seeitwith.me random outbursts of cinema appreciation

Le Mans (1971) – A gearheads wet dream, most realistic motorsport film ever made, and the picture that destroyed Steve McQueen

This post is part of the Steve McQueen blog-a-thon hosted by Jason Bellamy over at Cooler Cinema

Steve McQueen's vision was simple: Create the best, most realistic movie about motorsports ever made. It was a story that began years before filming took place during the summer of 1970, and its aftermath impacted McQueen for the rest of his life. Le Mans was a huge project; 20,000 props, 26 high-performance racing cars with 52 drivers from seven countries, along with 350,000 French-speaking extras. And no finished script. There were few lines, even for a McQueen film, and no intelligible structure. 'Cars,' he told everyone. 'We film the fucking cars.' And from the very inception of the idea it was riddled with problems.

McQueen, again teamed up with John Sturges, was chasing production of a script called Day of the Champion, about the highs and lows of a troubled Grand Prix driver with the F1 race as its backdrop. McQueen was filming The Sand Pebbles in Taiwan at the time (1965). Director John Frankenheimer was also moving ahead with a movie called Grand Prix, starring McQueen's friend, neighbor, and co-star James Garner. Grand Prix was running ahead of Champion in terms of production schedule, and the latter would have followed the Frankenheimer production in release. Warner Brothers pulled the plug on Champion, not wanting to follow with a second film of the same genre.

McQueen kept himself busy. His next two films, The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt, were among his biggest hits. But by 1969, at the height of his stardom and fully in command of Solar Productions, he was ready to make his magnum opus racing movie. Most of his racing experience took place in sports cars, and he had become enamored with the great endurance events like Sebring, the 24 Hours of Daytona, and of course, Le Mans. The latter, which has taken place in the French countryside since 1923, was the grand dame among them and thus the epicenter of the film.

Solar's production team attended the 1969 running of Le Mans to film the race as it happened. This was done to site the best camera locations, demonstrate to Cinema Center Films that the project was worthy, and in effect, learn how to film the movie. In a 1969 interview with Motor Trend, McQueen said, "For us to capture on film the greatest endurance race in the world has really got us excited. I'm thrilled because we think we'll be able to do things with the camera no one has ever done before. For instance, we'd like to effectively capture the speed of 220-225 mph at Mulsanne. If we can, cinematically, give people a pleasant feeling and yet give them the sheer sense of speed at the edge of infinity, then we've created greatness."

By mid-1970 there were 30 or more full-time employees in McQueen's care, plus valets, cooks, gardeners. As fast as the cash from Bullitt came in, it was hemorrhaging out again on salaries and overheads. Just before leaving for France to film Le Mans, McQueen hired a new business manager called Bill Maher. Maher audited the books and told Steve he was technically broke, at least, 'not fluid'. Suddenly he was a bankrupt tycoon.

Sturges, in brief, wanted a human-interest story about auto-racers and their love lives; McQueen, for his part, was lobbying for a 'pure' three-hour film that would be more or less a documentary on Le Mans. The measly 10-page treatment he'd worked on in Palm Springs baffled both cast and drivers alike, and Steve was even laughed at in a few production meetings. As for the shoot, he spent a lot of time driving around Le Mans and allowing himself to be filmed. Steve had said he thought the idea of doing a 'straight' car movie was dramatic enough, and it might have been; but what's dramatic in concept didn't turn out so on screen. Somehow even the racing scenes were painfully flat. 'All we were really doing,' says producer Robert Relyea, 'was laboriously moving Car 22 in front of Car 23 and vice versa. It was excruciating.' A whole day could be spent shooting a few seconds' film. Steve agonized for hours about the cut of his driving suit or the precise amount of dirt to be applied to his tires. McQueen once even had the flunkies carefully glue dead insects to his windscreen, then walked to and fro looking at the car from every angle, bending down, squinting, and finally shaking his head.'No - wrong kind of bugs.'

Off track it was another story. Le Mans never filled the hole at the heart of its plot. There was virtually no human interest and the token dialogue was uninvolving. For the first quarter of the film, the only voice heard was the one echoing over the track's Tannoy system. By early July, Steve had not only lost control of events but had the greatest difficulty in finding out what was happening. Relyea's co-producer Jack Reddish was on his way to losing 20lb and breaking out in sores. John Sturges's remaining hair went white. Then the studio stepped in.  Then Sturges threw in the towel. That was when Sturgess uttered one of his most famous lines: 'I'm too old and too rich to put up with this shit.'

Sturges flew home, and out of Steve's life for ever. His replacement was Lee H. Katzin, a TV director who hired on at three days' notice, drove to the set, stuck out his hand and said: 'Hello, Steve. Nice to meet you.' Steve grabbed the man by the tie, lifted him up and told him it was 'Mr McQueen'. Star and studio now began to strafe each other in earnest. A delegation of beetle-browed studio executives and William Morris agents arrived in France to consider whether to replace McQueen with Robert Redford, or even to shut the whole thing down. Round-the-clock negotiations finally produced a grim compromise. Steve would relinquish his $750,000 salary and, more pertinently, his creative control in order to at least get the film made.

After fruitless tinkering, the film was released in 1971 to poor reviews and little business. Not only was it a box-office disaster, but it was hadet by the critics and audience equally. Howard Thompson of the New York Times wrote:

But the star's exchange of monosyllabic utterances and long, meaningful stares with other drivers, and especially with Elga Andersen, a sensitive-faced blonde, add up to tepid, monotonous drama during the two-day race intervals. Dramatically, the picture is a bore. And neither the oblique approach to these time-out sequences nor a ripe score by Michel Legrand manages to juice things up.

McQueen left his family and became a recluse, his career put on hold. He would strive to attain his box-office pre-eminence but his relationship with Hollywood never recovered. Le Mans marked the end of the Sixties and his golden decade. Unfortunately, as Le Mans was a racers film. A film for car lovers. To quote one of the few lines McQueen does say in the film in response to being asked why is it so important to drive faster than anyone else: “It’s life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.”