Selling an Award Winning Film Proposal with Ten Photographs.

In 1987, the Italian Producer Dino De Laurentiis was involved in opening a film studio on Australia’s Gold Coast. The Head of Production held a series of meetings in Australia’s major cities, seeking interesting Australian story ideas.

A friend of mine, a playwright, attended the Perth session and told me about it afterward. She thought some photographs I had shown her about a black American athlete who came to Australia in 1903 and 1904 might make an interesting story for the studio.

Being utterly naïve about the industry, I put together five pages of photos and captions. I typed the text with an IBM Selectric, pasted on the photos, photocopied and stapled together the pages, and sent it off with a cover letter with contact details. The first two pages are shown, and really were of that poor of a quality.

To his credit, the Head of Production responded quickly, but explained why it could not be a feature film.

Dear Jim,

Whilst Taylor was obviously a great character, it is hard to see a mass appeal feature film in this when black athletes are so numerous and so often superior.

Adding to your problem is the fact that your “villains” would have to be white Australians and Americans. The very people who make up the potential audience.

Even as superbly written a script as “Breaking Away” failed to do big box office business with a cycle racing theme and “The Great White Hope” , another black Athlete in a white dominated sport story, also failed to attract an audience.

It seems you have a natural for a good documentary but not a feature.

Yours sincerely,

After receiving his reply my friend read it and, in her lovely British accent, said ‘that’s bullshit’. At her suggestion, I rang the head of the West Australian film Council, Andrew Swanson, and asked for the names of six Australian film producers. I photocopied six identical submissions, mailed them off and in less than two weeks, in June 1987, received a written reply from one expressing an interest. But most important was a phone call I received the same day, from Paul Barron, of Barron Films, with offices in Perth and Toronto.

Paul had just returned from North America, and while making a series of phone calls thumbed through a large pile of accumulated material on his desk. He saw my five-page stapled submission of photos, pulled it from the stack, turned the pages and read the captions. Paul immediately appreciated the racial implications of the film for the American market. As he described it later, when he finished the phone conversation he hung up, called me and quickly got to the crucial point. ‘What do you want to do with this? Write the screen play? Act in it? Direct it?’

I will never forget the next 2 lines.

‘I can’t do any of those things, I just want to see it made into a film.’

‘You have just made my day.’

After he hung up, I again called Andrew Swanson and asked for the name of a film agent. Within two days an initial letter of agreement was in place and Paul was off and running with his first and only over-the-transom project. He hired the late Tony Morphett, Australia’s legendary screenwriter and series creator to do the screenplay. I had to produce a book manuscript from my notes for him to work from, because at that time there was no book on Major Taylor (there are now a dozen on Amazon for sale, and that’s a story of its own). In 28 days I dictated, drafted and edited chapter after chapter, which a friend typed and retyped.

Disney became a silent financier, with the film premiering as Tracks of Glory on the Disney Channel in February, 1992, during Black History Month. It premiered in Australia in July, 1992 on the Channel 7 Network during television ratings week, won the ratings war, and won the 1993 Australian Logie Award (their Emmy) for ‘Most Popular Telemovie Or Mini-Series’.

I last saw Paul in 2011 while consulting for him on a project he was doing with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Over lunch he told me that if I had submitted my proposal in the traditional industry words-only format — log line, synopsis, and treatment — it would have gone straight in the rubbish bin. But he was hooked by the photographs.

And the movie? I served as historical consultant to Tony and spent a week on set while they filmed racing scenes, but never saw the script. Disney had veto over American dialogue (some Aussie phrases were altered for the U.S.) and some casting. The film ended with Major Taylor victorious against a gang of villainous white American and Australian riders. In the movie world, people like happy endings.

In reality, Australia was tragic for Taylor, as the following extract from the introduction to my book (published several years later) shows.

AN EXTRAORDINARY ATHLETE

For one and a half decades, from 1896, spectators filled stadium after stadium in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom and Australasia to watch Major Taylor race. He was the highest paid and most famous athlete in the world’s then-most popular and lucrative sport. To give perspective, Honus Wagner’s 1908 salary of $10,000 to play baseball in America (soon matched by Ty Cobb) was considered sensational, a landmark in American professional sports history. In 1903 Major Taylor’s earnings approached $50,000.

However, hovering over Major Taylor was the intense racial prejudice of that era, particularly in the United States. The difficulties associated with travelling and competing, combined with the bigotry, hatred, threats and unfairness of his competitors, eventually became intolerable. It ultimately forced Taylor off American cycle tracks and out of the country.

It was in Australia that it came to a head. Hugh McIntosh, an Australian promoter, invited Taylor Down Under for the 1903 summer racing season. He created the world’s richest bicycle race as an inducement. The Major rated that four month tour, free of the racial problems that confronted him in America, as the most successful and enjoyable of his career.

In 1904 it was a different story when Taylor returned for a second tour. McIntosh also invited along two intensely racist white Americans, Floyd MacFarland and his young protégé, Iver Lawson. Iver was highly talented and would win the World Championship six months later in London. MacFarland was a truly great rider who not only won over 400 races in his career but as a promoter and manager of several national and world champions, was one of the dominant influences on American and international cycle tracks for over two decades.

Taylor, Lawson and MacFarland were no strangers to one another, had tangled before, and proved to be a highly volatile combination. In 1904 they produced the single most amazing and controversial series of cycle races in the history of Australia, and possibly in any country. For Major Taylor it was the worst season he ever experienced as the trio fought out racially charged battles on the cycle tracks of White Australia. Taylor had the most severe fall and injury of his career, essentially suffered a nervous breakdown at the end of the tour, did not race at all for the next three years, and did not compete again in America for six years, in the twilight of his career.

The net result was that Major Taylor effectively vanished from the American sports scene. In 1932 he died destitute in a charity ward, his body unclaimed for over a week.