It has qualifications that make it noteworthy: star power, speed, danger, champagne in big
bottles and sexy girls. I’m talking
about Steve McQueen’s 4 decades old dream to film the greatest auto racing
movie ever to hit the silver screen. It
got rolling when he sold a screenplay to CBS Cinema Center Films, then trying
to move up from the small tube to big screen projects.
Steve personally expounded on his dream once when I was running for
him the work print of a featurette I had written and was producing, the subject
being ‘The Making of McQueen’s Le Mans Racing Picture”. His hands went flying expressively in the air
and he talked of the big rush competitive racing drivers experienced. It was like flying with eagles, he said. He wanted his audience to feel what he felt,
and the only way he knew to do that was to produce the greatest racing movie
ever.
Unfortunately, his dream wasn’t anything like the screenplay
he’d sold to Cinema Center, and the production that followed was one of the sourest
in the history iof filmmaking. His mentor, director John Sturges, quit, declaring it 'the worst experience of his professional career.' Costs soared. Three big name Hollywood writers dueled side by side in their own cabanas, churning out scenes they hoped might be approved for the next day's shoot. Steve sulked, rejected everything, refused to come out of his cabana. It was rumored he chewed cordite, known from Forsythe's The Day of The Jackal novel to give one a deathly grey complexion. Time passed. The picture went into hiatus. Steve eventually sold a bunch of personal property and put up money to assure it would go forward.
The film finally was cobbled together and did make it into movie houses, and,
depending on whether you are a film buff or a racing fan, it is either a colossal
dud or a decent quasi-documentary. To
me, it is interesting that, 40 years after the event, Steve’s big idea and the
way he defied the uber-lords of the Hollywood studio system to pursue his own
vision has become a legend. I can still
see him, that skeptical little smile playing on his famous features as he tries
to explain why something so ephemeral as a feeling of joy should be worth the
effort. Looking back, I think that maybe
it was...but the way he went about it took a heavy toll.
