Ed Iskenderian died on February 4, 2026, at 104 years old. He outlived nearly every hot rodder he ever raced against, worked with, or roasted in his famous cartoon attack ads. Now, thanks to director Cheyanne Kane’s documentary “Isky,” you can hear the man tell his own story, in his own voice, from the comfort of your couch.
The film hit Apple TV and Amazon Prime in October 2026. Kane started filming when Iskenderian was 98. “Don’t feel quite as peppy as I did at 97,” he quipped, “but I’m hoping to make 100 because it will be easy figuring.”
He made it past 100 with room to spare. The documentary is less a conventional biography than a guided tour through one man’s memory palace. Kane doesn’t narrate over Iskenderian.
She follows him, camera rolling, as he rummages through the trunk of an old Cadillac looking for cassette tapes he stashed there four decades prior. He finds them. On one tape, the voice of Ed Winfield, his mentor and one of the first performance cam grinders in history, crackles to life discussing combustion chamber quench.
Winfield was born in 1901. Iskenderian was nearly 100 when he played the tape. He was 102 when we watched him do it.
That layering of time is what makes the film feel urgent even though it’s about a centenarian recounting mid-century drag racing. Iskenderian founded Isky Racing Cams in 1947 after buying a grinding machine and converting it into a cam grinder. His first camshaft profile was, by his own admission, a total guess.
He shipped it because it was the only one he had. It happened to deliver real power gains for stock-car racers who ordered it. “Ha, who knew that would work?” was the standard Iskenderian punchline, deployed with a shrug after every story about stumbling into brilliance.
He was still coming into the shop in Gardena, California, well past his hundredth birthday. The building has housed Isky Cams since the mid-1960s. Ancient machines hum in dim light.
Workers hand-grind, polish, and package camshafts much the way they did decades ago. Every machinist in the place treats him like family, steadying his arm as he walks past workstations, clearing the floor of trip hazards. “People learn from Mr. Isky,” one employee says in the film.
The documentary threads between Iskenderian’s Depression-era youth, when Model Ts sat in junkyards for five bucks, and his later years signing autographs at car shows with his glasses held together by lead weights and fishing line. In between, there are the Cam Wars of the 1950s, when Isky and rival Howard Cams went at each other through savage cartoon ads placed in hot rod magazines after every major race. Losers got skewered.
It was marketing genius wrapped in genuine animosity. His stories about legends come fast. Ask about Ed Pink and Iskenderian remembers him as a kid ushering at the movie theater.
“He’s 92!” you say. “He wasn’t then,” Iskenderian replies. Ask about Keith Black and you get a tale about Edelbrock sending a free six-carburetor aluminum manifold that Black refused to install because he didn’t want to be the guinea pig.
Kane produced the film with Kerry Ann Enright and Vigilants. It circulated through festivals before landing on streaming platforms this fall. The timing stings — Iskenderian passed away eight months before anyone could watch it at home.
What survives on screen is a man who found camshafts “mysterious” and “exotic” and spent 77 years grinding them, a man who shaped an egg in his hand and saw a lobe profile that would unlock power in a small-block Chevy. The shop in Gardena is still open, still run by his children. The original 1946 cam grinder sits inside, freshly painted, like it’s waiting for someone to ask it a question.
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