Needham in turn hired Conner as his lead villain, the Helltrack qualifier who plays along with Best’s corporate interests. Case in point: Needham is the acknowledged inspiration for Brad Pitt’s stuntman character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. By the mid-’80s, Needham, the actor, stuntman, and director of Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, was a few years off his peak, but he still carried that swaggering, old-school Hollywood cachet. RAD took off in earnest when Jack Schwartzman hired Needham to helm the movie, which follows Cru as he defies both his mother’s wishes and those of the deceitful president of the Federation of American Bicyclists, Duke Best. And I’m doing this and I’m really into it, and here’s this little boy and he says, ‘Stop! Can’t somebody just get her a job?!’” And I started reading Robert Lowell’s Prometheus Bound, which is heavy duty. “I got my kids up, I made them lunch, and Jack and I carpooled.” It was at bedtime, Shire says, when she read to the kids and they’d remember she was an actress: “I - got a little bit dramatic.” She recalls one night, when she enthralled Jason with Romeo and Juliet. “‘My son! Who didn’t do the SATs!’” In reality, her life revolved around her children. “I was always talking about the SATs ,” she says, laughing. Taliafilm’s namesake, a two-time Oscar nominee for Rocky and The Godfather Part II, intended to remain behind the scenes on RAD, but, late in the process, she agreed to play Cru’s BMX-hating, spoilsport mom.
#Rad the movie movie#
“I didn’t understand the complexities of putting a movie together, but Jack Schwartzman was a master at it.” And looking back on, I’m gonna tell you a secret: I don’t know how helpful I was.” She laughs. “It was wonderful but also very stressful. “We had little children, and Jack really liked to be available to those kids,” Shire says. But with RAD, he pivoted to PG fare under the name of his production company, Taliafilm, which was based in his family home in L.A. Through the late ’70s and early ’80s, Jack Schwartzman produced films like the Peter Sellers classic Being There and Never Say Never Again, Sean Connery’s last outing as James Bond. And when you have a chance to revisit someone’s work, you have a chance to revisit them.” Jack died in 1994, and I miss him every day. “But now it’s going to have its opportunity for its next incarnation. My God, all those years ago,” says Shire. Robert and Jason’s mother, Talia Shire, helped her husband produce the movie and had a small onscreen role. His half-brother, the Oscar-winning cinematographer John Schwartzman, shot the intro’s mesmeric BMX footage. And then he exposes the world of corruption within the sport”), as was his brother, the actor Jason Schwartzman. The younger Schwartzman had been on the set of RAD (“I loved that Cru is such a badass,” he recalls. It was produced by Jack Schwartzman, who passed away in the mid-’90s and whose son Robert Schwartzman, the former Rooney frontman turned movie director, helmed the rerelease through his distribution company, Utopia Films.
(The comedians specifically borrowed the music of John Farnham, whose big, dumb power ballads - “Break the Ice,” “Thunder in Your Heart” - are all over RAD.) Still, RAD was never made widely available on DVD, let alone on a digital rental platform - until July 2020, that is, when a newly restored 4K version of the film so few people actually saw finally hit on-demand platforms. A Guardian investigation into 10,000 movies in the Rotten Tomatoes database found RAD to be the film with the greatest discrepancy between critical reception and fan love, and it has retained prominent boosters: Over the years, the cast has heard fawning tales of love for the movie from Shaq, Pharrell, and, unsurprisingly, the Lonely Island, whose 2007 film Hot Rod bears clear RAD overtones. The movie lived on instead in the hearts and minds of BMX diehards, who made it a Blockbuster rental staple and then passed around bootlegs for years.
#Rad the movie cracked#
Despite being a perfect relic of feel-good ’80s underdog drama, RAD never quite cracked the cult-film canon, either. The movie was panned, then bombed and disappeared. Says Olympic gold-medal-winning gymnast Bart Conner, who played the Billy Zabka–esque villain, Bart Taylor, “It stayed in theaters maybe a day and a half?” Directed by the iconic ex-stuntman Hal Needham, it told the story of Cru Jones (Bill Allen), a scrappy young biker fighting corporate malfeasance and dreaming of impossible glory in an insane BMX race called Helltrack. In March of 1986, a sports movie called RAD - all damn caps - hit U.S. Nobody saw the 1986 movie about a hometown BMX hero directed by Hal Needham and produced by Jack Schwartzman.
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