LIGHTS! CAMERA! NITRO!
by Cole Coonce
Zukovic and I were kickin' it in some rather trendoid hipster coffee
klatch at Melbourne and Vermont in East Hollywood, drinking espresso
and discussing the troubles with the age we live in. Zukovic is a
failed screenwriter who now stacks cars with a forklift at the
Pick-Your-Part in Santa Fe Springs, CA.
Our conversation turned to the topic of Hollywood, particularly how the studios had portrayed hot rodders on celluloid.
I told Zukovic about a videotape I had rented the night before, a piece
of B-movie pap from 1956 called Drag Strip Girl. As I riffed on the
plot of this forgotten cinematic flop I started experiencing a hazy,
unsettling feeling of spooky familiarity. I assumed it was merely side
effects from the fourth cup of Cafe Gavina, but I was wrong. No, this
particular bout of disorientation was different than the others. I
continued to reveal the plot synopsis and when I got to the obligatory
part about "so the old folks are tryin' to close down the newly opened
drag strip, and to make things worse the drag strip chickee challenges
two j.d. hoodlums to a street race" when-BAM-this uncanny sense of deja
vu thumped me right between the goal posts of my mind. "In fact," I
spluttered, "They were running red lights through this very
intersection!"
Zukovic was dubious: "Sure they did, Coonce."
"No, I'm serious," I replied. "The landscape was different, but I
remember seeing a street sign in the movie that said 'Melbourne'. And
there was this red brick apartment building just like that one."
I pointed across the street to this decrepit, crumbling tenement.
"Okay, minus the earthquake damage, but I swear it was the same
building."
I felt like Dorothy back in Kansas at the end of the Wizard of Oz, but
I continued my riffing. "Drag Strip Girl is your basic 1950's malt shop
America love triangle," I told Zukovic, "but with a twist. In order to
cross-collateralize sex, hot rodding, rock 'n' roll, and the spirit of
wild youth--all under the guise of promoting 'proper drag
racing'--American International Pictures staged a really reckless
street race, including one character hopping out of one car and into
the gal's car at maximum velocity on this very strip of asphalt."
Everything was getting clearer now. "The race started right up there,"
I said, pointing to what is now the House of Pies on Franklin and
Vermont. "And it ended past Sunset, around Fountain--you know, where
the blue Scientology hospital is."
At this point our conversation segued into other moments when the
disparate worlds of Hollywood and hot rodding intersected. I mentioned
that Robert E. Petersen was once employed as a publicist for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before he simultaneously started both Hot Rod
Magazine and the NHRA with Wally Parks. And that John Frankenheimer,
the director of Grand Prix and The Manchurian Candidate, was slated to
direct a film biography of drag strip hero "Big Daddy" Don Garlits, a
projected shelved due to "creative differences" between Frankenheimer
and "Big Daddy" hisself. But beaucoup other drag racing "projects" did
in fact get produced by the moguls of Hollywood: The Ghost of Drag
Strip Hollow, Bikini Beach, Funny Car Summer, Two Lane Blacktop, Heart
Like a Wheel, ad infinitum. Invigorated by the coffee and conversation
and jonesin' for nitromethane--even if it was only a glimpse of raw
fuel on videotape--Zukovic and I devised a plan: we would each procure
as many drag racing movies as we could possibly locate in the cobwebbed
vaults of our local video stores and then rendevouz at my pad. With
that accomplished, I would round up all the obsessive-weirdo film buffs
and race fans that we knew. This motley intelligentsia consisted of an
assortment of eccentric bohemian-types, among them: Ikky Shivers, a
malcontent documentary filmmaker from Death Valley; Clayton, a local
unemployed beatnik painter/feminist; Cuz'n Roy Gittens, a traveling
harmonica and washboard player from Ranlo, North Carolina; Sean Vigle,
an out-of-work cultural anthropologist from Echo Park; and Professor
Prina, an instructor who teaches a class called the "Films of Keanu
Reeves" to hopelessly art-damaged college students in Pasadena.
