Jay Leno, Jorge Lorenzo, and Ben Spies at Leno’s garage, 2010.
The reason I had to be back in SoCal was to coordinate a Yamaha MotoGP event held at Jay Leno’s garage in the runup to the USGP at Laguna Seca. My wife came with, and we met Grant and the producer–a guy I’ll call Mike Kravitz–at some nondescript restaurant in Burbank.
Before the food had even arrived Kravitz said, “I can think of about five reasons why your story won’t make it as a Hollywood film.”
I don’t remember what they were. I was probably making notes; I keep all my old notebooks so I guess I could reconstruct the conversation. But I do remember my response.
[I had just finished writing a screenplay based on the true story of the British Army’s motorcycle racing team from the Nazis; I’d already been through the mental exercise of adapting a true story in order to make it viable as a mass-market studio picture. This means doing things like adding a love interest, and changing the story arc and if necessary adding or deleting events and characters to conform to Hollywood’s hidebound three-act structure in which specific plot points occur at specific points in the script.–MG]
“I agree that the true story as told in Riding Man or shown in One Man’s Island isn’t Hollywood material,” I said. “But we’ve already ordered food and are going to sit here for at least an hour. So let me tell you some things that happened to me on the Isle of Man that I left out of the book; some things that happened on the Isle of Man but to other people, not me; and things that happened to me in racing and life before or after the period covered in Riding Man.”
As lunch arrived and we ate, I explained that although I’d barely mentioned lupus in Riding Man, I’d actually been very ill that year. Not only did I feel like shit, the drugs I needed in order to move normally on the motorcycle would dramatically increase the severity of all but the most minor crashes. Subsequently, I went into a complete remission that while not quite a miracle, was very rare. (My rheumatologist actually got a little teary when he told me, “Don’t come back unless you get sick again.”)
I described a post-IoM love interest that could easily be transposed to The Island and told a few mostly true stories about racing misadventures and near misses that had happened to me before or since my TT. They concurred those plot elements would all be fair game for a story that was “true” by Hollywood standards.
Towards the end of lunch, I asked what was in it for me. Years earlier, when I’d wasted a bunch of time helping Dan Strough with his screenplay, I had imagined that the principal benefit would be the promotion of book sales. Kravitz told me that the the guy whose book and life rights had formed the basis of his last (and only) film had received a fee approaching the mid-six figures. I tried not to choke on my last bite of BLT.
We agreed that after I returned to Kansas City, I’d write a short synopsis of a film incorporating some of those elements. I promised to get it to them within a month.
“If I’m going to sell this film,” Kravitz said as we stood to leave, “I’ll sell it by Thanksgiving.”
For the next ten years Thanksgiving always reminded me that I should have asked, “What year?”