The Wild Racers

The Wild Racers (1968)

From Stock Car To Grand Prix... show him a curve and he'll take it... on two wheels or with a kiss!

Promising young racing car driver Joe Joe Quillico leaves the stock car racing scene in the United States in order to pursue Grand Prix racing in Europe. After limited success he manages to win the Spanish Grand Prix. His love life however, is much less successful and his winning on the track only serves to alienate the woman he loves - with unhappy consequences.

Date of release
1968-03-27
TMDB
3.9 / 10 (8)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Drama, Action
Director
Daniel Haller, Roger Corman

Casting

Interesting facts

The Wild Racers is a 1968 American film directed by Daniel Haller and starring Fabian, Mimsy Farmer, and Judy Cornwell. The screenplay concerns a Grand Prix racing car driver.

Production

The film was partly funded by Roger Corman. Tamara Asseyev was working as Corman's assistant when assigned to help produce the film.

Haller later said, "That movie began when Roger asked me to develop the script with Chuck Griffith. That meant I drove Chuck to Santa Barbara in my car and wouldn’t let him out of the hotel room until he had a certain amount of pages done. Then we went to Palm Springs and he’d dry out there. We finally ended up in La Jolla writing for a day or so there. After a week, we came back with the finished script."

Haller said the original play was to go to Europe. Corman would direct the first unit and Haller would direct second unit – namely, filming all the races on Sunday. However, when he got to Europe, Corman had already shot one of the races and told Haller since that Haller knew the script better than Corman did, Haller should direct first unit while Corman did second unit. Eventually Corman went home for portions of the shoot.

The Wild Racers was shot in six countries in five and a half weeks with two weeks preparation. Most of the movie was filmed on locations without permission. "We were one step ahead of the law the whole time", says Haller. This was a method which had been used by Corman on The Young Racers (1963). Talia Coppola played the second lead, scouted locations and did the set dressings. During production the film was known as Hell's Racers.

Mimsy Farmer was working in a hospital in Canada when director Dan Haller called asking if she wanted to be in the film. "I jumped at the chance to go to Europe and also to see my brother Philip, who was living in London at the time", she later recalled. "It was the best move I’d made up to then and I loved traveling in France, Spain, and Holland."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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