It would be a weekend-long cathode ray orgy of drag racing motion
pictures. And at these screenings, unlike your local walk-in theater
("Quiet-the audience is listening"), running monologues during the
movie were not only tolerated, it was encouraged...As the gearheads and
film theorists sauntered into to my living room I warned them that we
would plow through this motion picture marathon--Zukovic and I
accumulated 19 videocassettes--until the last reel had been projected
or until the coffee maker hydraulicked. The assembled riff raff nodded
and mumbled in agreement, seeming to understand the seriousness of the
task at hand: not only would this impromptu film panel chronicle the
marriage of cinema and hot rodding, we would also look for the
definitive drag racing movie--if it even existed.
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DAY ONE As I dimmed
the lights for our first feature, the aroma of Cafe Bustelo
brewing in the coffee maker permeated the entire house. It is a
smell that is second only to the pungent punch of nitromethane, and it
seemed to be a fitting surrogate for the sensory delights of the
drag racing experience. A brew richer than Top Fuel dragster
driver Eddie Hill's fuel mixture, the members of our rag-tag
roundtable would consume a 55-gallon drum's worth of this
go-faster nectar before the weekend was over. I figured some
light escapist entertainment would ease us into this marathon, so
I slipped Bikini Beach into the VCR. This 1964 piece is another
teen exploitation flick from the shrewd crew at American
International Pictures, a film distribution company run by that
infamous titan of the tawdry, Samuel Arkoff. Drag racing was merely an
incongruous backdrop for Arkoff and director William Asher to
stage a typical teenage love triangle story: Surfer Boy (Frankie
Avalon) meets Bikini Girl (Annette Funicello) at a beach with no old
people. British Rock Star/Dragster Driver a/k/a "Potato Bug"
(also Avalon) woos Bikini Girl away from Surfer Boy. Surfer Boy
drag races British Rock Star for rights to Bikini Girl.
"This Potato Bug character is really just a thinly-veiled
composite of all four of the Beatles, isn't he?" Zukovic wondered.
"Well," I said. "You've got to realize that this is 1964, and the
Beatles just commandeered the top three positions of the American
Top Forty simultaneously. In 1964 America, if you weren't a teenage
girl, you were a little freaked out by this development."
"Yeah, but the Surfers just called Potato Bug a 'crumpet eater.' Don't you find that a little xenophobic?"
"Maybe, but the British Invasion is about to ruin surf music,
some would argue rock'n'roll itself. We were really lucky the
Beatles didn't kill drag racing, just music."
Meanwhile Don Rickles, cast as a drag racing renaissance man
(beatnik artist, chassis builder, "motorologist," track
announcer, and malt shop proprietor) known as the "Big Drag," is
loaning Frankie Avalon use of the Greer, Black, & Prudhomme
Top Fueler for his big race against Potato Bug. Clayton,
currently an artist in Los Angeles herself, is groaning at the
caricature of renowned "splatter" painters such as Jackson
Pollock in the guise of the "Big Drag."
"Why are they trivializing Jackson Pollock? He was really cool."
"I think they are spoofing "Big Daddy" Roth and Von Dutch more than Pollock," Vigle replied.
"Hollywood will always ridicule what it's incapable of
understanding," Zukovic chimed in. "The genius of Arkoff and
A.I.P. is that it made a lot of money by being completely
asinine."
While Zuke rhapsodized about the "intelligence" of the Hollywood
money-changers, the "Big Drag" was showing Frankie and his surfer
pals how to operate the dragster:
"Don't pull out the choke."
"Why not?"
"Because it releases the parachute."
The movie eventually cut to exterior shots of Pomona and the 1964
Winternationals, resplendent vintage footage of "Big Daddy" Don
Garlits in his gunslinger-black "Wynn's Jammer" AA/FD, "TV Tommy" Ivo,
the Albertson Olds Special, and Chris Karamesines' "Chizler" rail, all
juxtaposed against the serene San Gabriel Mountains.
"Every time I went to drive-in movie theater in the deep South and I
saw these beach movies with dragsters racing alongside those majestic
mountains, or whenever I heard a song by the Beach Boys on my AM radio,
I knew there was something going on in California I needed to
experience," Cuz'n Roy solemnly intoned.
