The Hollywood version of the GT40 story

A.J. Baime, the staffer at Playboy who wrote the best selling book
Goes Like Hell and sold it to the movies , was recently calling attention to a report on a website that at least says something is happening. I'll just pass on the info from the site unedited. The site is called ThePlaylist.Blogspot.com.
I don't know 'bout you, but five years is too long to wait!
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"10/28/2009
Brad Pitt And Josh Brolin Interested In Car-Racing Pic 'Go Like Hell'?

Speaking on Adam Carolla's podcast, producer Lucas Foster (producer of "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," "Man On Fire" and "Law Abiding Citizen") has revealed that Brad Pitt and Josh Brolin have expressed interest in his upcoming car racing film for 20th Century Fox, "Go Like Hell."

Based on A.J. Baime's "Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans," the film will follow young Henry Ford II as he teams with visionary Lee Iacocca and racing-champion-turned-engineer Carroll Shelby in reinventing his grandfather's company and challenging Enzo Ferrari's dominance in the illustrious world of European car racing, namely the 24 hour race at the Le Mans track.

Carolla, a car fanatic, compared the rivalry between Ford and Ferrari to that between the U.S. and Russia during the Space Race and discussed the implicating brutality of the rivalry which saw racers and spectators alike regularly killed due to the intensity of the 24 hour races and lack of technological advancements in safety.

“I’m trying to make a movie that’s about the drivers more than the politics,” producer Foster noted. “Carroll Shelby is a big character, Lee Iacocca is a big character, Enzo [Ferrari] is a big character, Henry Ford II is a big character and we’ll obviously cast them well but, to me, it’s really about the drivers and I’m trying to make a first-person experience out of this where it really puts the audience in the cockpit. This is what it’s like to go 200 miles an hour with a car that not really all that controllable.”

Way to ruin it. The politics behind it all sounded much more interesting than a period-piece "Fast and Furious" but obviously it's only early days and hopefully talent involved will sort it out. Of which, Foster revealed he "had a really cool writer," was "in the middle of hiring a director" and that he was interested in the likes of Daniel Day-Lewis , Russell Crowe, Matt Damon (for the character of American driver Phil Hill) and Eric Bana for the pic (gee, is that it? Sure there's no one else you want?). Sure, and we want Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet to star in our home movie too. Don't get too caught up in this. Producers eyes are always bigger than their stomachs or reach, but then again Lucas is the real deal and does have a good CV to his name.

Bana we could see easily joining — after all he did make a documentary this year titled "Love The Beast" that followed his love affair with his first car, a (drumroll) Ford — but we're not sure how Foster will go with his other pie-in-the-sky interests. Although if Pitt and Brolin are interested and if a strong director comes aboard, maybe we could see an Ocean's-style cast building?

"I have a lot of interest from big actors," Foster said before name-dropping the aforementioned actors. " It would shock you the telephone calls that have come in from people who we are chasing. Typically, I'm begging these people to read these scripts that we develop and, on this one, luckily, thank God [it's the other way round] and I think it will cause it to get made." And, at the end of day — as Carolla notes — what actor wouldn't want to get paid to go to France for six months and race amazing vintage cars?

Don't expect this to go in front cameras any time soon but. "This movie will, by the time we actually physically go make it, will certainly be four or five years in," Foster added. With such big names potentially involved but, surely Fox would fast-track this? Or is there interest just curiosity right now? File this one away for a possibility that might happen one day if this producer's lucky and the stars align. We'll see.


Posted by Simon Dang at 7:07 AM

Labels: Brad Pitt, Daniel Day-Lewis, Eric Bana, Josh Brolin, Matt Damon, Russell Crowe "

 

More about the author of "Go Like Hell"

I haven't heard much lately about the movie about endurance racing in the Sixties, centering on Ford, andhope readers who know what's happening (for example, which actor will play Shelby?) to post here. But I did find an entertianing interview of the author A.J. Baime. I reproduce it here from the NYT via Baime's own website.
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GETTING THE TIRE TRACKS ON PAPER By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: June 8, 2009
A. J. Baime’s new book, “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans,” is set in the 1960s but evokes a world that now seems vanished and fantastical. General Motors and Ford, far from bankrupt, are two of the mightiest companies in the world.


An excerpt from "Go Like Hell."
Gas is as plentiful as water, and almost as cheap. Nobody buys a car because of its fuel efficiency or its safety features. All that matters is how fast it goes. Race drivers are heroic figures who appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek almost as often as they turn up in emergency rooms or the morgue. When Ralph Nader starts complaining about the Corvair, G.M. hires private detectives to dig up dirt on his private life.

The centerpiece of the story is the quest by Henry Ford II, or the Deuce, as he was known, to end Ferrari’s string of victories at Le Mans, the 24-hour road race that at the time was probably the world’s most dangerous sporting event. He was convinced that Ford’s racing success would translate into sales back home in the showroom, but he was also locked in a personal rivalry with the imperious Enzo Ferrari, head of the Italian car company. It took Ford three tries and countless millions, but he finally prevailed when a Ford GT40 Mk II, driven by Bruce McLaren, won at Le Mans in 1966.

In many ways, though, the feud persists. There are still car enthusiasts who prefer the elegance and nimbleness of the Ferrari, and those who swear by the muscle and straight-ahead speed of the Ford GT. Mr. Baime, an executive editor at Playboy, where he oversees the automotive coverage, is partial to Ferraris, and recently borrowed a bright red $300,000 599 GTB Fiorano and drove it to the Monticello Motor Club, a private track in the Catskills.

