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"The Racing Scene"
James
Garner's The Racing Scene:
Its
Place Among Auto Racing Films For Theaters
By
William Edgar
Something
you no doubt already know is that Hollywood and the
racing-about of automobiles have been thrill partners
for a long, long time.
Early on, there were the old Keystone Comedies
and most primitive of filmed car chases and races. Later
it was Mickey Rooney and his race track hijinks in The
Big Wheel, and Clark Gable’s To
Please A Lady, both with story line and star
ending up in preposterous wheel-to-wheel duels at the
Indy 500. That
was 1949 and 1950 respectively, about the time I
started attending real races where the finish was not
already scripted. Concurrently, a new awareness of
what auto racing really was was changing Hollywood,
and its racing movies began looking a bit more like
reality at the tracks.
But still there were those mid-1960s
throwbacks, Elvis Presley as race car driver
“Lucky” Jackson in Viva
Las Vegas, and Blake Edwards’ The
Great Race, its dedication to Laurel and Hardy
ample to define the film.
The Love
Bug, concerning a race-prepped VW Beetle named “Herbie,”
followed to no surprise.
Meanwhile, when in need of bona fide auto
racing on screen, I turned to the amazing Shell
historical films of the Grand Prix, as well as getting
lost in my own dreams of someday making racing films
– about real racing.
In the early 60s, before those Elvis and Edwards
flings, a certain short racing film made for theater
came on the scene to the delight of the few who saw
it. Called
The Sound of
Speed, directed by sports car racer Bruce Kessler,
this beautifully shot 35mm gem showcased Lance
Reventlow’s Scarab, with most of its photography at
Riverside Raceway.
There was no narration, only the natural sounds
of racing, testing actually, with the sound track of
the car presented in stereo, not common at that time.
The film ran in a Los Angeles movie theater
only for a brief while, as Bruce and Lance’s effort
to qualify it for an Academy Award in the theatrical
documentary category.
It was also entered at the Cannes Film
Festival. Sadly,
with only very limited release, The
Sound of Speed disappeared from sight.
But for those who did see it, this work stirred
in them a desire to look deeper into the art of motor
racing cinema, and doubtless inspired other
filmmakers.
In 1966, something truly fresh began to happen when
John Frankenheimer brought out his huge movie, Grand
Prix, titled after that resoundingly elite world
it strived to enter. Frankenheimer’s
earnest assault on archetypical racing movies proved
imaginatively brave and more believable, especially
when his camera was in the car, or shooting it from
trackside streaking past.
Audiences flocked to see this breakthrough
movie, if only for its superb action and violent
crashes, and outstanding
cinematography. And
all eyes went to James Garner as fictitious American
driver Pete Aron going up against the best of
international GP maestros, many of whom were actual
world class drivers playing parts.
Phil Hill was a chap called Tim Randolph, while
the other Hill, Graham, became Bob Turner.
We were getting there, but with many laps to
go.
That same year from France came Claude Lelouch’s A
Man And A Woman, and with it a race driver’s
passion that all but substituted for racing reality, a
stylistic conceit that would be repeated a decade
later through Al Pacino’s title role in the brooding
motodrama Bobby
Deerfield. Would
racing on the screen ever really be racing?
We all wondered.
In 1969, three years after Grand
Prix and testing a new age when movie goers
plainly wanted more than pastiche, two new racing
films got underway.
One was Winning,
an Indy-based picture starring Paul Newman and Robert
Wagner. Playing
rival drivers called Joe and Luther, Paul and RJ
looked correct in a race car and, helped along by
Newman’s love for and understanding of legitimate
racing, the movie worked for many.
The other racing production before the cameras
that year had James Garner, again, in the lead.
This time, in The
Racing Scene, Jim was playing just Jim, now more
team owner than driver, with the film’s mission to
break Hollywood’s racing movie mold.
It was, to be absolutely honest about it, that
dreaded marquee put-off spelled D-o-c-u-m-e-n-t-a-r-y.
This is where I came in, as documentary film
writer with a privileged upbringing on the sidelines
of motor racing.
