ONE OF THOSE DREAMS THAT REFUSES TO DIE

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.