It was time to put in another movie and put on a fresh pot of coffee.
Since the sequencing of our feature festival was entirely free-form and
improvisational, I decided to step back further in time to 1956 and
subject the panel to another A.I.P. teen-o-rama time bomb, Hot Rod
Girl. Set at the old San Fernando Raceway, which was also nestled in
the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, the story line of this
B-picture was as predictable as rush hour traffic.
"Rifleman" Chuck Connors stars as the cop with a conscience. Hot Rod
Girl's raison d'etre is a parable about the perils of street racing
(which we all know will degenerate into a youth-on-the-loose "chicken
race"), compared to the sanctioned, chaperoned sanctuary of legitimate
drag racing. Clayton dismissed it as "malt shop propaganda," but I
thought the footage of San Fernando Raceway was worth the histrionic
Hollywood moralizing. Of course A.I.P. really revels in the gratuitous
carnage, while hypocritically admonishing the moviegoer to drive the
straight and narrow. Yeah, right...In 1956, after watching Hot Rod Girl
at the drive-in on Foothill Boulevard, how many teenagers do you think
realized the error in their ways, and then obeyed the traffic laws all
the way back to the Bob's Big Boy in Burbank?
As our feature reached its drag strip denouement, I sensed I was losing
the attention of our audience. Too many moral lessons, not enough funny
cars on fire, I reckoned. It was still early, but I hoped Funny Car
Summer would rejuvenate the troops.
It did not. A 1973 16-millimeter documentary shot at OCIR, Irwindale,
Sacramento Raceway, and Utah(!), Funny Car Summer has very little
moralizing (or dramatic tension for that matter) to get in the way of
the drag racing. Ostensibly, this flick concerns itself with the trials
and tribulations of independent funny car racer "Fireman Jim" Dunn. The
night racing sequences are pretty underexposed, leaving the viewer in
the dark as to who is racing, both literally and figuratively.
Occasionally someone in our panel could make out which race car we were
watching, or even who the driver was, say, "Big John" Mazmanian or Pat
Foster in Barry Setzer's flopper, but those moments were fleeting. I
really enjoyed watching an endless parade of anonymous header flames
panning across the screen- I found it rather mantra-like.
Unfortunately, there is a thin line between zen and tedium, and my
opinion as to which side of (un)consciousness FCS landed on was among
the minority consensus. (Only Cuz'n Roy shared my enthusiasm, but he
likes listening to a radio that has been simultaneously jammed to two
different frequencies.)
To relieve the monotony of the out-of-focus night footage, the
filmmakers cut to shots of Dunn's entourage caught in a sandstorm at a
drag strip in Salt Lake City. After that nosedive, the filmmakers
regurgitated and re-cut footage seen earlier from OCIR, this time as a
montage underscored with hopelessly overwrought folk music, schmaltzily
sentimentalizing the plight of our race car driver. For sheer cinematic
dreariness, Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal has nothing on Funny Car
Summer.
Zukovic was unimpressed: "What manner of community-college film school bullshit is this?"
"This is art, my friend."
Another pair of header flames shot across the screen.
Clayton, the artist, was equally dubious: "This may be art, but these
guys might want to figure out how to pull focus on their camera before
they shoot another documentary."
As we argued about the artistic merits of Funny Car Summer, one of the
out-of-focus header flames crashed into the guardrail at OCIR. The next
shot was of Sush Matsubara smoking a cigarette, pensively contemplating
the twisted, bent remnants of the once-gorgeous "Pisano &
Matsubara" nitro-burning flopper. I maintain that this scene was worthy
of Marcello Mastroianni reflecting on the futility of life at a cafe in
Rome in Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. Only Cuz'n Roy agreed with that
sentiment. We both really liked this movie. He even liked the folk
music.
Our symposium was starting to get really restless at this point, so I
resorted to a film that had very little to do with drag racing, but had
everything to do with gratuitous sex and violence: Faster, Pussycat!
Kill! Kill! This 1966 flick, directed by soft-core pornography purveyor
Russ Meyer, squeaked into our hot rodding festival by the narrowest of
prerequisites: the film's sports car and karate sequences, featuring
militant go-go dancers, were shot at the El Mirage dry lake bed in the
Mojave Desert, where drag racing was born.
