27 minute read
OF ON ANY SUNDAY
AN ENDLESS SUMMER OF SUNDAYS
Three amigos: Steve McQueen (left), Mert Lawwill and Malcolm Smith (right).
SUMMER OF SUNDAYS
Five decades after its release, Bruce Brown’s epic On Any Sunday continues to change lives
By Mitch Boehm Photos courtesy of Bruce Brown, Malcolm Smith and AMA archives
The first few minutes of On Any Sunday hit you like whoops on a wide-open desert trail…a staccato, whack whack burst of visual and visceral impact.
It all starts quietly enough, with the big guy on the Mini Enduro bouncing away from the camera. But then the twangy banjo music starts and we’re treated to an array of two-wheeled visuals, from kids and adults trail riding, to Hall of Famer Jeff Ward wheelieing, to Hall of Famer Steve McQueen cruising by, to the little boy falling in front of Mom on his plastic push bike, and to the Harley touring couple crashing slo-mo in the mud.
“Four million people ride motorcycles in the U.S.,” says narrator, filmmaker and Hall of Famer Bruce Brown, “and they come in all shapes, sizes and ages.” When the music shifts to the familiar Ba ba ba ba baaaa tune we all know and love, we hear Brown continue. “To some people, a motorcycle is work… or a way to get to work…or a way to get away from it all to the solitude of the open country,” as we watch a rider — probably Malcolm Smith — wheelying across a field.
A real thrill. At this point the goosebumps are alive and kicking on your arms whether you know what comes next or you’re an On Any Sunday rookie — and what comes next is pretty epic. It’s pro dirt tracker and Hall of Famer Mert Lawwill walking down a crowded San Francisco sidewalk. “A group of businessmen during the rush hour,” Brown chimes. “The young man with the garment bag over his shoulder is Mert Lawwill. 29 years old. Five foot six. 143 pounds.”
Bruce Brown (left) and cameraman Bob Bagley (right) filming the movie’s epic final scenes on the Cantamar sand dunes in Baja.
Only God knows why Mert’s dressed in a suit, but we don’t care because, as Mert gets to his van, we hear Brown utter the now-legendary line: “He’s not a banker, or an accountant, or a salesman, but he is a professional man, like the rest. His profession?” he asks, as Mert opens the back door of his van and we finally see the Harley-Davidson dirt tracker that’s inside, “Motorcycle racer!”
And then all hell breaks loose, Mert pitching his Harley KR through a loamy Mile corner, the images and sounds making the hair on your neck stand on end.
Like great magazine stories, great movies and documentaries need a good hook, and Brown wrist-yanks several into our open mouths in the opening minutes of On Any Sunday. We see all that fun trail-riding action in those opening minutes and we wanna go do that right now. We see Mert ripping up that Mile corner sideways at 75 mph and we wanna know more…Who is that guy, and holy smokes…what is this crazy sport?
Just before the movie hit theaters in the summer of 1971, Brown released a short movie promo narrated by McQueen. “This is Steve McQueen,” Steve says in it. “A few years ago, Bruce Brown made the classic film on surfing The Endless Summer. Now he’s made a new film about my favorite sport, motorcycle racing. It’s called On Any Sunday. It shows for the first time what the sport is really like. And I’m proud to have a little ride in the film. It wasn’t much, but it gave me a chance to work with some real stars. Whether you ride or not, I think you’ll enjoy On Any Sunday.”
Fifty years later, it seems ol’ Steve was right, and then some. On Any Sunday is not only far and away the
best example of motorcycle-themed moviemaking…it’s become a bonified cultural phenomenon, a vivid and powerfully emotional link to the past, and a surefire inspiration to younger folks — or OAS newbies — for the future of our favorite sport.
Bruce Brown was a Southern California kid who started surfing (and taking photos) at age 11. He attended high school in Long Beach, majoring in (his words) “not going to school.” After scoring well in the Navy’s submarine school he was sent to Hawaii in 1955 (the horror!), where he continued surfing and began taking 8mm movies of the scene in his off hours. Five early surf films followed his Navy discharge in 1957, culminating in 1966’s The Endless Summer, which cemented his legacy as the premier chronicler of surf culture.
