Fast Company

Fast Company (1979)

Strap yourself into a car that flies 240 miles an hour down a quarter mile track.

After his sponsor replaces him with his archrival, a race-car driver decides to steal the car and race it himself.

Date of release
1979-03-18
TMDB
5.1 / 10 (82)
Runtime
1h 33m
Genres
Drama, Action
Director
David Cronenberg

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: $1.2M

Fast Company is a 1979 Canadian action film directed by David Cronenberg and starring William Smith, John Saxon, Claudia Jennings and Nicholas Campbell. It was written by Phil Savath, Courtney Smith, Alan Treen and Cronenberg. It was primarily filmed at Edmonton International Speedway, in addition to other locations in Edmonton, Alberta, and Western Canada.

Production

David Cronenberg stated that Fast Company "was my least personal movie, even though it had to do with cars and dragsters which I loved" due to him having not written the original script. He stated that he did the film in order to support his family and that "I really did it for the money". Cronenberg met Carol Spier, Mark Irwin, Ronald Sanders, and Bryan Day while working on the film and continued working with them for much of his filmography.

Phil Savath and Courtney Smith wrote a screenplay based on a story by Alan Treen and John Hunter aided, but remained uncredited. It was the first film Cronenberg made that he did not originally write, but he did rewrite parts of the script. Peter Vronsky's Bad Company was initially written under the title Fast Company, but was altered to avoid confusion with Cronenberg's film.

The film was shot from 21 July to 29 August 1978, in Edmonton and in Calgary for two days. The film had a budget of $850,000, but cost $1,200,000 (equivalent to $5,383,607 in 2025) with $200,000 coming from the Canadian Film Development Corporation. This was the first film Cronenberg made following the creation of Canada's film tax shelter policy.

Although Fast Company - an all-action, non-horror, non-psychological B-movie - remains an anomaly in Cronenberg's filmography, it has never lost its place in the affections of its director, who is an enthusiast of cars and their machinery ("which I get very metaphysical and boring about") and sometime racer.

This was the final film for Claudia Jennings before she was killed in a car accident later that year, seven months after the film's release.

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

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