Cannonball

Cannonball (1976)

The annual Trans-American outlaw road race - A cross country demolition derby without rules!

Coy "Cannonball" Buckman and his blazing red Pontiac enter the Trans-America Grand Prix, an underground road race spanning the continent in which there are no rules, no speed limits and no heed for the law. En route, Buckman jockeys with an international ensemble of racers for a $100,000 purse. But there are none more important than Cade Redman, his direct competition for a guaranteed spot on the elite Modern Motors racing team.

Date of release
1976-07-06
TMDB
5.6 / 10 (132)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Action, Comedy
Director
Paul Bartel

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $780K
  • Filmed in: Santa Monica

Cannonball is a 1976 comedy film directed by Paul Bartel and starring David Carradine. The film is co-produced by the American studios Cross-County Productions and Harbour Productions and Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers Studio. It is one of two released in 1976 that were based on the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, a real illegal cross-continent road race that took place for a number of years in the United States. The same topic later became the basis for the films The Cannonball Run, Cannonball Run II and Speed Zone. The film was written and directed by Paul Bartel, who also directed Death Race 2000.

Production

Producer Sam Gelfman wanted to make a film about the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash race. After the success of Death Race 2000, he hired Paul Bartel to direct and David Carradine to star, and set up the film at Fox. However Fox decided not to make it. Gelfman had Don Simpson rewrite the script then obtained finance from a group of investors including New World, Run Run Shaw and Gustave Berne.

Roger Corman told Bartel that Death Race 2000 would have been more successful had it been more realistic and so Bartel made Cannonball as the answer.

Bartel later said he worked for a year on Death Race 2000 for $5,000 "so when it was finished I desperately needed money. The only thing anybody wanted from me was another car picture, hence Cannonball. Corman had drummed into me the idea that if Death Race had been 'harder' and 'more real' it would have been more popular. Like a fool, I believed him".

The cameo by Sylvester Stallone is uncredited, while Roger Corman and Simpson appear as district attorneys. Directors Joe Dante, Jonathan Kaplan, Allan Arkush and Martin Scorsese have cameos, and former beach movie star and The Transformers voice actor Aron Kincaid appears in a small role as one of two cops who pull over the girls in the van.

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

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