“In the 1950s,” he told an interviewer, “we just tried to figure out something to do to stay at the beach. [John] Severson [founder of Surfer magazine] did the magazine, [Gordon] Clarke did the [surfboard] foam, Hobie [Alter, of Hobie Cat fame] the boards, and I did movies. We did it just to stay at the beach.”
After the release of The Endless Summer, Brown began focusing on his other passion — dirt bikes. “I’d been riding on and off,” Brown told me years
Bruce Brown, shown here filming at So Cal’s Saddleback Park (the Jeff Ward wheelie? The trials guy wheelie?) sometime in 1970.
ago, “and really enjoyed it. I thought, ‘this is really fun. Maybe I’ll do a movie about motorcycles.’ I figured I’d cover a wide range…motocross, desert, road racing, the flat track circuit. I wasn’t sure where I’d go with it, but I figured I’d see what developed.”
Brown had befriended Hall of Famer Malcolm Smith after buying a motorcycle from him, and after seeing what a well-rounded rider he was, figured ol’ Malcolm would be part of his film. To finance it he approached movie icon Steve McQueen, who was at first a bit miffed that Brown wanted money and didn’t seem all that interested in having him star in the film. McQueen said he acted in movies, not financed them. “Fine,” Bruce told him goodnaturedly, “you can’t be in the film!” McQueen thought better of it and called Brown the following day, telling him to get going on the project.
Getting Malcolm to commit was tougher. Malcolm wanted to be involved and figured the exposure could be good for his business, but was underwater trying to make a go of his newly purchased K&N Yamaha store (which he’d just bought outright from Kenny Johnson and Hall of Famer Norm McDonald, who were just launching K&N Air Filters), and told Bruce to go on without him.
Fortunately, Brown asked again a few weeks later and, having gotten things a bit more buttoned up at work, Malcolm agreed to be involved, but only if Brown would pay him $100 for every day he was out of the office. Brown agreed, and it would be one of the better investments he’d make.
Part of the cache of original film canisters for On Any Sunday at Brown’s Santa Barbara ranch. Look closely and see how many events and locations you recognize…
Despite his many mini-crashes during filming (“he was bruised everywhere after those final few days of riding,” Malcolm Smith told this author), Steve McQueen was a skilled off-road rider and racer — fast in the desert or on a motocross track, and his auto-racing exploits are well-documented. On Any Sunday helped make motorcycling mainstream in the 1970s, but this Sports Illustrated cover (right) didn’t hurt, either.
Grand National champ Lawwill had a different experience meeting Brown. “I didn’t know Bruce from Adam when he walked up to me at the Sacramento Mile and told me he was gonna make a motorcycle movie,” Mert told me recently for this story. “I figured he was just another wannabe Hollywood filmmaker, though once my wife June told me who he was and what he’d done, I was impressed.”
“Like Malcolm,” Lawwill continued, “I didn’t have any clue at all what Bruce was planning for the film. But as we did some of those early shoots, like the one downtown, we became friends. I’m pretty sure Bruce was planning to feature Hall of Famer Mark Brelsford in the film instead of me; Mark was flashy and had that big grin, you know? But eventually, I guess my struggle trying to retain the number-one plate became a better story.”
“I had met Malcolm years before, at Ascot Park, when Malcolm was doing some TT racing. When we reconnected during the movie we traded stories, and both of us thought what the other did was crazy. I thought desert racing was crazy, and he thought dirt track was way too intense! I told him once, ‘at least I can see where I’m going… when you fly over those hills you can’t see what’s on the other side!’ We had a good laugh.”
“Meeting Steve was pretty neat,” Mert told me. “It was when we were doing the beach-riding stuff along the California and Baja coastlines. We all met at Bruce’s Dana Point home, and I remember Steve looking at all the photos of me and [Hall of Famer] Dick Mann on the walls and saying something like, ‘don’t any of you go to the movies?’ We all got a kick out of that. It was friendly, and Steve definitely had appreciation for the racing myself and Malcolm and our peers were doing. He knew his stuff.”
