Speed on screen

 Went to see "F1: The Movie" the other day, and you know what it got me wondering?

It got me wondering why there aren't more racing movies like "Ford vs. Ferrari." 

It got me thinking the best movies in an admittedly tiny genre tend to be the ones ripped from the pages of history -- like, well, "Ford vs. Ferrari," or maybe Ron Howard's "Rush." Real life, or a reasonable facsimile, tends to be yea more compelling and yea less formulaic on most occasions, it seems to me. And its surface in this area has barely been smudged.

For instance: Re-reading "Driving With The Devil," Neal Thompson's chronicle of the woolly early days of stock-car racing in the American south, made me wonder why no filmmaker has ever told the story of Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall. It's a hell of a tale: Two wild boys from rural Georgia wheeling Ford V8s loaded with 'shine on the twisty moonlit road from Dawsonville to Atlanta, in the meantime becoming the infant stock-car racing circuit's first glittering stars.

What Seay didn't win, Hall usually did.  Together with former bootlegger/huckster/semi-legit businessman Raymond Parks, they formed the first kinda-sorta team in what was then, in the late 1930s and early '40s, barely a kinda-sorta sport.

They were two entirely different men, Seay and Hall, the former quiet and calculating and the latter flamboyant and reckless to the point of madness. The story of both, however, is the story of two men who could never quite move on from the hills and stills that formed them, and who were ultimately ruined by it.

Seay was just 23 and at his peak as a racer when he was shot dead by a deranged cousin in a moonshine deal gone sideways. Hall spent most of his racing days on the run from the law, until finally his seeming compulsion to self-destruct landed him in prison for a six-year stretch.

When he got out, he tried to go back to racing, but Bill France had squeezed stock-car racing in his iron fist by then, and the lawless days in which Hall had flourished were past. One last crash left Rapid Roy with severe head injuries from which he would never quite recover.

So, drama, conflict, tragedy and car crashes, all wrapped up in one neat package. Pretty much your recipe for box-office gold.

If only the box-office gold didn't have to be vetted by Hollywood first, that is.

Studio heads are as skittish as kittens in a roomful of rockers when it comes to getting behind projects it considers iffy, and "Lloyd and Roy" would have iffy crawling all over it. Any racing movie is a gamble -- the appeal is hardly as broad as a movie about pirates or mobsters or former Navy SEALs out to avenge some horrific wrong -- so if you're going to drop significant coinage on one, it better have Brad Pitt or Matt Damon or Tom Cruise in it. 

And if it's Based On A True Story, as they say, it better be a True Story with which the general public is at least semi-familiar. And outside the Deep South, who except incorrigible gearheads has ever heard of Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall?

Better to put Brad Pitt in a racing movie, and go with the standard formula: Struggling  team owner brings back an old racing buddy who washed out of Formula One years before. Pairs him with a brash young rookie who's not about to take advice from a relic. Conflict ensues ... the old racing buddy does some crazy cowboy stuff that intensifies the conflict ... eventually everyone learns to work together. 

Oh, yeah: And somewhere in there, the old racing buddy beds the attractive female chief engineer despite her hard-and-fast rule about mixing business with pleasure. Because of course he does.

It's all as predictable as sunrise, which is why none of the above violates the Spoiler Rule. Heck, you see it all coming from a mile away, especially the bedding-the-female-chief-engineer part. You know what's going to happen there the first time she appears on the screen.

None of this, mind you, means "F1" doesn't work. It does. It's all enormously entertaining: The racing scenes are state-of-the-art, Brad Pitt is Brad Pitt, and, as in John Frankenheimer's groundbreaking "Grand Prix," actual F1 drivers and team principles make cameo appearances.

Hell of a ride, all-in-all. Best fictional racing film since "Grand Prix," in the Blob's humble opinion. Not to mention a neat two-and-a-half-hour infomercial for F1.

Still like to see Ron Howard or someone tackle Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall, though. Still like to see that.