Indeed, anti-heroine Tura Satana and her fellow femme fatales scoff at
a sports car enthusiast who is racing against the clock-ala the
Southern California Timing Association-and challenge him to a real race
across the desolate desert floor. Then, not only does Satana smash his
prized stopwatch, which he won at a speed trial, she also delivers a
lethal karate chop to the poor chap's neck.
"I think Jim Dunn would have kicked her ass," Ikky said.
"Yeah, but Frankie Avalon wouldn't have stood a chance," Vigle replied.
Zukovic was way beyond this conversation: "What you gentlemen are
missing here is how this movie has nothing to do with violence against
men, and has everything to do with debunking the various myths about
Southern California in the ''60s".
This aroused Vigle's sense of anthropology. "You mean that a
pornographer like Russ Meyer has a more accurate perception of the
Southern California youth culture than the Hollywood movie
corporations?" he asked.
"It is all pornography," interrupted Clayton, the artist.
"This is well beyond corporations or pornographers co-opting and
trivializing a culture they did not understand, and, perhaps more
importantly, a culture that is now gone forever" Zukovic replied.
"In the '60s you stood a better chance of finding a go-go dancer at El
Mirage than a British Pop Star like Potato Bug at the Winternationals,"
Ikky chimed in.
"Whether it was Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Bikini Beach that
tapped into the the psyche of the youth culture more realistically is
irrelevant," Zukovic added. "The point is that once the film studios
did tap into what was happening at Zuma Beach or San Fernando Raceway
or El Mirage, that was the beginning of the end."
"Even in the '60s," he continued, "the problem with rock 'n' roll,
surfing, and hot rodding is not that it has gone corporate...no, that's
not it, the problem is that it's gone. Over. Kaput. Do you know what
I'm saying? It's not that 'things go corporate, those darn
corporations...' Well, things only go corporate when they are all over."
"What?"
"If the corporations don't understand what is going on, then what is
going on doesn't go corporate. I wouldn't pin the decline of the surf
culture and the car culture on Hollywood."
"What would you pin it on?" I asked.
"Pin it on this: In 1964 there was a left turn into the future that
never happened. Only now you realize it didn't happen because it wasn't
supposed to happen. People then try to get 'it' back of course, which
is human nature. But there is no 'it' to get back. By watching Bikini
Beach, you realize how much of it was utter and complete mythology."
Zukovic was really getting warmed up: "It's called The Fall, people.
It's called 'there was a time when the dew was upon the grass, when
things were pure AND NOW LOOK WHAT HAS DONE AND GONE AND
HAPPENED--THOSE DARN CORPORATIONS HAVE GONE AND CORPORATIONALIZED
EVERYTHING.' That's the oldest myth in the world. Surf city never
existed," he thundered, as Ikky and Sean stared at their beers, "it
just existed in these movies--'We got to go bring surf city back.' No,
there was never 'two girls for every boy,' like these movies and the
song imply, it's a metaphor goddammit, you don't literalize a metaphor.
Not only did that time never exist, it never could exist, that's why
everybody wants it back. If the dream is realizable, it's not worth
dreaming about. Cappice?"
"And at that point the media and the moviemakers feast on the carcass
of what was a 'scene,' or 'movement,' or whatever you want to call it?"
I asked.
"Ex-act-ly. It's a paradoxical thing. Something happens and while it's
happening you don't know its happening. And then once you realized it
happened, you are never gonna get it back. The minute it's conscious,
it's gone. That's when the Hollywood schlockmeisters coming swooping
down from the hills to take your baby away like a hungry coyote. That's
when they co-opt surfing, drag racing, and humping in the back seat of
a Woody station wagon. They just put music to it."
"This coming from a man who stacks cars at a junkyard," Clayton said.