The Elsinore Grand Prix
One of the first events Brown filmed was the Elsinore Grand Prix, a then-annual around-town street and dirt race that attracted huge crowds and hundreds of riders. As Brown voices in the movie, “If there’s one event you ride each year, it’s the Elsinore Grand Prix. People of all ages…Girls, the pig farmer from Murietta...” Elsinore was a big deal. Heck, Honda even named its early motocross bikes after it a couple of years later.
Malcolm and Steve took part, of course, with McQueen entered as Harvey Mushman to avoid attracting too much attention. As we all know, Malcolm won going away, with “Harvey” grabbing tenth overall, a superb result given the number of local fast guys entered. Brown mentions McQueen breaking his foot and still finishing eighth in the following day’s race, which had him catching hell from his Hollywood handlers. Of course, broken foot and all (broken in six places, actually), McQueen would team with Peter Revson two weeks later to finish second in the 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race in a Porsche 902 Spyder.
Of his racing career, McQueen once said this: “I’m not sure
whether I’m an actor who races or a racer who acts,” and it’s hard to know given his natural abilities and substantial racing accomplishments.
What the film doesn’t cover is the controversy that swirled around Malcolm’s 250-class win in the weeks after the event — or the ugly crash he was involved in the following day in the Open Class race.
First, the controversy, which had everything to do with the movie’s famous mudhole. That mud obscured a lot of number plates, and the video the sanctioning body shot on Saturday (for the 250 race) was mistakenly overwritten with Sunday’s Open Class event — which meant there was no visual backup to the scoring sheets, which had a lot of holes thanks to the obscured number plates.
Everyone there knew Malcolm had won, and even the sanctioning body had him listed as finishing six minutes ahead of the second-place finisher. But they had Malcolm a lap down, which denied him the “official” overall win. There was a large outcry, and a group of Malcolm’s friends even ran a fullpage ad in Cycle News, which read: “Hey World! Malcolm Smith won Elsinore! Riders know it! What’s your problem, Gripsters? -Signed, a rider and truth lover!”
That didn’t bother Malcolm a bit, as he knew, as everyone else did, that he’d won — though what happened the following day shook him up pretty badly. Riding a very fast 360cc Husky in the Open division, Malcolm hit a woman crossing the track with her two kids in tow. She’d basically stepped off the curb and walked right out in front of him.
“I was headed straight for the smallest child,” Malcolm told me. “I swerved, and the handlebar went over the child’s head, but it struck
The Elsinore Grand Prix was a wild and wooly affair, with big crowds and very little in the way of crowd control. The 1970 event was the third-ever happening, with the race having a bit of music-festival look and feel. Right: Malcolm gets a goggle (and probably a number plate) wipe off during Saturday’s 250 race.
the mother in the chest, tossing her violently into the crowd and fracturing several of her ribs. The impact flipped me over the high side and I tumbled down the pavement. I was skinned and bruised, and really upset. I kept flashing back to how close I had come to hitting and maybe killing a child. I was very shaken.”
The woman recovered, fortunately, though she later tried to sue the race promoter, the city of Elsinore and Malcolm. She failed, but according to Malcolm, it wasn’t much fun.
The Widowmaker Hillclimb
Most folks don’t know this, but Malcolm has pretty strong roots in the Salt Lake City area. Malcolm’s mother Elizabeth was born and grew up in Provo, just 30 miles south of Salt Lake City (she graduated from the University of Utah), and Malcolm spent several summers in Utah working for his uncles. All of which made Malcolm’s and Bruce’s trip to Salt Lake City for the annual Widowmaker Hillclimb an easy
one, though he didn’t stay long. “I came up the night before and went back the evening of the next day,” Malcolm told me with a laugh. “Hey, I had to work!”
The old Widowmaker hill lies at the southern edge of the Salt Lake valley (you can still see tire grooves in the hillside 50 years later) and was so steep that no one had gotten to the top, though that would change the year Bruce and Malcolm visited. Mike Gibbon from Grants Pass, Ore., rode a modified 750 Triumph hillclimber with chains on the rear tire and nitro-methane in the tank into the history books with his stirring afternoon run to the top — which Bruce was there to record.
