Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [110]
8 She later donated the scrapbooks to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
9 Neile never mentions his name in her memoir, but Terrill, in his biography, quotes David Foster as saying that one day over dinner Steve told him it was Maximilian Schell, who had won a Best Actor Oscar for Stanley Kramer’s 1961 Judgment at Nuremberg.
10 In 1979 Inter-Planetary Pictures offered to fund a sequel if it starred Steve. He turned it down.
Look, I’m an actor, not a racer. I love bikes for the fun they give me, not the money they might have given me. You can’t earn more than $80,000 a year racing bikes, and you work your tail off doing even that, races every weekend for seven months of the year and from coast to coast. I think if I started young enough in motorcycle racing, I could have been ranked.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
MOST PEOPLE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHY, AFTER FINALLY finding the perfect movie formula for himself with Bullitt, Steve had thrown it away and made one oddball film, one semi-documentary, and now one real documentary that had nearly succeeded in turning his golden-boy Hollywood career to lead.
On Any Sunday was released in 1971, which Steve agreed to finance for $300,000 in exchange for a brief appearance in it. The film was directed by Bruce Brown and used twelve cinematographers. Brown had also directed 1967’s groundbreaking documentary about surfing, Endless Summer. Steve appeared in the motocross and cow-trailing sequences. Ironically, On Any Sunday, a glorified vanity film, went on to make more than $10 million, which helped keep Steve solvent. He has no lines in the film and plays no character other than himself.
His goal with On Any Sunday was to elevate his reputation as a serious bike rider, and biker movies themselves. “Brando’s movie The Wild One set motorcycle racing back about 200 years,” Steve told Sports Illustrated in 1971. “Most bike flicks in the past concentrated on the outlaw crap, Hell’s Angels and all of that stuff, which is about as far away from the real world of motorcycle racing as I am from Lionel Barrymore.”
It was not all that unusual in transitional Hollywood for actors to shift professional direction. Brando had simply turned his back on the industry; and Beatty and Newman tried to find ways to grow older gracefully on-screen and extend their acting careers. But Steve, after his brief and slightly bizarre campaign to elevate the stature of motorcycle movies, wanted to distance himself from everything—his career, his racing, his wife. The aloofness that had always been there on the surface, the celebrated cool, had turned into a chill after Sebring’s murder and the utter failure of Le Mans. Steve became an even more mistrustful loner, unwilling to commit to anyone or anything. His professional and social withdrawal had begun.
The small house Steve rented on top of Topanga Canyon became his private sanctuary where he enjoyed getting up late, popping open a couple of cold ones, and spending his afternoons alone watching soap operas and game shows. He couldn’t find anything else worthwhile to do, and none of