The mood got pretty heavy--heavier than the monstrous 4-wheel drive,
4-engined Oldsmobile dragster "T.V. Tommy" Ivo drove in Bikini Beach. I
felt it was time to shut down the festival for the night, despite the
fact that everyone was wide awake, and despite the protests of
Professor Prina. The Professor had been pretty quiet all night, perhaps
because he was upset about recent rumors of Keanu Reeves marrying film
mogul David Geffen during a closed ceremony in Canada. Or perhaps he
was saving his commentary for the screening of Parenthood, the film in
which Keanu Reeves crashes a Super Comp dragster.
Regardless, it would have to wait until the next day, when we would
continue to watch more films that documented a culture very dear to our
hearts and souls--from an era that, according to Zukovic, may or may
not have even happened at all.
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DAY TWO
It was Sunday night, coincidentally the night before the Academy
Awards. Last night our "film symposium" had endured an endless loop of
mostly Eisenhower to Nixon-era drag racing films, from Hot Rod Girl to
Funny Car Summer, none of which unanimously satisfied the discerning
tastes and palettes of our hard-to-please critics. Clayton, the local
unemployed beatnik painter, dismissed most of the movies as "sock hop
damage." Ikky
Shivers, the documentary filmmaker from Death Valley, questioned the
technical accuracy of the dragster crash sequence in Bikini Beach.
Professor Steven Prina, the scholar who teaches a class at Art Center
in Pasadena called "The Films of Keanu Reeves," does not really like or
understand drag racing. Despite this cultural handicap, the Professor
is willing to ruminate about Keanu's role as a dragster driver in the
movie Parenthood. Cuz'n Roy was the most lenient in his assessment of
the movies, nodding approvingly at Annette Funicello in Bikini Beach as
well as toasting "Fireman Jim" Dunn during the sandstorm sequence of
Funny Car Summer by raising his bottle of "Mickey's Big Mouth" to the
ceiling. Ironically, the film that had the least to do with drag
racing, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, reaped the biggest accolades
from our panel during last night's screening. That was a sad comment on
the state of cinema.
It seemed obvious that the fictional accounts of drag strips were
mauled and mangled by the graceless paws of the clueless Tinseltown
Coyote Gods, so I reckoned we would commence the second day of our
festival with some documentaries. When I mentioned that our first
couple of films were independent documentaries produced without any
input from Hollywood Sheckies, the mood and tenor of the forum
brightened considerably. This countenances of this once-sullen bunch
lit up like Chrondek Timers as soon as Hot Rod Action hit the screen.
Produced by Hot Rod Magazine and NHRA magnate Robert Petersen, this
flick handsomely chronicles the 1966 NHRA Winternationals, the
Bakersfield March Meet, the U.S. Nationals, as well as the NHRA World
Finals in Amarillo, Texas. This includes priceless footage of the late
Mike Sorokin in the awe-inspiring "Surfers" AA/FD, Mike Snively in
Roland Leong's formidable "Hawaiian" Top Fueler as well as "Sneaky
Pete" Robinson's triumph as World Champion in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Interspersed with the digs is some extremely cool clips of Craig
Breedlove launching his jet-powered salt flat racer into a lake during
an epic but futile pursuit of the Land Speed Record at Bonneville.
"Boy Howdy!" shouted Cuz'n Roy, spilling his coffee on my couch as
Breedlove waved from the tail section of his speed machine, most of
which was submerged in water.
"How would you like to race in the desert at 600 miles-an-hour on the
desert floor and then almost drown?" asked Sean Vigle rhetorically.
"I can't believe they call that monstrosity the 'Spirit of America'," bellowed Ms. Clayton.
The cognoscenti all expressed their approval of Mr. Petersen's
documentary, the only qualm came from Professor Prina who considered
the timbre of Keith "Wide World of Sport's" Jackson's voice-over "an
acquired taste--like escargot or butyl nitrate." Whatever...
Despite the Professor's neuroses I sensed we were in a groove, the
vibrations were positive, Ikky asked for more Cafe Gavina (a brand of
bean juice that is particularly hard to find in Death Valley). "Don't
waste time with Hollywood Productions," I told myself, "stick with the
documentaries--they are far more surreal than anything the Film Studios
could offer."
