By the first weeks of 1969 we were in the initial outline stage, as meetings with Garner, his American International Racing (AIR) team, and the Sidaris-Scholer production group got underway.  Our first outing of cameras, cast and crew at the end of January was the 24 Hours of Daytona with Garner’s two Lola T-70 coupes.  Jim’s Ed Leslie/Lothar Motschenbacher car finished 2nd and his Dave Jordan/Scooter Patrick driving duo came 7th.  Not a bad start for AIR and our film, we all agreed.  In March, at the 12 Hours of Sebring, we took our first really hard knocks.   

        The film was not all about closed course racing.  Garner himself had run the grueling Baja California off-road race the year before and done well.  We used that 16mm action and aerial footage to build our split screen opening segment of The Racing Scene, inserting 35mm scenes of Jim and his co-driver Scooter Patrick as they wrestled with their Ford Bronco.  With a lot of effort and long shooting days and nights helmed by Sidaris, and 6-day weeks in the cutting room on Sunset Boulevard with editor Jim Gross, our film was actually coming together. 

        By July we had an hour-long rough cut of The Racing Scene and were showing it to agents and potential distributors.  It looked good and felt great.  But we needed more races.  In early August, at a meeting of Garner, Filmways’ Martin Ransohoff who was producing Catch-22, and Frank Wells who would years later be president of Disney, it was decided to buy a new John Surtees open-wheel car and enter the final races of the 1969 Formula A series. Timing caused us to miss the Mosport Formula A event in Canada on August 24th, but the very next day, after shooting scenes of Jim driving northbound over the Golden Gate Bridge, we were at Sears Point testing the Surtees car just in from England.  There was plenty of work ahead to make it competitive.  We were indeed crossing our own bridges and getting it on!

Our tempo quickened with the new car and challenge at hand.  We did a Filmways publicity screening on August 27th, and three days later were on a plane to Connecticut to run the Surtees in its first race, at Lime Rock Park, on Labor Day.  And labor it was, working in the heat and “hummiddy” – as Jim kept us in laughs – of the Litchfield Hills.  Our spirits went to red line.  But, governed by the consequences of real racing far from Hollywood, we were again down and out of luck on the Lime Rock track, and with only a week to make things better for St. Jovite in the Mount Tremblant region outside Montreal. 

        On Sunday September 7th at St. Jovite we finally got the Surtees running in top form, with Scooter Patrick at the wheel.  But the spectacular and fully filmed first lap pile-up that included Scooter would take us out for good.  There would be no more races for The Racing Scene. 

        What we did have in the can was a real film on real racing, and a spot on picture of what it was to run a racing car team – the whole truth of it, all the Good and the Bad.  Scooter survived without a scratch, so there was no Ugly.  We had played every foot of film for what might happen, and not knowing it until it did.  As Jim said in the film’s beginning, from behind the wheel of his revving Baja Bronco, “Ask me if we think we can go down the road quicker than 300 other guys, I’d probably say ‘We sure as hell are gonna find out!’” 

        The rest of The Racing Scene production story is follow-up, leading toward a theatrical release of the film.  We busied ourselves shooting loose ends to make certain scenes work, such as the airplane and airport, and other links.  By October 17th there was a completed cut screening at Goldwyn Studios in Hollywood, and two weeks of changes later, using a 35mm Moviola in a spare bedroom at home, I began writing narration-to-picture.  Jim loved what I wrote, but it was through our year-long association, one of the best times in my life, that I really got to know Garner’s mind about racing and the way he expressed himself.  My goal was to make Jim’s words in our film truly what he was thinking and then to write it how he would say it.  We recorded Garner at mid-December in a 2-day session, laid in his narration, and dubbed The Racing Scene at the end of February 1970. 

        The release of The Racing Scene is a tale of hopes and heartbreaks.  In screening after screening we delighted the press with our real racing film, but forever struggled with the mechanics of making a proper distribution of our documentary – that evil word again. Warners turned it down, as did other studios.  Garner himself even considered coming to the rescue and follow his own course of distributing in the U.S. and Europe.  On April 23rd we put on happy faces and had a cast-&-crew showing of The Racing Scene at Goldwyn, congratulating ourselves on praise from gathered friends and the press.  Five days later, Garner and Sidaris meet with Marty Ransohoff, and others, where perhaps a dozen plans were considered to bring the film to the movie-going public.  But all remained more or less up in the air.  Eventually, The Racing Scene had a far-too-short release in smaller theaters scattered around the country, ending in a disintegration of the artist-distributor relationship between Jim’s Cherokee Productions and Marty’s Filmways.  And, for years, The Racing Scene would go unseen, except for more recent occasional runs on cable television, commercials inserted. 

        Shortly after James Garner’s feature documentary dropped from view, another star with zeal for racing, Steve McQueen, playing a driver called Michael Delaney, experienced his own much-publicized disappointments while trying to make Le Mans the way he wanted it.  The next year, Paul Newman signed to host a racing documentary special for television called Once Upon a Wheel, which I was brought in to write, and from that grew a series of half-hour TV documentaries on Indy, NHRA Drags, AMA Dirt Track, NASCAR, Formula A, and Can-Am.  All on real racing, but all for the “little” screen.  The following year, after Andy Sidaris directed the ABC Sports coverage of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, Sidaris and Trans World International joined Roone Arledge on ABC’s Championship Auto Racing television series, for which I again wrote narration.  The “big” screen seemed ever and ever remote. 

        Since those days, racing has come back to the movie theater with Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder and Sly Stallone’s Driven, both efforts full of promise in the making but falling short in outcome.  Who knows what will be next?  Ten years ago, meeting face-to-face with Bernie Eccelstone, I pitched a big-budget, wide screen documentary for theaters about Formula One racing that would follow an entire season on the F1 circuit.  Instantly keen on the idea, Eccelstone agreed to open his essentially unapproachable world championship series to our cameras.  The fee required by Bernie plus our projected production costs, totaling only a part of what regular movies demand and get, was, alas, unobtainable.  “Documentary,” that assassin of full screen racing films for movie houses, closed us down again. 

        Nonetheless, this whole story has a delightful ending, which might in fact be a new beginning of appreciation for The Racing Scene.  Petersen Automotive Museum Chairman Bruce Meyer called me this past November and asked if I had a video copy of the Garner documentary.  It was in the mail to him that same day.  Bruce saw it, showed it to Margie and Robert Petersen, and in no time we were putting together the “James Garner & The Racing Scene” night at the Museum.  We right away contacted Jim, his drivers, and production crew for a grand reunion. 

        Now, at long last – January 29, 2003 – the sights and sounds of The Racing Scene  come to life on the screen once more here at the Petersen.  Call it the magic of our indefatigable interest in racing, and our respect and admiration for that fine gentleman of the sport, James Garner.  Maybe we don’t know how everyone will like going back to those days of 1969, but, to quote Jim from his own wonderful racing film – “We sure as hell are gonna find out!” 

 

Sadly, Andy Sidaris passed away while arm-wrestling cancer on March 7, 2007. He was loved by many and will be forever missed by all of us infected with his spirit of living and ability to see humor in practically anything. Andy was recently honored with a screening of THE RACING SCENE at the 2008 Southern Yosemite Automotive Film Festival where his widow, the lovely Arlene Sidaris, was presented an award for her husband's life's work in television, documentary and feature movie production.  He kept all of us in stitches all of the time, and he was proud of saying of himself, "Nobody in Hollywood pays faster than Sidaris, and let that be a lesson!"