Kansas City Bomber

Kansas City Bomber (1972)

The Hottest Thing On Wheels

Roller-derby skater K.C. Carr tries to balance her desire for a happy personal life and her dreams of stardom.

Date of release
1972-08-02
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (19)
Runtime
1h 39m
Genres
Drama
Director
Jerrold Freedman

Casting

Interesting facts

Kansas City Bomber is a 1972 American sports drama film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, directed by Jerrold Freedman and starring Raquel Welch, Kevin McCarthy and an eight year old Jodie Foster in her second feature film appearance.

Production

The film was written by Barry Sandler as a UCLA MA Thesis, with Raquel Welch in mind for the lead. "Raquel was a huge star at the time--kind of like the pop culture goddess", recalled Sandler. "I just thought it would be great to see her as a roller derby queen; it seemed like a perfect meshing of pop culture with that role."

Although Sandler and Welch shared the same agent, ICM, he was a very new screenwriter and was unsure if the script would actually get read. He delivered a copy personally to the house Welch then shared with her husband and manager, Patrick Curtis. Curtis bought the script in March 1971 for their production company, Curtwel Productions.

"I believe that he had me in mind when he wrote it", said Welch. "The girl is more than a little bitchy."

Sandler says the original script was very different from what the movie became:

[It was] a dark, gritty, character piece, more in the vein of Requiem for a Heavyweight. It's about this young woman from Kansas City who goes out to Hollywood dreaming of fame and fortune, making it in the movies, and she's really not good enough to do so, but she's desperate to make her name and to get attention.

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

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