I jammed in something called American Nitro into the VCR and hoped for
the best. And I got it. This guy was not unlike Funny Car Summer, but
ultimately more successful i.e., no maudlin folk music obnoxiously
underscoring the plight of the independent drag racer, and no
gratuitous sandstorm footage. Shot mostly at Fremont Raceway, this gem
contained plenty of mid-70's era funny car racing. Also included in
this work, however, is an extremely chilling interview with engine
builder Ed Pink who discusses the horrors of oil fires in the early
days of drag racing, particularly the incident which claimed the life
of Top Fuel hero John "the Zookeeper" Mulligan at the U.S. Nationals in
1969. That was a dark day for drag racing, and the footage from this
segment rattled the collective soul and psyche of the race fans and
film buffs gathered in my living room.
"This too was the 'Spirit of America,'" Zukovic solemnly intoned.
"His passing was as tragic to the drag racing community as the school
teacher's who died in the Space Shuttle was to Middle America," replied
Sean Vigle.
"Beebe & Mulligan were the #1 qualifiers at that race with a 6.43,
they had the rest of the dragsters covered by 2/10ths of a second,"
Ikky mentioned.
He then whispered, "It was perhaps our Hindenberg crash." It got pretty quiet for a few moments.
"Wow, you guys really take this stuff seriously. Do any of you remember
where you were when you heard about the news about his death?"
Professor Prina wondered.
"Yeah...I do," I said softly.
Yes, the "Zookeeper" pushed the parameters of a Top Fuel car in the
60's and did not survive. His clutch exploded, a not-uncommon phenomena
at the time, perhaps due to strain from the massive horsepower. But a
lot of envelopes were subjected to stress tests during that era, both
on and off the ol'1320. The racing movie that embodied the social chaos
of that time would have to be Two Lane Blacktop. If Mulligan's demise
was symbolic of the end of drag racing's innocence, then Two Lane
Blacktop seemed to be a fitting segue out of American Nitro. Indeed,
this 1971 flick could have only have been shot in post-Altamont
America. Starring two rock stars as outlaw drag racers and directed by
Monte Hellman, this is the only feature that captivates the zeitgeist
of Vietnam-era drag racing. Hellman's coup was that this feat was
accomplished not only without Hollywood's money, but also without much
plot or dialogue either. In fact, there is more dead air in this flick
than a baseball broadcast with Marlee Matlin calling the play-by-play.
The "plot" consists of a cross-country street race between Warren Oates
in a fresh GTO and the Tuinol tag-team of James Taylor and Dennis
Wilson in a primer-colored '55 Chevy. The first hot rodder to arrive at
a D.C.Post Office pockets the pinks slips to both vehicles. If the plot
seems like an exercise in minimalism, the dialogue is excruciatingly
sparse, especially from the rock musicians that were hired as actors.
Dennis Wilson (the drummer for the Beach Boys) as "the Mechanic" has
one phrase he repeats like a mantra throughout this art film: "I got to
check the valves."
James Taylor, as "the Driver," at least gets to stretch out with
relatively long-winded speeches such as: "He better find himself a
relief driver or he's in trouble...unless he has some uppers."
It is Warren Oates, however, who delivers a performance worthy of
Laurence Olivier. Cast as "GTO," the pathological liar-cum-methedrine
addict-cum-street racer, Oates expertly delivers such literary gems as
"If I'm not grounded pretty soon I'm gonna go into orbit," as well as
"What are you tryin' to do...Blow my mind?"
But is the following exchange, as GTO waves off the Driver's symbolic
offering of a flask of hooch, that sums up the tone of this
teeth-grinding road picture:
Driver: "I just thought it might relax you while you drive."
GTO: "This is competition--I got no time."
Shortly thereafter the rock stars, now with a jailbait hitchhiker in
tow, stopped at Shelby County International Raceway to make enough
bread "grudge racing" to finish their cross-country endeavor. As the
camera panned across the pits, bleachers, and the Tennessee drag strip
itself, it looked like Cuz'n Roy was getting a little misty-eyed. This
was a resplendent montage of something us Pacific Rim race fans had
never cast eyes upon: down 'n' dirty drag racing in the Deep South. As
Dennis Wilson got under the hood to "check the valves," Roy grabbed his
washboard and harmonica and commenced to improvising a impromptu
soundtrack. It sounded a little like "Dixie," but none of us were
really sure. Professor Prina looked very afraid, his knowledge of the
South limited to watching the sodomy sequence in Deliverance.