Two years earlier I had paired with ABC Sports hotshot
director Andy Sidaris, who was doing Wide
World of Sports. With
Andy directing and me writing, we made a high-profile
television special for ABC on the life and speedy
times of Craig Breedlove.
It was in the exhaust flames and dust of
Breedlove’s record-breaking jet car that Andy and I,
with finances pulled together by producer Barry
Scholer, began The
Racing Scene project in the company of fellow
racing aficionado James Garner.
Jim was primed for the picture and ready to roll film,
in this case an economical wide-screen color 35mm
process called Techniscope, and, in essence, we set
out to make our auto racing version of The
Endless Summer.
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Production
meeting: Golden Gate Bridge, Aug 1969
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| From
left: Barry Scholer, Andy Sidaris, Pierre
Adidge, William Edgar, James Garner, Earl Rath. |
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By
the first weeks of 1969 we were in the initial
outline stage, as meetings with Garner, his American
International Racing (AIR) team, and the
Sidaris-Scholer production group got underway.
Our first outing of cameras, cast and crew at
the end of January was the 24 Hours of Daytona with
Garner’s two Lola T-70 coupes.
Jim’s Ed Leslie/Lothar Motschenbacher car
finished 2nd and his Dave Jordan/Scooter
Patrick driving duo came 7th.
Not a bad start for AIR and our film, we all
agreed. In
March, at the 12 Hours of Sebring, we took our first
really hard knocks.
The film was not all about closed course racing.
Garner himself had run the grueling Baja
California off-road race the year before and done
well. We
used that 16mm action and aerial footage to build
our split screen opening segment of The
Racing Scene, inserting 35mm scenes of Jim and
his co-driver Scooter Patrick as they wrestled with
their Ford Bronco.
With a lot of effort and long shooting days
and nights helmed by Sidaris, and 6-day weeks in the
cutting room on Sunset Boulevard with editor Jim
Gross, our film was actually coming together.
By July we had an hour-long rough cut of The
Racing Scene and were showing it to agents and
potential distributors. It
looked good and felt great.
But we needed more races.
In early August, at a meeting of Garner,
Filmways’ Martin Ransohoff who was producing Catch-22,
and Frank Wells who would years later be president
of Disney, it was decided to buy a new John Surtees
open-wheel car and enter the final races of the 1969
Formula A series. Timing caused us to miss the
Mosport Formula A event in Canada on August 24th,
but the very next day, after shooting scenes of Jim
driving northbound over the Golden Gate Bridge, we
were at Sears Point testing the Surtees car just in
from England. There
was plenty of work ahead to make it competitive.
We were indeed crossing our own bridges and
getting it on!
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Adjusting
Scooter Patrick's helmetcam - Sept 1969
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| From
left: Pierre Adidge, Earl Rath, Scooter
Patrick, Robert Fischetti, Max Kelley, Andy
Sidaris. |
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Our
tempo quickened with the new car and challenge at
hand.
We did a Filmways publicity screening on
August 27th, and three days later were on a plane to
Connecticut to run the Surtees in its first race, at
Lime Rock Park, on Labor Day.
And labor it was, working in the heat and
“hummiddy” – as Jim kept us in laughs – of
the Litchfield Hills.
Our spirits went to red line.
But, governed by the consequences of real
racing far from Hollywood, we were again down and
out of luck on the Lime Rock track, and with only a
week to make things better for St. Jovite in the
Mount Tremblant region outside Montreal.
On Sunday September 7th at St. Jovite we
finally got the Surtees running in top form, with
Scooter Patrick at the wheel.
But the spectacular and fully filmed first
lap pile-up that included Scooter would take us out
for good.
There would be no more races for The
Racing Scene.
What we did have in the can was a real film on real
racing, and a spot on picture of what it was to run
a racing car team – the whole truth of it, all the
Good and the Bad. Scooter
survived without a scratch, so there was no Ugly.
We had played every foot of film for what
might happen, and not knowing it until it did.
As Jim said in the film’s beginning, from
behind the wheel of his revving Baja Bronco, “Ask
me if we think we can go down the road quicker than
300 other guys, I’d probably say ‘We sure as
hell are gonna find out!’”
The rest of The
Racing Scene production story is follow-up,
leading toward a theatrical release of the film.
