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| Unofficial Celebrity Report: Roughed Up by Sly's Dudes | | Date Created: Jan 27, 2006, 02:22 PM |
 This entry was inspired by the realization Sylvester Stallone really is filming another ROCKY movie. (Is this the 12th in the series?) And, if the thought of a 78-year-old boxer making a comeback isn't scary enough for ya, there's even a Rocky blog. Yup, the blogosphere may have indeed just Jumped the Couch.
But, this is not about Rocky. This is about a moment in the early planning stages of what may be the cheesiest racing movie ever made: Driven. Though - to their credit - the movie does offer the chance to ogle Estella Warren for a few moments. And, the flick did use the fine PacWest team as the visual focus with the colorful Nextel/Motorola and Hollywood (the Brazilian cigarettes, not the city)-sponsored Mercedes-powered Champ cars. But that's where the compliments end.
The 1998 season for CART started at the picturesque track at Homestead, Fla. New to the series and the Mercedes-Benz camp was a likeable, enthusiastic Brazilian kid, Helio Castro-Neves. (Back then, his last name was hyphenated rather than a single word.) Former World Champ and recently retired Emerson Fittipaldi had helped his young countryman get a drive with the small Bettenhausen team, run by Tony Bettenhausen (who, sadly, was killed in a plane crash in 2000).
That weekend, Emerson invited Miami-resident Stallone to the track to see the CART series in action. Stallone had been hoping to do a Formula One movie, but after determining F1 head honcho Bernie Eccelstone was impossible to work with, Sly turned his attention to the Indy car circuit.
My role at that time - among other marketing/pr/menial tasks - was to play Logo Police for Mercedes-Benz. This consisted of going up and down pit lane, taking digital photos of Mercedes logos and three-pointed stars on the race cars, transporters, uniforms and anywhere else the logo appeared. Mercedes has very, very specific graphic standards, and I took many photos to submit to the German offices to confirm the teams were following the guidelines.
On the first morning of practice, all of these elements collided rather awkwardly.
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 Blissfully unaware of anything other than photographing three-pointed stars, I ambled down pit lane, approaching the #16 car. Snapping away photos with a first-race-of-the-year-enthusiasm, I was suddenly grabbed under both arms by two entirely-too-serious behemoths with arms the size of my torso.
"No photos of Mr. Stallone," one barked out.
Because they had a grip on both of my arms, I had no way to grab my CART/Mercedes team credential from my shirt pocket, and they brusquely escorted me toward the pit wall. Luckily, Fittipaldi's publicist, Kika Garcia-Concheso, saw what was happening and began yelling "it's OK! He's OK!" (Except in her high-pitched Portuguese accent, it sounded like "EEEEESSE HOOOKAY! EEEEESE HOKAAAAAAY!")
The goons let go of my arms, and all was forgiven. (But not forgotten. And they remain lucky I didn't get medieval on their asses.) And that's the story of how I was almost roughed-up by Sly Stallone's bodyguards. (Had I been James Frey, the story might have concluded with me being transported to the hospital for some Novocaine-free dental work.) |
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