Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [104]
In the victory circle, Steve, hailed as racing’s newest movie-star athlete, stood atop his car and gave the peace sign as the crowd cheered.
IF THERE was any cost-cutting taking place at Solar, it did not apply to Le Mans. Production and principal photography began June 7, 1970, in France. Steve acquired all the equipment he wanted for the shoot, including a new Porsche 917. A specialist mechanics crew headed by Haig Alltounian was brought over to personally maintain the Porsche. Alltounian was a friend from Wanted: Dead or Alive. In keeping with the way he did things, Steve once more reached back to those he had known before he became a superstar, people whose loyalty would be unquestioned. Alltounian was one such friend.
As shooting began, Sturges became increasingly alarmed that he still did not have a script. The previous draft, which he did not like at all, had been completed more than seventeen months earlier. Sturges had some footage from an earlier Le Mans race, but none of that had proved usable because many of the drivers and sponsors had changed. Steve wanted Sturges to stage a fake race before the next real one, and use all of the real race footage to enhance the parts where Steve was seen in close-up driving his Porsche. All of this on-site planning, meanwhile, was costing Cinema Center and Solar $100,000 a week, still with no actual shooting script.
Finally, after Bob Relyea warned Steve that production costs were spiraling hopelessly out of control, Cinema Center decided to pull the plug. Steve blew a fuse, and Abe Lastfogel and Stan Kamen accompanied Steve to Los Angeles to meet with everybody and see if there was any way the project could be saved.5
A take-it-or-leave-it deal was negotiated between the William Morris agents and Cinema Center: Steve would have to forfeit his $1 million salary, Solar would no longer produce the film (meaning Steve would have to give up all creative control), and he would have to surrender his personal profit participation. Relyea had to take a salary reduction and give up his profit participation as well.
Steve agreed to everything; he had no choice if he wanted to get the film made. He asked for one last rewrite, and Cinema Center said no. Steve went back to the William Morris Agency hoping they would support him on this one point, but there was no way he could get any changes to the deal.
The next day he fired Stan Kamen and the William Morris Agency.6
The production was shut down for two weeks so that everyone could regroup. Steve then hired agent Freddie Fields, who was also Paul Newman’s agent. And at Fields’s urging, as leverage against Cinema Center, Steve became a partner in First Artists, a production company created in 1969 by Sidney Poitier, Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, and later on Dustin Hoffman. First Artists was modeled after and named for the original United Artists, created in 1919 by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith. In both instances, the intention of the performers was to have more control over their projects and to be able to play roles against type they wouldn’t ordinarily get to do (eventually, First Artists was dissolved and has no relation to First Artists Management, a talent agency presently in operation in Hollywood).7
WHEN WORK on the film resumed, just before Steve left for France, Neile gave Steve a copy of a book she had read and liked called Papillon, about a French prison escape. She thought it might make a good movie; it had elements of The Great Escape that she thought fit right into Steve’s comfort zone. He shrugged and threw the book into one of his suitcases.
Neile was rapidly losing whatever was left of her