Dennis Wilson wears a Desotos 17-Jewel Chronograph

Esquire put Two-Lane Blacktop on its April 1971 cover as its nomination for movie of the year and printed the entire screenplay inside, all before the film opened. Monte Hellman had cast two musicians who had never acted: James Taylor as The Driver and Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys' drummer, as The Mechanic, the pair hauling a primer-gray 1955 Chevy 150 across the country in a pink-slip race against Warren Oates's G.T.O., with Harry Dean Stanton turning up as an Oklahoma hitchhiker. The film flopped, and Esquire closed the year by handing its own prediction a Dubious Achievement award. Four decades later the Library of Congress put the picture in the National Film Registry, and neither Taylor nor Wilson ever took another acting role.

BAMF Style read the Mechanic's watch off the frames. "Like so many well-loved tools and the rest of the mechanic's attire, his stainless Desotos 17-jewel watch reflects plenty of wear," the site writes, describing a chronograph with a bright-red dial, luminous hour indices, two red sub-registers at 3 and 9 o'clock, and a black rotating bezel, on a black edge-stitched leather strap, with scratches on the crystal and the bezel markings rubbing off.

The brand is real but barely documented. Desotos was a label of Georges Gay SA of Les Bioux, Switzerland, which built chronographs on Valjoux 72 and 7733 movements from the 1960s into the 1980s before the name passed to Claude Meylan in 1988. BAMF concedes there is "little information about the watches they produced during this period, and in particular almost nothing about red-dialed chronographs like Wilson clearly sports," which is exactly what the watch has become to collectors: in the article's words, "something of a grail among enthusiasts and fans."