A couple of years before his late-’70s ascension to teen idolhood, Robby Benson auditioned for the Luke Skywalker role in Star Wars. He was as ill-suited for the role as you’d expect, given his subsequent success as a geeky but adorable moptop in such sports-themed movies as One on One and Ice Castles. In the clip below, 20-year-old Benson spends nine minutes reading turgid George Lucas dialogue with a mostly off-camera Harrison Ford.
[via YouTube member Ghyslain, with an indirect assist from All the Little Live Things. Ghyslain’s profile contains links to several other Star Wars audition tapes, including Mark Hamill’s.]
I decided to do a little research for you on the Claude Lelouch film, along with a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
As you mentioned, it is said the driver of the car, whoever it was, hit speeds of up to 140 mph driving through Paris. Sounds pretty fast, right? I decided to test this claim.
The distance from the point where you turn onto the Avenue Foch from the Bois de Boulogne, to the point where the Champs Elysees feeds into the Place de la Concorde, is right about 2.25 miles. Yes, I’m including the curve around the Arc de Triomphe. By my count, the car covers this distance in 1:50 in the film, from the 0:44 mark to the 2:34 mark.
That averages out to about 74 miles per hour. So the car was going fast, but it’s just about impossible it could have been going 140 at any point. Moreover, this is the part of the route most conducive to driving at high speeds, so the car could not have been going faster later in the film, which is also obvious from watching it. A more likely high speed would thus be in the 80s — almost as fast as Princess Di’s driver supposedly was going when they crashed in the underpass at the Place d’ Alma in 1997, of course.
Aren’t you glad I took the time to figure this out?
Calculations made by several independent groups showed that the car never exceeded 140 km/h (85 mph), Lelouch himself cited that the top speed achieved was 200 km/h.
Comments from Lelouch prove that the vehicle that carried the camera was his 6.9L Mercedes-Benz, with automatic transmission and a top speed of 230 km/h. The gear changes up into 5th and high-revving engine sounds indicate speeds of well over 200 km/h, yet the picture often does not match, as visual speed does not change as much as the sound does. This is due to the fact that the sound track was dubbed with the sound from a Ferrari 275GTB to give the impression of much higher speeds, as confirmed by Lelouch.
I’m not sure if this passage is accurate; at the very least, “comments from Lelouch” do not “prove” anything. But the Wikipedia page does include a link to this photo of Lelouch playing with a camera attached to the front of a Mercedes:
Early on a summer morning in 1978, the French filmmaker Claude Lelouch attached a gyro-stabilized camera to the front of a Ferrari 275GTB. He turned on the camera and handed the car keys to a professional racecar driver, who fired up the engine and then sped through the center of Paris at about 140 miles per hour. The resulting eight-minute film, C’etait un rendezvous, is a classic. Thanks to Google Video and YouTube, it’s gotten a lot of web attention in recent months. But here’s something new: A blogger named Brian Hendrix has created a Google Maps mashup that displays the car’s location on a map as the driver rockets himself through Paris:
Lelouch has apparently claimed that it was he who was behind the wheel; he supposedly also said that the car was a Mercedes, not a Ferrari, and that the sounds of a Ferrari were overdubbed later. But I don’t have the energy to investigate whether (a) he actually claimed these things or (b) the claims are actually true.
In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.
In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.
The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.
