I began last week by confidently stating in the first of several posts about race-car driving that I found Motorsports the silliest sport next to tractor-pulls known to man. I’ve never done a 180 on a subject as quickly as I have on race-car driving over the past week. I am now obsessed with the idea of serious motorsports, possibly as a result of watching some of the strange old footage of early versions of the sport that I posted last week, culminating in my seeing the ridiculously entertaining Brad Pitt race-car drama’F1″ (Formula One) this weekend. My further research has now brought me to the tale of the movie ‘LeMans’ (1971) starring Steve McQueen. I’ve never seen the movie, having never had any interest in the subject, and I can’t say that the trailer (posted above) makes it look terribly promising. In many ways it appears so identical to the Pitt vehicle (ahem) that one wonders if there is, in fact, any other way to do a race car movie–the architecture of the sports movie is hard to re-think to begin with but the specific nature of those who drive cars at 200 miles per hour seems to put the same words in their mouths albeit fifty plus years apart. What looks more interesting than ‘LeMans’ the movie is a documentary about the making of the movie which came out ten years ago (the trailer is posted below). The McQueen film was a notoriously troubled production which you can read about in this Wikipedia entry. McQueen, a total prick, fired the original director John Sturges as well as the writer Alan Trustman, who wrote ‘Bullitt’ for McQueen a few years earlier. (You’re welcome, Steve). As he was a dedicated driver himself, he used his own 1969 Porsche 917K in the movie. It’s now owned by Jerry Seinfeld and even has its own webpage. I’m having a helluva time finding the doc–it’s not on YouTube–but a viewing of both the doc and the movie seem in order. Meanwhile, I heartily reccommend a nice old-fashioned visit to your local movie theater for a viewing of ‘F1’. As a filmmaker I was both impressed and depressed by it, the former because of its high level of craft, the latter because of what a huge pain in the ass it looks like it was to make. Of course, that’s just another thing it appears to have in common with ‘Le Mans’, to say nothing of Steve McQueen, Le man.