World's Fastest Indian
World's Fastest Indian
UP FRONT
David Edwards
No PICNIC, BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP with an unrepentant bike nut. Take my lady, Peggy, for instance. Her Pontiac has never seen the inside of our garage. Swapmeets outnumber nights at the theater about 10 to 1. I’ve forgotten Valentine’s Day(s), but never miss Valentino Rossi on the TV during race season. The poor re-landscaping fund has been looted mercilessly over the years-hey, anybody can have a fully functioning sprinkler system, but how many chances do you get to buy a beat-up 1953 Ariel Square Four bob-job with no seat and half an exhaust system?
So when I told Peggy we’d been invited to the Hollywood premiere of a new motorcycle movie, she was not exactly over the moon. “What’s it about?” she wanted to know first.
“It’s a biopic about Burt Munro, a crazy old Kiwi who set land-speed records at Bonneville on an Indian streamliner in the 1960s.”
“Kiwi?”
“Yeah, you know, from New Zealand. Munro’s like a national treasure down there.”
“I dunno, maybe you should go alone on this one.”
“Nah, come on, it’ll be fun. Red carpet, flash bulbs, an after-party. Besides, Tony Hopkins will be there.”
“Anthony Hopkins?”
“Yeah, he plays Munro.”
“You mean Sir Anthony Hopkins, as in Oscar winner, as in Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, as in one of the best actors of our time? That Anthony Hopkins?” “The same.”
“How’d they ever get Anthony Hopkins to star in a bike movie?”
Good question. “They” in this case is Roger Donaldson, writer and director of The World’s Fastest Indian, in limited release now and due for wider distribution in February. Australian-born Donaldson has helmed such big-budget Hollywood fare as The Bounty, No Way Out, Cocktail and a remake of The Getaway, but he got his start in 1971 filming a shoestring documentary, Offerings to the God of Speed, about then-72year-old Munro’s final trip to Speed Week at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Ever since, he’s wanted to make a theatrical movie based on Munro’s first time on the salt in 1962. He polished his script off and on for the past decade until finally, he says, “It was time to make the movie or stop talking about it.”
No studio was interested-not enough car chases or exposed mammaries-so Donaldson went the independent route, going so far as funding a third of the movie (estimated total budget, $ 15 million) with his and friends’ money when an investor skipped at the last minute. The project has happily consumed the last five years of Donaldson’s life.
“I wanted to make an entertaining film without any compromises, an uplifting and inspirational story in the spirit of such films as Rocky, Billy Elliot and Chariots of Fire,” he says.
He certainly started with the right raw material.
H. J. “Burt” Munro had an uncommon relationship with his 1920 Indian Scout, purchased new in his hometown of Invercargill when he was 21. He would own the bike, constantly tweaking it, until his death in 1978, by which time the Scout had gone from a stock 600cc wheezer unable to top 60 mph to a full-on 950cc Tiner, capable of speeds in excess of200. Munro’s best official two-way run in Utah of 183.586 mph is still the fastest posted by an Indian motorcycle, hence the film’s title.
To obtain that kind of velocity, Munro, king of the garden-shed tinkerers, resorted to all kinds of unorthodoxy. For cylinders, he favored old cast-iron gasworks pipe, and cast his own cooling rings on a stove in his home/workshop using cut-up bits of car pistons. The motor morphed from two camshafts to four, the cam grind accomplished by saw and file. It also went from sidevalves to ohv. Munro even home-brewed a dohc setup but ran out of time to make it work satisfactorily. Connecting rods were carved from Ford truck axles or later a Douglas DC6 propeller.
“Development goes on all the time and has been frill-time these last 22 years,” Munro wrote to a friend in 1970. “It is almost impossible for me to give you a true picture of the time I have spent on my cycle. For one stretch of 10 years, I put in 16 hours every day, and on Christmas Day only took the afternoon off.”
Hopkins, who was so taken with Donaldson’s script that he took only a fraction of his usual fee, captures Munro’s delightful obsession perfectly, tossing off one-liners and pearls of wisdom. Essentially this is a road picture: Don Quixote in a broken-down Chevy making his way from the port of Long Beach to Utah with his beloved Indian in tow just to see how fast it can go. “You live more in five minutes flat-out on a bike like this than most people do in a lifetime,” he tells a young admirer. Good stuff.
Donaldson is no slouch, either. Indie film or not, this is as fine a job of moviemaking as I’ve seen in years. He and Hopkins got a two-minute standing ovation after the credits rolled.
Oh, what about Peggy? She went, she laughed, she cried, she can’t wait to see it again. Whodda thunk it? A motorhead movie that’s also a chick flick. Take your lady when it comes to town. Beats the hell out of relationship counseling.
