Winternationals : Now, Just Call Him Big (Screen) Daddy Garlits

The $30,000 that Big Daddy Don Garlits hopes to win today in the top-fuel class at the Chief Winternationals drag races would be nice, but it’s nothing to what’s going to be spent on him later this year.

A $22-million feature film entitled “Big Daddy”--what else?--is scheduled to start production in September under director John Frankenheimer. Frankenheimer directed the 1966 film “Grand Prix,” generally considered the finest motor racing picture ever made.

“It’s hard to keep my mind on racing when I’m thinking about the movie so much,” Garlits said between qualifying runs at the L. A. County Fairplex track in Pomona, where final eliminations in the $851,325 event start today at 11 a.m.

“I’m going to be very involved in it, from start to finish. I’ll be the technical adviser and I’m going to very busy getting all the old cars ready to run again. Most of them are coming from my museum in Ocala, Fla. And I’m going to do all the driving of my cars when the shooting starts.”

Martin Sheen, star of the movie “Apocalypse Now “ and the TV special, “The Execution of Private Slovik,” is the actor rumored to be under strong consideration to play Garlits, although executive producer Jeff Lang of Los Angeles-based Nitro Productions, Inc., said no one has been selected as yet.

“Sheen’s the man I want,” Garlits said.

The picture, which will be shot primarily on drag strips in California, Florida and Arizona, is scheduled for release in the spring of 1988.

“We want to sell Garlits as the Chuck Yeager of drag racing,” Lang said after returning home from a meeting in Germany with Frankenheimer and Brock Yates, who is writing the screenplay. Yates co-authored the book, “Big Daddy,” with Garlits in 1967. The film will update his career to the present.

Frankenheimer is in Munich directing Klaus Maria Brandauer in “The Artisan,” after which he will begin work on the portrayal of Garlits’ life from the time he was saved from a burning house when he was 6 weeks old through the high and low points of his drag racing career.

Lang said that rather than relying on action film taken at the time, the movie’s racing scenes will be recreated. Lang wrote and produced “The World of Pro-Drag Superstars,” a syndicated TV series narrated by Garlits that was distributed last year. M. Cathy Main will be the producer.

Two scenes from California races will be prominent. The first will take place at Bakersfield’s Famoso strip, where Garlits brought his first Swamp Rat top fueler out from Seffner, Fla., to face the California hot-shoes in the U.S. Fuel and Gas championships, better known as the Smokers’ Meet.

“I got beat that first time, but when I came back and won in ‘65, the fans threw beer cans and all sorts of junk at me,” Garlits recalled. “All of that will be in the picture.”

And so will be the accident that occurred at Lions Drag Strip in Wilmington on March 8, 1970, when the transmission exploded in Garlits’ top fueler, severing half of his right foot.

While lying in the hospital, recuperating, Garlits thought out the concept of moving the engine to the rear in the explosive top fuelers, instead of having it up front, between the driver’s legs. That is considered the most significant change in the history of top-fuel drag racing.

“The movie will be based around a lot of close calls,” Garlits said.

Many scenes will also be shot at the old Garlits home in Seffner, where he built the first 25 of his legendary Swamp Rat machines.

“An old drag racing associate of mine bought the house when Pat (Mrs. Garlits) and I moved to Ocala to build my museum,” Garlits said. “He’d love nothing more than to have part of the movie shot where we used to live.”

Today, however, Garlits has other concerns--trying to win his fifth Winternationals and getting off to a fast start in attempting to become the first top-fuel driver to win four National Hot Rod Assn. world championships. He and Shirley Muldowney have each won three.

Garlits, who turned 55 Jan. 14, will be the oldest driver to win a Winternationals event if he outlasts the field today. The defending champion, Darrell Gwynn, was not even 2 when Garlits won his first Winternationals in 1963, which was Garlits’ first national championship win. Big Daddy also won at Pomona in 1971, 1973 and 1975.

The Super Shops streamliner is the same Swamp Rat No. 30 that Garlits drove at the World Finals last fall when he defeated former world champion Joe Amato to win the Cragar-Weld Classic for the year’s top qualifiers. Garlits then lost to Gwynn in an early round of the finals when he jumped the start and was disqualified.

“Herb (chief mechanic Parks) and I did some wind tunnel work on the car over the winter and now it has about 30% more down force,” Garlits said.

Garlits qualified third at 5.371 seconds and 270.02 m.p.h. behind two other old-timers, Hank Endres, 48, and Gene Snow, 49. Garlits will meet Larry Minor, the potato magnate from San Jacinto, Calif., in today’s first round.

Kenny Bernstein, defending world funny car champion from Newport Beach, gave the crowd of 40,000 a national elapsed time record when his Buick Le Sabre was clocked at 5.482 seconds in a Saturday morning qualifying run. It bettered his own record of 5.543 set in a Ford Tempo last October at the Texas Motorplex outside Dallas.

Ray Stutz, 33, a LaVerne firefighter, had his top-fuel dragster demolished when the parachute failed to open, but Stutz walked away with nothing but lacerations and bruises. The 22-foot long vehicle broke in half after Stutz failed to go into the sand pit and crashed, upside down, into a concrete barrier alongside busy McKinley Street.