The rain that began an hour and a half after the 4 pm start fell in torrents by 8 on that almost-summer night over half a century ago, but the Solar Productions crew assembled by actor Steve McQueen kept filming. McQueen's idea had been to make a drama as close as possible to a documentary about road racing, and he'd arrived with Solar's crew, director John Sturges, a Porsche 908 camera car that actually ran in the race, and a team of professional drivers, but no script. He was more than an amateur himself, having taken 2nd place in the Sebring 12 Hours (and with a broken foot) on the first day of spring that year. By the time my college roommate took the photo below, it was mid-autumn, the film was behind schedule, and the desperate production team was spray-painting the trees green to make it look like summer.
McQueen's original plan had been to share a Porsche 917 with Jackie Stewart in the race, but that had been nixed by McQueen's insurance company. And while McQueen and Sturges had originally planned the film as "Day of the Champion" with Warner Brothers, the project moved to Cinema Center Films as "Le Mans" when McQueen's multi-picture contract was cancelled after the studio was sold. While it wasn't unheard-of for filming to begin before a script was written (directors like Jean-Luc Godard bacame famous for avoiding scripts), the sheer size of the operation began to make Cinema Center nervous. Director Sturges disagreed with McQueen about how to proceed, and was replaced mid-project by Lee Katzin. During and after the actual 24-hour race, the story line remained unresolved. In lieu of a finished story, Katzin and the production crew threw their energies into solving technical problems. They mounted cameras on the front of their 908 camera car (McQueen's Sebring Porsche) with quick-release hardware for fast film changes, and mounted cameras outside the windshields and door windows on John Wyer's Gulf Team Porsches to get real-time driving portraits, like the one below. The vague story line of the fictional race called for Porsche to win, so Enzo Ferrari declined to cooperate with the filming, and the crew borrowed Ferrari 512s from privateer Jacques Swaters. Ironically, the Gulf Porsche team actually won the real race, a first for Porsche. That victory could've been described as going according to the script, except of course, there still wasn't any script…
The risks posed by the project went well beyond financial ones. McQueen insisted that the supplemental footage be filmed at racing speeds. What were those speeds? The big Porsche flat-12s and Ferrari V12s were hitting 230 mph on the long Mulsanne straight. The previous year, the winning Ford GT had averaged over 120 mph. During the downpour, three of Ferrari's contenders were taken out in a single accident, and another soon retired with mechanical damage. Luckily, no major injuries resulted, but later in the race, track marshal Jacques Argoud was killed when Ferrari driver Jacky Ickx crashed due to brake failure. During filming of supplemental scenes, the Solar Productions crew had more accidents. Pro drivers Derek Bell and David Piper were involved in separate accidents. Bell suffered burns and Piper lost a leg after an accident during a re-take that might have been avoided had there been a script. And McQueen had a wreck after driving co-star Elga Andersen to dinner; she was lightly injured and his personal assistant took the blame so the project could continue. This incident may have been more credible as story than the actual plot, involving Michael Delaney (McQueen ) and Lisa Belgetti (Andersen), the widow of a driver killed in an accident involving Delaney the previous year...
It's possibly a sign of the weakness of the plot line that the crash scenes are more believable than the interactions between Michael and Lisa. The crashes were filmed using obsolete racers, Lola T70s, re-bodied as Porsches and Ferraris. It seems the feminine contingent got all the thankless roles. For Elga the co-star, it was "convince us you're mesmerized by this incommunicative, distant guy." For Lola the car, it was "crash into this steel barrier over here…"
After that long-ago visit to Le Mans, my college pal took a photo of the Porsche 917K (Kurz, for short tail) that had won that rainy race 4 months earlier in the hands of Hans Herrmann and Richard Attwood. Herrmann immediately retired from racing. Car #23 had headed up a short parade of cars that survived the race, including a 917L (langheck for its long tail), and a Porsche 908 in 3rd ahead of 2 Ferraris. Only 16 cars (12 of them Porsches) out of 55 were running at the finish, and only 7 were officially classified due to minimum distance requirements.
In 8th place was the Solar Productions camera car, a Porsche 908 driven by Herbert Linge and Jonathan Williams. The production crew joked that if the car hadn't pitted so often to change film, they might've done better than taking 2nd in the 3 liter prototype class. That probably would not have consoled the studio, as the film was way over budget as well as behind schedule. Over a million feet of film had been shot, and McQueen had given up his salary and his percentage of any profits to finish his dream film. Eventually, two documentaries would be made about the filming. But evidence supporting McQueen's original documentary impulse precedes his riveting footage of live racing, and goes back to a movie released 5 days after his race at Sebring. Michael Wadleigh's documentary "Woodstock", also of a big spectacle nearly derailed by rain, cost $600,000 and made $50 million at the box office. "Le Mans" cost around $7.6 million (if you can ignore the personal cost of those accidents), and took in about $5.5 million.
All other photos: Solar Productions
More than anything, this post reminds me why I never went into filmmaking. Don't quite have the cajones or insanity to pull off stunts like these.
ReplyDeleteI watched one of the 2 documentaries about the making of this film. Sometimes documentary films about making dramas are more revealing than the subject dramatic fictions. Will post info on the documentaries soon...
ReplyDeleteI watched "Filming at Speed—The Making of 'Le Mans'", just under 24 minutes and free on YouTube, made in 2001 and featuring interviews with driver Derek Bell, director Lee Katzin, and Chad McQueen, Steve's son. There's also a longer documentary called "Steve McQueen: The Man and Le Mans" from 2015, clocking in at 102 min. Haven't seen it yet, but it's streaming at movietone.com as well as that behemoth would-be monopoly whose name I won't mention.
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