"Y'know," Ikky said, oblivious to Roy's corn-pone film score, "Dennis
Wilson used to drag race a Super Stocker at "the Pond" a/k/a San
Fernando Raceway back in '66."
"Yeah but his acting ability--and I use that phrase loosely--is stiffer than his surfboard," replied Sean Vigle.
At the conclusion of Two Lane Blacktop I noticed that Professor Prina
was still shaken and nervous from Roy's behavior. To appease our
resident academic I finally jammed Parenthood into the tape machine and
hoped the race fans could sit patiently through the non-drag race
sections of this feature--in essence, the first two acts.
Ostensibly a comedy about the trials, tribulations, and hijinks of life
in suburbia, Parenthood was scoring few points with an audience that
had been subjected to a overabundance of coffee, Mickey's Bigmouth's,
and videotapes during the last 24 hours.
"Wasn't this turkey directed by Opie Taylor?" Vigle asked the Professor.
"If you mean Ron Howard, yes it was," he replied.
"He also directed Grand Theft Auto," Ikky bellowed, "now there was a movie."
"Grand Theft Auto was utterly banal, reductive trailer-park dross," argued Zukovic.
"Maybe so," Ikky replied, "but at least their was some action."
"My, how the mighty have fallen," someone said.
"Quiet you guys," Clayton admonished, " Martha Plimpton just found the helmet that Keanu has been hiding from her."
"Todd! You promised! No more drag racing!" Plimpton barked shrewishly.
"So I lied!" Keanu shot back.
"What depth!" shouted the Professor.
The argument continued to rage onscreen, Keanu acknowledging he wasn't
really a housepainter after all; in fact, he made his money as--get
this--a Super Comp driver. This admission really brought the house down.
"P-l-e-e-a-s-s-e," groaned Ikky.
It only got worse. The film cut to a meet at Lakeland, Florida. Keanu
was racing his rear-engined digger, now with his fiancee's approval.
Reeves was on a nice run, when, apropos of nothing, he crashed into the
guardrail at half-track, destroying the car. The symposium booed en
masse, except for the Professor, who looked hurt and confused.
"He's even shittier at driving than he is at acting," said Vigle.
Ikky was appalled at the technical inaccuracy: "What the hell was that? A Super Comp dragster just doesn't turn left like that."
"In Hollywood films they do," Zukovic countered.
"I'm offended at the implication that everything is husky dory once he quits drag racing," I said.
"I think you people are missing the point," Professor Prina
backpedaled. "Although Keanu's role as the race car driver is
inconsequential, and from an engineering standpoint the race scenes are
implausible, that's not the crux of this picture. What this film does
is it promotes Family Values, Patriotism, and ..."
"So did Joseph Goebbels and the Third Reich." said Clayton, the feminist beat painter.
I ejected the cassette immediately. It was late and I was in no mood to watch the plight of white people in the suburbs.
But I was in the mood to try and wrap up this festival on a positive
note. I gingerly inserted something that would appeal to everyone,
including feminists painters and pop culture scholars: Heart Like a
Wheel. This feature is the drag racing corollary to It's A Wonderful
Life. Indeed, Frank Capra would be proud.
This epic is the Shirley "Don't Call Her Cha-Cha" Muldowney story.
Thanks to spot-on technical advice and scintillating stunt driving from
"T.V. Tommy" Ivo and "the Unsinkable" Kelly Brown, for once Hollywood
captured the atmosphere of the digs. The arc of the storyline
chronicles the rising tide of female liberation in the 60's and 70's as
well as the career of one of drag racing's epic figures.
The crashes and fires play well, there is nothing gratuitous about the
carnage at all. More importantly, the casting of Bonnie Bedellia and
Beau Bridges as the "Bounty Huntress" and the "Bounty Hunter" is
perfect.
"What a cool story," Clayton gushed. "This whole tale could be a blueprint for the feminist's paradigm."
