In the early 2000s, I quit a career in advertising, sold everything I owned, and moved to the Isle of Man. My goal was to qualify for and race in the TT, and to write a book about it. I raced in two TT classes in 2002. My account of those races was published as an extended, two-part series called Island Man that appeared in Motorcyclist magazine later that year. A film-maker friend from the ad business, Peter Riddihough, came to the IoM and made a documentary film of my experience there. That film, One Man’s Island, was released in 2004. My Motorcyclist series was expanded into a memoir, Riding Man, that was published in 2007 and re-released in 2011.
A lap of the TT course has nowhere near as many twists and turns as the process of turning a true story into a Hollywood movie. Riding Man spent 10+ years in development hell I am now ready to say it ain’t ever gonna’ be resurrected. Writing this account — and be warned there will surely be many installments — is my way of coming to terms with a process that cost me countless hours and, quite possibly, a marriage.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know everything that happened to me over there. But until now I’ve written little about the decade Riding Man spent in Hollywood’s “Development Hell”
For a guy who was probably the least naturally talented and most cowardly TT racer, my time on the IsIe of Man was pretty extensively documented. But few people know that the story had a life of its own–so there’s a whole story about the story. Most of that meta-story is about Riding Man’s improbable and frustrating decade in development hell as a feature film. But the prequel to that Hollywood story goes back to 2006, even before the book was published.
The truth is that although I put everything I had on the line to race in the TT, it was not a crazy financial decision. I started pitching Riding Man in 1999 and pretty quickly signed with a decent East Coast literary agent who loved the idea.
“I sell 75% of the books that I take on,” he told me. “And my authors’ average advance is $140,000.” I tried to play it cool but in my mind I was multiplying $140k by 0.75 and coming up with $105,000 as an expectation
Spoiler: He never did get me a publisher. He tried; acquisitions editors at all the major trade publishers rejected it in glowing terms. Usually they praised the writing but wondered whether there were enough motorcycle racing fans and did they read? Presumably they would have rejected The Perfect Storm because there are only a few commercial fishermen left and they probably don’t read, either. (Zac Kurylyk, you’re obviously excepted from this rule!)
My agent pitched it to progressively less impressive imprints while pressuring me to make the story more dramatic and accessible to a broader audience. In the end he decided to retire and thus released me from my contract. I decided that rather than dumb Riding Man down, I’d write it for the members of my tribe: motorcyclists, racers, people who loved the TT.
This takes us to McKinney, Texas some time in 2006 if I recall correctly. (I spent a few months in Texas; long story but not germane.) I’d already been hired and fired at Motorcyclist, and was writing for Road Racer X. Somehow Chris Jonnum, my editor at RRX, spoke to a filmmaker who said that he was in the process of writing a screenplay about the TT. Jonnum gave that guy my number and said, “You have to talk to Mark Gardiner; he raced in it and is just finishing up a book about it.”
(MG Note: Since even frivolous lawsuits are worth avoiding, I’ll give that filmmaker a different name. Hmm… how about “Dan Strough”?)
I remember getting the first of many phone calls and emails from Strough, who introduced himself and asked if I had some time to talk about the Isle of Man and the TT. Of course I did. At this point, I figured I was talking to some guy who had a day job as a waiter. One thing that I warned him about was that the film rights to the TT had been tied up by a company called Greenlight Productions. Greenlight had been a real pain in Peter Riddihough’s ass.
“Oh, I’m not worried,” Strough told me. “It’ll be a fifty-million-dollar picture. Film rights will be the studio’s problem.”
I was, like, “Oh--kaay.”
After a long, long time on the phone I suggested that for efficiency’s sake I’d send Strough a working draft of Riding Man because most of his questions were answered in the text. Looking back on it now, I can say in his limited defense that he was the only filmmaker who I’m sure read it from start to finish. The next time we spoke, he told me that he loved certain scenes from the book.
“Don’t sell the film rights to anyone else before talking to me,” he said. At that point I really couldn’t translate Filmese into English, so I thought he meant that later, he might be interested in buying the film rights. That was promising, because at that time, my only source of income was freelance writing for motorcycle publishers who, except for RRX, paid neither well nor promptly. Every month it was a huge challenge just to keep a balance available on any one of several credit cards. Over the next few years came to learn that in Filmese, “Don’t sell the film rights to anyone else before talking to me,” wasn’t a statement implying intent, it was a question: “Has anyone else sniffed around your story?”
Strough called and emailed often as he worked out his story; checking to see if what he’d written had been accurate so far. I made many suggestions. This amounted to me burning zero/dollars/per hours talking to, emailing, and generally assisting a guy who lived in New York but kept a motorcycle in California “so he could ride in the winter.”
More and more, I felt my experience being mined for someone else’s benefit; it would be easy to avoid plagiarizing me, and thus obviate the need to ever pay me anything. In hindsight, a smarter/more confrontational person would have said, “Why don’t you pay me an hourly consulting fee, that will be deducted from my option fee later?” But I’m not that guy and anyway, the fastest way to find out if a stranger plans to screw you over is to pretend that you can’t see it coming; if you confront them, they’ll work harder to hide that fact. Learning it later is always worse.
Me being me, I just stopped returning his calls and emails. This decision was made easier after renting a film he’d written and directed, which starred the ingénue du jour and an Academy Award winner. I hated it. I wasn’t alone. Roger Ebert described it as having an “Idiot Plot”. In other circumstances I might’ve given him the benefit of the doubt and assumed the director had messed up a good script, but he’d both written and directed it.
Eventually Strough sent me a finished draft of his Isle of Man script to read. I never opened it. I put him out of my mind and focused on finishing Riding Man and publishing it myself.
Since then I’ve learned to speak pretty fluent Filmese. “I love your work, you’re a genius,” means, “Who are you, again?” In Hollywood, the way people express sincerity is not with words (or as I would learn later, even written and signed contracts.) Only checks matter.
Ironically at that time in my life if Strough had said, “I’ll give you $5,000 for the film rights,” I would happily have signed them over.
Our paths were destined to cross again years later. He was still trying to get funding but by that point a big production company had optioned Riding Man. As far as Hollywood was concerned, the island was only big enough for one feature.
But I’m getting way, way ahead of myself.