muscle power collected under one roof. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The real name for this bold and brazen brand of photographers is actually the “car-parazzi.

So there you have it. La Verne has a real video game star in its community. Keep your eyes open because you never know when “Boydman” will next be patrolling La Verne’s streets in his Lamborghini to grab a late-night latte at his favorite hideout.