I told her that there are dozens of drag strip dramas that would make
excellent fare for films: Garlits, "Wild Willie" Borsch, the Story of
Pete Robinson, etc. But it was my hope that Hollywood would just leave
drag racing alone because, regardless of the Shirley Muldowney movie,
Hollywood would just screw these stories up by casting Keanu Reeves as
Pete Robinson or something.
Zukovic agreed. He said:"In the annals and folklore of drag racing
there lie a plethora of dramas and anecdotes equal to or greater than
any screenwriter could summon, but at this point in time, moments
before the new millennium, let us hope that Hollywood leaves drag
racing alone--let them find some other source of fodder for their
gristmills."
Zukovic then bid us adieu, and went home to get some sleep before his
shift started at Pick-Your-Part in the morning. The rest of the panel
also left.
As I closed the door behind them I thought about some of Zukovic's
comments he made the night before after watching Bikini Beach. He
maintained that "Surf City" (or "Drag City," if you will--the two seem
interchangeable if you grew up on a farm in the Midwest which seemed to
be AIP's demographic, the only way to get your ya-ya's out was
stump-breakin' cattle out by the feed trough) never existed, it only
existed in the crass, reductive screenplays of hack Hollywood producers
and screenwriters anxious to cash in on any "youth movement" that could
be packaged and marketed like a hula hoop.
Let's get real: for all practical purposes Drag Strip Girl, Bikini
Beach, The Ghost of Drag Strip Hollow, as quaint and kitsch as they may
be, are the cinematic equivalent to Nacho Flavored Licorice Whips. The
real drag racing epics were shot without the influence of Hollywood
number-crunchers and bean-counters. I.e.: Two Lane Blacktop, Funny Car
Summer, American Nitro, and Hot Rod Action.
Sure, Arkoff and his ilk portrayed the surface elements inherent in the
drama of the drag strip: speed, danger, sex. (Let's face it: capturing
Top Eliminator is not too far removed from slaying dragons--either way
you got to bag the trophy chickee, whether she was the proverbial
Rapunzel or the proverbial Linda Vaughn,or in the hot rod movies, a
stacked ex-Mouseketeer in a bikini named Annette.) But when you add up
the elements of speed, youth, chrome, and fire--set against a backdrop
of either the majestic San Gabriel Mountains or the placid, smooth
Pacific Ocean--its sum is greater than the total of its parts. That is
what Hollywood never captured--the intangibles which separate Camelot
from The Last Picture Show.
Zukovic had argued it was all a mirage, but he did not grow up at the
drag strip and I did. There was something transcendental going on out
there. Some would argue a Renaissance. Thus drag racing possessed
something beyond the ken of the opportunistic Sheckies of
Movieland--something intangible that these lardass cigar-chomping
"movers and shakers" could never grasp. Drag racing had soul. Hollywood
never did (at least not since Orson Welles was run out of Tinseltown on
a rail in the 1940's). And when these disparate worlds met, Hollywood
was successful only at eviscerating the soul out of drag racing,
leaving a hollow form that was then stuffed with the base, crass
trappings of exploitation film making.The men-in-suits considered the
digs a trivial, white trash culture...
But I know there is something noble about the pursuit of horsepower. It
is a crucial, virtuous component to the human spirit. Indeed, the
inquisitive nature of humanity is exemplified by the passion and
prowess of the likes of Madame Curie, Michelangelo, Descartes,
Einstein, and even good ol' Ayn Rand. During the last American
Renaissance, which I maintain transpired at Lions Drag Strip in the
1960's, there were physicists, artists, and engineers who could rub
shoulders with M. Curie, Einstein, Da Vinci, et. al. Human beings like
Beebe & Mulligan. Skinner, Jobe & Sorokin. Mickey Thompson.
Marcellus & Borsch. "Big Daddy" Don Garlits. "Sneaky Pete"
Robinson. Keith Black.
And yes, you can see these men and their machines in various Hollywood
epic misfires such as Bikini Beach and Drag Strip Girl. But in these
movies you will not see what made these men tick. Or tinker.
The End.
CLUTCH DUST VAPORIZES INTO THE ETHER: THE COLE COONCE READER