Department Of Documentary–“Dust To Glory”: If you liked filmmaker Dana Brown’s surf epic “Step Into Liquid,” you’ll be glad to know he’s been out filming again. But this time he’s taken his cameras to the wastes of the Baja Peninsula, to chronicle the Baja 1000, a 32-hour race from Ensenada to La Paz. Brown first considered filming the desert drag race after his buddy (and racer) “Mouse” McCoy popped the idea on him. At first, he wasn’t so hot on it, in part because his famous filmmaking father Bruce Brown had followed HIS surf masterpiece (“Endless Summer”) with a motorcycle pic (“On Any Sunday”). And according to the LA Times’ Ashley Powers:

Brown also fretted that a film about the Baja 1000 might come off as “ugly Americans ripping up someone’s Third World country.”

But after checking out the Baja 500 in June 2003, he recognized the hair-raising drama of bulked-up trucks, motorcycles and even Volkswagens gunning through mountains and deserts amid yahooing crowds. His worries about offending the locals subsided when he witnessed their zeal for the race.

“This is a big deal and they love it,” he says.

After the fatiguing shoot, Brown stared at 250 hours of footage from which he would craft the race’s story lines. Sifting through the characters, he settled on his friend McCoy–who finished, but came in far from first–to drive the narrative.

“Mouse staggering around heroically to the finish with snot coming out of his nose –I don’t know why that strikes me as super-fantastic, but it is,” Brown says. “Twelfth place for us was better than first; there was something about his journey.”

In the desert light, snot always looks great on film. The movie is due out in April…

Meanwhile, in a companion piece the LA Times’ Christopher Reynolds gives you a sneak preview of how much dirt the racers really eat (his story is accompanied by a great Flash photo gallery, and some thrill-packed video; I tried to rip it off, I mean snag it for you, but couldn’t figure out how, so you’ll have to go through the article):

Dave Ashley once ran Baja wired up to a machine that measures lateral and vertical G-forces. The results showed G-loads that shifted from positive 9–nine times the usual pull of gravity–to a heart-in-throat negative 5.

“And sometimes those reversals happen in less than a second,” he says. “It’s enough to where it knocks the air out of you sometimes.” Vomit happens.

Well, there you have it. The perfect race slogan: “Vomit Happens”…



“Aww, c’mon, Dude! Any more of that and we’re going to start calling this rig “Hurlin’ Herb”…

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