The car is so valuable that Ferrari also sent a guy to the track whose job it was, apparently, just to stand around and worry. In case you were wondering, it gets about 11 miles per gallon driving around the neighborhood, and less than that out on the track.

The Monticello Motor Club is a sort of country club for people who own high-performance cars and want to do more with them than collect speeding tickets on the Merritt Parkway. They can take racing lessons, book time on the 4.1-mile track or lounge around, in their driving shoes and racing suits, on sofas designed to resemble sports car upholstery.

On any afternoon the parking lot is apt to be full of very expensive machinery with long-winded names: Ferrari 360 Stradales and F430 Scuderias, Porsche 911 GT3’s, Lotus Exige S 260’s, Beemer M3 GTR’s, Audi R8’s. If you arrive in your dinged-up, 10-year-old commuter heap, you probably want to park it over on the side and out of the way.

On the other hand, you might feel less guilty about having postponed the muffler job you so badly need. Your engine, which used to sound loud and embarrassing, now seems sweet and throaty, and, feeling turbocharged, you may even be emboldened to take the wheel of the Ferrari yourself when the guy from the company isn’t looking.

William McMichael, the president of the club and its managing member, is a Ferrari man, and owns several. Ari Straus, one of his partners in the club, prefers the Ford GT and backed one out of a garage to show off its long, low lines, its rumbling power plant.

“It’s a real car,” he said. “It’s a man’s car, an American car. And it’s a rocket ship on the straightaway.” Its weakness is cornering, he admitted, and the GT actually makes less sense than the Ferrari on a track like Monticello, which has 22 turns, and where the longest straight stretch is only three-quarters of a mile. To fly around the club’s track, Mr. Straus also owns a bone-rattling Lotus in which you strap yourself inside like a jet pilot.

Mr. Baime’s personal ride is a four-cylinder Subaru station wagon in need of a wash, but he has hung around tracks enough to become a competent race driver. At Monticello he went out first with an instructor, but then took the wheel himself and, flicking the paddle shifter, easily booted the Ferrari up to 135 or so, well below the car’s capability but fast enough to create G force in the cockpit and terrify a passenger.

The trick, he explained, was not so much spinning the wheel or stomping on the accelerator as finding that straight line that connected the apex of one turn to another. If you’re good enough, according to Mr. Straus, you can steer mostly with the gas pedal, which straightens the car out as you accelerate and ducks it into a turn if you let up.

On the other hand, if you’re used to a commuter heap, you’re apt to find steering merely with the wheel challenge enough; even at 90, the turns at Monticello come on you as suddenly as those in a video game.

Car racing is a lot safer than it used to be, Mr. Baime said, sitting in one of the club’s lounge areas, and that may explain why it has lost some of its glamour.

“I think it was the danger of motor sport that made it so fascinating,” he said. “That it could be so violent was part of the appeal.”

He added that it was the driver Jackie Stewart who began to change things. “At the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix he was in an accident and was pinned beneath the car while fuel leaked on him. He retired in 1972 or 1973, at the peak of his fame, and he was the first one to say: ‘Excuse me. We have a problem here.’ ”

As he researched the book, Mr. Baime went on to say, he was struck by how practically everyone he read about seemed larger than life.

“It wasn’t just Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari who were great characters, there were all these others,” he said, and he began to list them: Carroll Shelby, builder of the legendary Cobra, who directed Ford’s winning Le Mans campaign; the drivers Mario Andretti, Phil Hill and Ken Miles, whose death in 1966, while testing-driving Ford’s experimental J-Car, gives the story its tragic end.

Mr. Baime began “Go Like Hell” four years ago, when he had little inkling of what would happen to the American automobile industry. “I saw the book as an action-adventure story and also as a cultural history, about the fascination of speed in the 1960s. But it’s also a business story about a company that is going to try to survive at the very dawn of globalization.”

He picked up a copy and read the end of the second-to-last chapter: “ ‘We don’t want to buy Ferrari anymore,’ Henry II told one reporter before leaving France. ‘Now we fear most of all the Japanese.’ ”

“If you think about it,” Mr. Baime said, “ this is the first chapter in a very long story. It’s still a story about a struggle for the technology of the future. The difference is that now they’re going to have to reinvent the wheel.”

 

Update: Michael Mann is looking at The Hollywood version of the GT40 story

There is movement about the movie--Fox is talking to a director.
-----------------------------------------------here's the news story as I found it.


Michael Mann in talks for film about '67 Le Mans

Pamela McClintock Reuters
4:16 p.m. CDT, May 27, 2011

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Michael Mann is in talks with 20th Century Fox to develop and potentially direct "Go Like Hell," the real-life story of the famous competition between the Ford Motor Co. and Ferrari that led to Ford winning the Le Mans in 1967.


Ford was the first American car maker to win the world's oldest car race, held annually in France. For years, Ferrari had dominated the contest.

Based on A.J. Baime's book, the Fox project recounts how a young Henry Ford II -- determined to infuse new life into his family's company -- decided to get into the European racing scene.

With the help of racer Carroll Shelby and Lee Iacocca, Ford built and designed a car that could take on Ferrari cars, known for their speed and style. They ultimately won the Le Mans.

Insiders say the initial idea was for Mann to develop the script.