‘The Lost Movie’, Steve McQueen (2021)
A new feature-length documentary about Steve McQueen was aired on Sky on early 2021 and for anyone with even a passing interest in motor racing it should be considered unmissable.
The documentary is narrated by legendary talkshow host and Indianapolis 500 winning team owner David Letterman.
It was McQueen’s plan and dream to shoot a movie about Formula One, it would have been called Day of the Champion, was to be built around specially-shot footage from races in the European F1 season, and would have been based on photojournalist Robert Daley’s book The Cruel Sport (1963), which probed the dark side of a glamorous occupation which killed far too many of its participants. McQueen proposed to team up with director John Sturges, with whom he worked on The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape.
Famous racers, including Jack Brabham, Dan Gurney, Hills Phil and Graham and Stirling Moss (Sturges’s technical consultant), pop up regularly, while the footage often focuses on the 1965 German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring. The exclusive material hasn’t been seen for 55 years and was unearthed by archivist Richard Wiseman, who also worked on the 2015 McQueen film The Man & Le Mans.
Professional driver Stirling Moss drove both single and two-seater camera cars, and the richly-textured 35mm film of Lotuses and Brabhams jinking through the woodlands and hedgerows of the famous old circuit is fabulous stuff.
It’s hard to disagree with Letterman when he says: “This is the untold story of the best movie never made…”
The shooting was supposed to last nine weeks but, due to McQueen being stuck in Taiwan filming The Sand Pebbles, stretched out to seven months. Meanwhile, movie director Frankenheimer and his crew were working on “Grand Prix” an almost identical movie project, based on the same Daley’s book, during the 1966 F1 season and sponsored by MGM. Frustrated, McQueen saw the prospects for Day of the Champion slipping away.
Warner, who was McQueen's main sponsor, pulled the plug on Day of The Champion in the summer of 1966 when it became clear MGM would beat them to the cinemas with Grand Prix, leaving McQueen furious and disappointed. To make things worst, Grand Prix won three Oscars at the 1967 ceremony, while his own Best Actor nomination for The Sand Pebbles didn’t bring him the dreamed statuette.
Bittersweet.
McQueen carried on with many other successful projects as “Bullitt” directed by Peter Yates, released in 1968, and his F1 movie project was left behind, forgotten.
