When Rob and Mahé went head to head, it made for some spectacular viewing and gave the sport in the country (and the world) a bit of a well timed boost before the Olympic Games. It had the lot. Drama, tension, excitement, triumph and tragedy. Everything, in fact, that you might just think would make a good movie. One or two people even wrote to Rowing New Zealand suggesting as much. One even suggested we contact Peter Jackson. Unfortunately, he wasn’t in the phone book.
The thing is, rowing as a sport has had it’s moments in Hollywood and elsewhere and to be honest, hasn’t cut the mustard. Let’s face it, it isn’t the world’s most exciting spectator sport and it needs more than a riveting plot and some compelling characters before it even stands a fighting chance of being made, let alone becoming a blockbuster. Wait, you cry, we had that and more in Rob and Mahé. Well, that’s certainly true, but there have been some great rowing stories before that made it onto the Big Screen and sadly, in most cases, they lost everything in translation and simply sunk without trace.
So what does Hollywood think it needs to make a rowing movie? Well, in most cases it thinks it needs Oxford or Cambridge and the Boat Race. The end results prove that particular path to be wrong.
Oxford Blues – staring a young Rob Lowe – was a really terrible movie. Witness the scene where he hops into his scull to win the big race still wearing his jeans and leather jacket. Hmm, I don’t think so.
The blues - True Blues if you watch this one...
A Yank at Oxford was a much earlier film from 1938 and featured some of the big stars of the day in the thirties, including Vivien Leigh. A pleasant enough tale where our American hero comes to Oxford and wins a rowing race to win the love of his chosen lady. And that is about it really.
And then there was True Blue (Released again somewhat bizarrely in 2004 as Miracle at Oxford ) Critics who care about rowing movies (and there don’t appear to be that many) site this film as the best ever made about rowing. It follows the 1987 Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race and the disagreement amongst the Oxford team during a year marked by the "Oxford mutiny". It is an adaptation of the half decent book written by Oxford’s coach at the time, Dan Topolski.
It certainly does convey the striving for physical perfection and the stress of selection and training for one of the hardest rowing races in the world. But, and it’s a big ‘but’ – continuity and the actors’ rowing technique are dreadful. The mixture of real Boat Race footage from 1995 inter-cut with footage of actors and real rowers recreating the 1987 race gives rise to some strange occurrences and several mega-comedy moments. Carbon cleaver blades appearing and then disappearing in favour of wooden macons, Cambridge going from two lengths up to two lengths down in the blink of an eye and the appearance at one stage of a ginger bloke in one of the boats for a few strokes.
So, ‘Oxbridge’ based movies just didn’t work, even when there was a real life drama driving production. But what of the others? Two of the more recent ones went away from the genre of English gentry and focussed on two real life and historic rowing dramas elsewhere in the sport.
Rowing Through traces the quest of Tiff Wood to make the Olympic Games in the single, and is based on the great book, The Amateurs, by David Halberstam. That one gave high expectations. But seeing the movie, it’s almost laughable how miscast some people in the film are from a technical point of view. And that seems a little daft. Make a rowing movie that will appeal to rowers but conveniently forget that every single one of them will immediately spot huge gaping holes in technique, style and even equipment.
No - not the legendary Tiff Wood
If you ever get to see it, watch out for some really bad rowing technique from the leading actor Colin Ferguson (especially ironic when overlaid with words "Are we or are we not the greatest crew you've ever coached"). On the plus side though, Rowing Through did have some great extras - the real Tiff wood, Derek Porter, Harry Parker and Xeno Muller amongst them. And that is something that you would clearly have to have in any decent rowing movie.
One of the more recent efforts and one of the best of the bad bunch was Golden Will – a movie made for TV that was a nice tribute to one of Canada's greatest Olympians, Silken Laumann.
Silken though, probably deserved a bit better. If you're unfamiliar with Laumann's amazing story, it goes something like this. An odds-on favourite to capture a gold medal, she was involved in a collision with the boat of German coxless pair team Colin von Ettinghausen and Peter Hoeltzenbein in May 1992. Despite horrendous injuries to her leg (in her words, "I looked at the leg for a few seconds and knew it was serious when my muscle was hanging at my ankle and I could see the bone”), five operations and a total stay in the hospital of approximately three weeks, Laumann was back on the water training by late June. Her efforts paid off with a bronze medal at the Barcelona games and she was subsequently named Canadian of the Year by the Canadian Club in recognition and was selected to carry the Canadian Flag in the closing ceremony of the Olympics.
An amazing true story, but in general, this movie is average at best. It will help you appreciate what a courageous effort she gave, but much of the film takes place before the serious injury she suffered, and quite simply, these parts really aren't all that interesting. Anyone into rowing at the time could never forget Silken's Olympic effort, but this movie about her, like the other movies, remains very forgettable.
So, with our two boys going at it hell for leather this last summer, do we have the ingredients of the first great rowing movie? That’s intriguing. If it were to ever be made, there’s something compelling from the dire portfolio of past efforts to suggest that Rob and Mahé should play themselves, and simply re-enact the whole of the year with its twists and turns.
Engage some serious actors to play the supporting roles – Brad Pitt to play Calvin Ferguson, Christopher Lee to play Dick Tonks, Russell Crowe as Mike Roger and that bloke who plays James Bond to star as the battle-scarred High Performance Manager Andrew Matheson – spice it up with a bit of love interest and throw in a $40-$50 million dollar budget and a movie set at Lake Karapiro and you could almost imagine it happening.
Well, almost.
Films about rowing
Rowing Through
True Blue
Eight Girls in a Boat
A Yank at Oxford
Golden Will
Summer Storm
Give It All
Three Men in a Boat
Rowing in the plot
Blondie Goes to College
The Emperor’s Club
The Notebook
May Morning
Bullshot
Sliding Doors
College (Buster Keaton)
Enemy of the State
Blink and you will almost certainly miss it
The River Runs Wild
Dead Poets Society
Mad Love
Philadelphia
The Firm
The Exorcist
Golden Eye
True Lies
Sixth Sense |