Malcolm’s day was memorable for several reasons…getting farther up the hill than any other production bike, riding his Husky down the hill when everyone else dragged theirs down and, most famously, for forgetting to turn the petcock on for his first run, and running out of gas a couple hundred feet up the hill. “That wasn’t Bruce telling me to do it for drama,” Malcolm told me. “I really did forget!”
Expensive homes now sit at the base of that famous hill, but for anyone in the know, driving or riding past it on I-15 is a for-sure whoa! moment.
A real-deal Malcolm Smith Husqvarna, one of the bikes Ol’ Malcolm rode in the movie, now resides permanently in the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum. Photo by Preston Ray (prestonray.com)
Dirt Track Racing
Dirt track racing figures prominently in On Any Sunday, with Bruce following Mert — the 1969 Grand National Champion — throughout the 1970 season as Lawwill defended his title from fellow competitors Hall of Famers David Aldana, Dick Mann, Jim Rice and eventual 1970 champion Gene Romero.
Every inch of film of Mert and his fellow competitors is simply stunning — especially the helmetcam stuff Bruce worked up by building two bracket-laden helmets to carry the cameras. Bruce and Mert traveled to several races in Mert’s van, with the film crew usually flying to meet them. Mert was the odds-on favorite to repeat as Grand National Champion, but mechanicals took him out of the running late in the season.
“Dick [Mann] and I would normally double up in a single room back in those days to save money, because we didn’t really have any,” Mert told me. “When Bruce traveled
Mert Lawwill rode three different H-D racebikes during the 1970 season: the then-brand-new XR750 (left), which broke and overheated a lot, and arguably cost him the championship; the reliable-but-slower KR750 dirt tracker (following pages); and an XRTT-750 roadracer, shown here in a subsequent season.
with us that year he’d pay for extra rooms, which was nice. He knew how to spend Steve’s money!”
Spanish ISDT
Bruce and Malcolm traveled together to the 1970 International Six Days Trial in El Escorial, Spain — Malcolm’s fourth ISDT. There was no camera crew this time, just Bruce’s simple, hand-held unit.
“Bruce and I had fun on the Spain trip,” Malcolm told me during prep for the autobiography he and I released in 2015. “We pretty much went our separate ways during the day, as I had my riding and prep work to do, and he had his shooting, and I only remember seeing him once during the riding portion of the event, on a rocky downhill with switchbacks. We waved, and that was it.” Things in the afternoon pretty much shut down for siesta, so after Malcolm was done riding he and Bruce would grab a nap at the hotel and wake up at 9:00 or 9:30 for supper.
“During those meals Bruce would talk about all the good spots he’d found to shoot,” Malcolm told me, “one of which was a shot of a local Spaniard eating grapes while watching
the race…and of course it made the movie. Spain was a big deal for me, [largely due to] Bruce’s presence. He had such a great sense of humor; we had a great time together.” Husky On Fire
One of the scenes folks remember best is the lost rider in the desert who “accidentally” torches his Husky while trying to light a signal fire. According to Malcolm, that guy was John
Creed, a surfer and friend of
Bruce’s who’d go on to run the Chart House restaurant chain for 20 years. “Bruce came up with the idea for the scene,” Malcolm told me, “and I had the perfect bike for it; a repossessed Husqvarna with a blown engine.”
The scene is obviously staged, but the fire was 100% real. Most viewers probably figured the bike was a total loss, but it wasn’t, as Malcolm repainted the fuel tank, replaced the cables, tires and seat, rebuilt the engine, and ended up
Mert Lawwill’s Harley-Davidson KR750, which he rode in several events during the 1970 season, is permanently enshrined in the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum. Photo by Preston Ray (prestonray.com)
Malcolm Smith (242) at a checkpoint during the 45th ISDT in El Escorial, Spain. Malcolm remembers it being quite cold, and said his fingers went numb on several occasions.
selling it. “I often wonder who has that bike now,” he says, “though I doubt there’d ever be any way to confirm its history. But it’s out there somewhere, and worth a lot of money.”
