For motor racing fans over the age of fifty and racing history buffs, few stories will compare to the tale of how Ford, a maker of mass-market cars, took on Ferrari, arguably the most renowned racing marque in the world, back in the 1960s, particularly in the field of endurance racing, and beat them four years in a row at the legendary 24 Hours of Le Mans race. Like the saying goes, "you can't make stuff like this up," and even though Ford has never ever duplicated its success in international racing since those four years in the late 1960s, its story will almost certainly endure.
Well, thanks to a book by A.J. Baime which is currently being developed for the big screen with Michael "Miami Vice" Mann apparently slated to direct, the odds of that story being burned into the public subconscious have just improved considerably.
Traditionally, movies about motor racing don't really sell all that well. The most recent motor-racing themed movie, Speed Racer, was an also-ran at the global box-office in 2008, as was the latest "Herbie" sequel in 2005 and the Renny Harlin/Sylvester Stallone collaboration Driven ten years ago.
Not even Tom Cruise could sell the NASCAR-themed Days of Thunder; though that film was a modest hit in 1990, it came out at a time when the actor was white hot thanks to the success of films like Top Gun, Cocktail and Rain Man, as well as his first of three Academy award nominations for Born on the Fourth of July the year before. So by Cruise's standards at the time, Days of Thunder was a letdown and proof positive of just how hard it is to sell a racing-car-themed movie.
Pixar's Cars and Sony Pictures' Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby the latter of which starred Will Ferrell are the rare exceptions (both of which, coincidentally enough, were released in 2006), but in those films racing took a backseat to other things. In the case of Cars it merely served as a backdrop for Lightning McQueen's journey of self-discovery in Radiator Springs, while in Ricky Bobby it was a distant second to Will Ferrell's man-child antics, this time with co-star John C. Reilly.
(The Fast and Furious movies, by the way, being about street racing, don't count.)
In fact, apparently most Hollywood producers are so sure that motor racing movies don't and won't sell that they hardly make them.
The very notion, therefore, that Mann would take on a project as risky as this is something for which I genuinely admire him. One thing he has going for him, though is that more than just a run-of-the-mill motor racing yarn, the story of the Ferrari-killing Ford GT40 is a classic underdog, David-and-Goliath tale in the vein of the horse-racing movie Seabiscuit and the football-themed Remember the Titans, both of which were also based on true stories, and both of which were quite successful at the box-office. The story has a lot of potential to draw in audiences that wouldn't normally watch movies about car-racing, but I suppose that would depend largely on what kind of movie Mann eventually decides to make, and how it's marketed. As a moviegoer who enjoyed The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, Ali and Collateral, I'm reasonably confident in Mann's ability to pull off a nice, gripping movie. While scouring youtube one day, I even managed to catch a Ferrari ad he directed. He definitely has what it takes.
For my part, I dearly hope that this movie gets made, gets made well and that it really takes off at the box-office. I've been jonesing for a real, balls-to-the-wall racing movie since I first saw John Frankenheimer's 1966 cult classic Grand Prix on DVD a couple of years ago. With the right cast and script, the tale of the GT40 could be the screen classic racing fans know it deserves to be.
The best of luck, Michael Mann!
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