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Movie Trivia

daneldorado

By daneldorado,
in Games and Trivia

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Dothery Advanced Member

Dothery

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I was going to post this as a question, but it would be 400 years before anyone got it, so I'll just tell the story and plead that it IS trivial, and it IS about a movie, and that's the name of the thread ...

 

Minny minny years ago, I think 25 or so, I was approached by a secretarial service client of mine to do some transcription which would, indirectly, end up being part of a movie script. The idea was that I would do it on spec, and be paid down the line sometime, when the project was in production. I said sure. The subject was a solar car, which was being built by students at Konawaena High School, down the road from Kona. The authors of the script were interested in getting the students to the solar car race in Australia, the World Solar Challenge, and finally succeeded in doing so. The car was a fragile, cobbled-together thing but worked reasonably well if they could get it to hold together long enough. When they got to Australia they had qualifying runs and the car made it just to the finish line and then fell apart. But it did qualify. They fixed it (they fixed it about every twenty minutes for weeks, before and during the race).

 

The race went on, with several multimillion-dollar cars (Mitsubishi had two cars which cost $6 million each). The little solar car from Konawaena finished, I think, 18th in a field of 75 or so. Don't quote me; I'm just doing this from memory. The kids raced the car themselves, the girls driving faster than the boys, since they were lighter, and every ounce counted. One girl was particularly skillful. Nobody could touch her for endurance and courage. It was grueling, and the kids did a masterful job, since they were riding about a couple inches off the pavement all the way, hot, sweaty, exhausted at the end of their segment, but very positive. They drove a very long way, from Darwin to Adelaide.

 

My client came back from Australia with a finished script and backing from several car manufacturers, who had contributed several millions for the privilege of having their names on the car during the race. He approached several movie companies, one of which (Tristar) bought the script and eventually made the movie, as "Race The Sun." He then told me I was going to be compensated for my work to the tune of $10,000, which was just short of twenty times more than the value of the work I had done. He got the same deal from Tristar for all the students who had been involved in the building of the car and racing it. Tristar was quite amenable to these arrangements. You were in the script, and even though you might not make it to the movie itself, if you were still in the script ten days before principal photography began, you got your money. I was depicted in the script, and made it to the ten days before. Then apparently I must have been cut, because no matter how many times I've seen the picture, I can't find me. My movie career died a-borning. I didn't mind, because the authors had been feeding me bits from the script that made me feel pretty uncomfortable, like "She stood on a table wearing only a string bikini ..."

 

The movie was nothing like what really happened. The kids were far from being misfits at the high school, the teacher was a really solid man who knew how to work with the kids and who had flawless credentials. There were no cockroaches involved (why they put that idea in the screenplay I will never know). The authors found out the studio cared nothing about authenticity, but not until after they'd sold it and a writer did the screenplay. By that time they were out of the picture. They did get an "Executive Producers" credit, for the blink of an eye at the end of the picture. But they got a satisfactory deal. They were a little disappointed that it wasn't what they'd written, but that's show business.

 

I still have the T-shirt, which was designed by one of the script authors, who was also an artist.

 

Anyway, a couple months later I got $10,000 from Tristar.

 

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