We busied ourselves shooting loose ends to
make certain scenes work, such as the airplane and
airport, and other links.
By October 17th there was a completed cut
screening at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, and two
weeks of changes later, using a 35mm Moviola in a
spare bedroom at home, I began writing
narration-to-picture. Jim
loved what I wrote, but it was through our year-long
association, one of the best times in my life, that
I really got to know Garner’s mind about racing
and the way he expressed himself.
My goal was to make Jim’s words in our film
truly what he was thinking and then to write it how
he would say it.
We recorded Garner at mid-December in a 2-day
session, laid in his narration, and dubbed The
Racing Scene at the end of February 1970.
The release of The
Racing Scene is a tale of hopes and heartbreaks.
In screening after screening we delighted the
press with our real racing film, but forever
struggled with the mechanics of making a proper
distribution of our documentary – that evil word
again. Warners turned it down, as did other studios.
Garner himself even considered coming to the
rescue and follow his own course of distributing in
the U.S. and Europe.
On April 23rd we put on happy faces and had a
cast-&-crew showing of The
Racing Scene at Goldwyn, congratulating
ourselves on praise from gathered friends and the
press.
Five days later, Garner and Sidaris meet with
Marty Ransohoff, and others, where perhaps a dozen
plans were considered to bring the film to the
movie-going public.
But all remained more or less up in the air.
Eventually, The
Racing Scene had a far-too-short release in
smaller theaters scattered around the country,
ending in a disintegration of the artist-distributor
relationship between Jim’s Cherokee Productions
and Marty’s Filmways.
And, for years, The
Racing Scene would go unseen, except for more
recent occasional runs on cable television,
commercials inserted.
Shortly after James Garner’s feature documentary
dropped from view, another star with zeal for
racing, Steve McQueen, playing a driver called
Michael Delaney, experienced his own much-publicized
disappointments while trying to make Le
Mans the way he wanted it. The
next year, Paul Newman signed to host a racing
documentary special for television called Once
Upon a Wheel, which I was brought in to write,
and from that grew a series of half-hour TV
documentaries on Indy, NHRA Drags, AMA Dirt Track,
NASCAR, Formula A, and Can-Am.
All on real racing, but all for the
“little” screen.
The following year, after Andy Sidaris
directed the ABC Sports coverage of the 24 Hours of
Le Mans, Sidaris and Trans World International
joined Roone Arledge on ABC’s
Championship Auto Racing television series, for
which I again wrote narration.
The “big” screen seemed ever and ever
remote.
Since those days, racing has come back to the movie
theater with Tom Cruise in Days
of Thunder and Sly Stallone’s Driven,
both efforts full of promise in the making but
falling short in outcome.
Who knows what will be next?
Ten years ago, meeting face-to-face with
Bernie Eccelstone, I pitched a big-budget, wide
screen documentary for theaters about Formula One
racing that would follow an entire season on the F1
circuit.
Instantly keen on the idea, Eccelstone agreed
to open his essentially unapproachable world
championship series to our cameras.
The fee required by Bernie plus our projected
production costs, totaling only a part of what
regular movies demand and get, was, alas,
unobtainable.
“Documentary,” that assassin of full
screen racing films for movie houses, closed us down
again.
Nonetheless, this whole story has a delightful
ending, which might in fact be a new beginning of
appreciation for The
Racing Scene.
Petersen Automotive Museum Chairman Bruce
Meyer called me this past November and asked if I
had a video copy of the Garner documentary. It
was in the mail to him that same day.
Bruce saw it, showed it to Margie and Robert
Petersen, and in no time we were putting together
the “James Garner & The Racing Scene” night
at the Museum.
We right away contacted Jim, his drivers, and
production crew for a grand reunion.
Now, at long last – January 29, 2003 – the
sights and sounds of The
Racing Scene
come to life on the screen once more here at
the Petersen.
Call it the magic of our indefatigable
interest in racing, and our respect and admiration
for that fine gentleman of the sport, James Garner.
Maybe we don’t know how everyone will like
going back to those days of 1969, but, to quote Jim
from his own wonderful racing film – “We sure as
hell are gonna find out!”
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