"On Any Sunday" Turns 50!
Inspiring riders for a half century.
The main protagonists of Bruce Brown’s 1971 motorcycle documentary On Any Sunday— nominated for an Academy Award — were 40, 30 and 29, respectively. The eldest, actor and avid motorcycle racer Steve McQueen, helped bankroll the film. Motorcycle shop owner and racer Malcolm Smith became an international sensation, while the youngest, Mert Lawwill, stamped his name as a motorcycle legend and developed the first true production mountain bike seven years after the film’s debut.
Brown, then 33, achieved cult status with his classic surf doc Endless Summer in 1966. Like most Californians during that era, motorcycling was part of his daily fabric, and he dug racing. This was all McQueen needed to know before agreeing to underwrite Brown’s efforts to translate his surf mantra into moto.
According to Bruce Brown Films, Brown and his wife rented a Honda scooter while visiting Japan. When he returned home to California, he bought a used Triumph Cub.
Many of the surfers whom Brown hung out with were getting into riding as well. Several of them took up desert racing. Brown got more involved in the sport and began attending races around Southern California.
“I remember going to Ascot Park and watching the dirt track races,” Brown said. “I met a few of the racers and was struck by how approachable and how nice most of these guys were. It wasn’t at all like the image a lot of people had about motorcycle riders in those days. I just thought it would be neat to do a movie about motorcycle racing and the people involved.”
Even though Brown already had a successful movie to his credit, he found that financing a film on motorcycling wasn’t going to be easy.
“I talked to a few folks and knew that Steve McQueen was a rider,” Brown said. “Even though I’d never met him, I set up a meeting to talk about doing On Any Sunday. We talked about the concept of the film, which he really liked. Then he asked what I wanted him to do in the film. I told him I wanted him to finance it. He laughed and told me he acted in films, he didn’t finance them. I then jokingly told him, ‘Alright, then, you can’t be in the movie.’
“The next day after the meeting, I got a call and it was McQueen. He told me to go ahead and get the ball rolling with the movie — he’d back it.”
"I talked to Steve and he decided he wanted to ride in it (the Lake Elsinore Grand Prix)," Brown said to Toni McAllister of the Lake Elsinore Patch on the 40th anniversary of On Any Sunday in 2011. "He was so supportive."
Final budget was $313,000 for 96 minutes of pure cinematic motorcycling bliss.
The year after Brown made On Any Sunday, he returned to Lake Elsinore to ride the Grand Prix. The 1972 event attracted about 250,000 people, many no doubt inspired by their movie-going experience.
"I had such a good time filming it, I decided to ride in it," Brown said.
Film critic Roger Ebert was glowing in his assessment of On Any Sunday, giving it three stars while stating:
“A lot more art goes into a film like On Any Sunday that might be apparent. It's tremendously hard to get the footage, first of all; a surfer on a wave operates within a relatively small area, but a two-mile motorcycle race requires thousands of feet of footage from several cameras to be adequately covered. Brown has somehow accomplished this (with some financial backing from Steve McQueen, who turns up in the movie a couple of times). What's better, having done it he doesn't tell us about it.”
Dominic Frontiere—famous for composing theme songs for television shows The Rat Patrol, Branded, and The Flying Nun plus Clint Eastwood’s 1968 film Hang ‘Em High—provided the ear bug soundtrack for On Any Sunday.
Alas, following a successful career through the `70s and early `80s, Frontier was sent to a federal penitentiary in 1986 for scalping tickets to the 1980 Super Bowl. He reportedly made $500,000 in profit after selling 16,000 tickets obtained from Georgia, his then-wife and then-owner of the Los Angeles Rams, but neglected to report it to the IRS.
So, who won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary? The honor went to The Hellstrom Chronicle, which combined “elements of documentary, science fiction, horror and apocalyptic prophecy to present a gripping satirical depiction of the struggle for survival between humans and insects”.
What’s your favorite memory from On Any Sunday? Haven’t seen it? Stream or buy the DVD.