Practical Jokes
To me, the last ten minutes of On Any Sunday are the movie’s pinnacle moments. Motorcycling, for all its wonderful physical and visceral thrills, the speed, the G forces, the wind in your face and the feeling of flying through the air, is fundamentally an emotional exercise.
There’s big truth there, and a lot of that feeling is captured in those last ten minutes. It all starts with the cowtrailing scene on Bruce’s ranch above Dana Point, obviously staged but funny nonetheless. Not so with the watercrossing bit, however, which the riders knew about, but which Steve wasn’t quite ready for on the first pass. McQueen thought they were gonna all ride through slowly, but Malcolm and Mert had other ideas, blasting him good and hoping Bruce got the shot. He did. They did more takes, changing into dry clothes each time, but Bruce ended up using the first one. “Steve had been had, and good!” Malcolm told me.
The sand dune footage everyone likes so much was filmed on the Cantamar sand dunes in Baja, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with Malcolm, Mert and Steve just basically ripping around for fun. Mert, by the way, was aboard a Greeves two-stroke with an enlarged fuel tank (the stock tank was too small, according to Mert) and a Harley-Davidson sticker on the tank “as a joke,” he says.
“There were some crazy crashes that day,” Malcolm told me. “One was Steve’s loop-out; he hit the ground pretty hard but bounced right up, faking the heart attack! Mert fell hard, too, high-siding after landing from a jump,
his hip smacking the engine case and front wheel.”
For the final day of filming, Bruce wanted more of this goofing off/fun riding stuff, and contacted the Marine base commander at nearby Camp Pendleton, explaining what he had in mind. “No way, no how,” came the reply. Bruce mentioned this to Steve, who called the commander, introduced himself, told him about the motorcycle movie he was doing, and asked again to use the beach for a few hours. “Anything you want, Mr. McQueen,” came the reply. “Can we send some Marines to help?”
Malcolm told me the riding that afternoon was insanely fun, especially the power-sliding on the sand during low tide. “That sort of sand is usually pretty smooth,” he said, “with lots of consistent traction, and I loved doing big donuts in it. With the throttle on it’s a power slide, and crashing on the low side isn’t too bad. But if you chop the throttle too much you get high-sided, which can hurt. Steve did it several times that afternoon.”
Malcolm says Steve was always very competitive and worked very hard at leading whenever they rode together, but crashed a lot during those final days. “At the end of the third day we all jumped into Bruce’s hot tub,” Malcolm says. “Steve was a mess; what wasn’t black and blue was skinned up! Still, Steve was a very competent rider and loved motorcycles.”
“You expect movie stars to be magnets,” Malcolm added, “but Steve was in another league. People — women especially — noticed him everywhere he went, but he was usually quite good
Bruce’s “boys” during filming of the movie’s final scenes. Left to right, Mert Lawwill, Steve McQueen, cameraman Bob Bagley, Malcolm Smith and Brown.
about the attention and autograph seeking unless they were rude. He also had a heck of a sense of humor. I remember riding with him to Mexico in his hopped-up Ford pickup to do the sand dune filming, and at the border toll booth he just blasted through, knowing that Bruce — who was right behind us — would pay for both of us. He was very funny at times.”
“Mert was a very good rider in all conditions, and also quite technically proficient. He built and maintained his own race bikes, and in later years built and patented trick suspension systems for downhill bicycles [Lawwill is in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame -Ed.], and these days builds highend prosthetic arms and hands for amputee motorcycle, snowmobile, bicycle and ATV riders.” [See mertshands.org]
Steve McQueen was nothing if not a gracious friend, and especially so to Mert after Mert suffered two terrible injuries to the same hand, first at Daytona when a tire exploded at 150 mph and sent him sliding into the wall, and then again some time later when he crashed into Jim Rice at Castle Rock, smashing that same hand between the frame and fork tube.
“That’s pain I never want to experience again,” Mert told me for this story. “All the bones in my wrist and hand were broken; it was just a mess. A local doctor said there was no way to fix it; he told me, ‘Just let me fuse it all together from your thumb to your elbow…it will be like a club’ and gave me overnight to think about the shape I wanted to have it fused in. I was delirious, so it was good that my wife June was there to think clearly. She and Hall of Famer Cal Rayborn and his wife checked me out of the hospital that evening and we drove back down to San Francisco before that doctor could do anything to me!”
“By that point Steve had heard about it and had me see his doc in San Francisco, who advised me to see his friend in LA who was a hand specialist, Dr. Stark. I didn’t have any money and told Steve I couldn’t
The late, great Gary Nixon (9) and Scott Brelsford (87) helped Brown with movie’s all-important helmet-cam filming. Below: Bruce Brown accepting movie industry accolades with Steve McQueen in tow.
go, but he wasn’t hearing it. He bought me a ticket and had a driver pick me up, and when I got to LA they said it was good that I brought my toothbrush!”
“They did five surgeries, put a bunch of pins in it, and basically reconstructed my whole hand — and even wrote about the then-new procedure in a medical journal. I went from having a club hand to having a hand that works pretty much as normal, and it’s thanks to Steve — and his doctors — that it panned out like that. I never even got a bill! I’m so very thankful to them.”
The Release
After shooting wrapped up, Bruce began doing editing and narration, which ended up being a year-long deal, working twelve hours a day, six days a week, all with help from cameraman Don Shoemaker.
The first-ever showing was at a theater in Los Angeles, just a few miles from Beverly Hills. Admission was only a dollar, but for that moviegoers were asked for a verbal review after the showing. It was Bruce’s way of gauging reaction, seeing what did and didn’t work. Folks generally liked the movie, but felt it was a bit long. The least-liked part was the Speedway section, which Bruce eventually deleted.
Malcolm and crew all attended, of course, and both Malcolm and Mert were stunned they were featured so heavily. “Both Malcolm and I were in shock,” Mert told me. “We had no idea we’d be featured like that. Bruce never let on!”
Nominated for Best Documentary in 1972’s Academy Awards, On Any Sunday was edged out by the Hellstrom Chronicle — a movie few remember today. Not long after, Hollywood moguls came knocking on Bruce’s door, offering him Big Money to continue his work — for them.
“Thank you, but no,” he told them, as he remembered the advice McQueen had sent him in a letter, which said something like, “Never get involved with studio!” “The only boss I’ve ever had or wanted is me,” he told them, and walked away.
Bruce, Malcolm and Mert on a casual ride (left) near Brown’s Santa Barbara rancho back in about 2012, and reminiscing afterward.
Final Thoughts
Those closing scenes, shot on the beach at Camp Pendleton in the twilight, are wonderfully captured, especially when combined with the Dominic Frontiere Orchestra soundtrack’s title cut — sung superbly by Sally Stevens — floating in the background. The lateafternoon sun and shadows, the slow-motion donuts and wheelies on the beach, and that oh-somemorable melody…it’s become a legendary and much-loved scene, a sad-but-hopeful visual that makes you glad you’re a motorcyclist and happy you’re alive.
“I can’t believe that after all these years people who see it for the very first time are completely blown away,” Mert told journalist Shawn McDonald years ago. “It could have been made yesterday instead of 34 years ago. I’ve met a lot of good people I would not have met because of the film. It was one of the two highlights of my whole career, the other being winning the National Championship.”
“Steve said something really interesting to me one day when we were at his home in Brentwood,” Mert told me recently. “He said, ‘Mert, you are the luckiest guy I know. You are Number One in your field. You won the title. You get to be you. Me? I’m just an actor. I play other people. I never get to be me!’ Afterward, I wondered if riding and racing motorcycles helped Steve feel a little more normal, and maybe not on that Hollywood-actor pedestal quite so much…”
“You make a movie to make it, and maybe get your money back,” says Bruce’s son — and successful moviemaker — Dana Brown, “and all these years later, all these lives are changed. The spirt of [On Any Sunday]…every generation gets it! It’s my favorite. It’s amazing the influence it’s had; the genuine fondness folks have for that film.”
Dana Brown is spot-on about the “spirit” and “fondness” bits. But he’s even more right about the many thousands of lives that have been changed. And that’s probably the best legacy Bruce Brown — and On Any Sunday — could leave behind.
