What Is There About Buses, Bombs and Writers?

Sound familiar?

20th Century Fox recently said it was putting the film project “Speed” on the fast track toward production. The story? About a morally ambivalent cop, played by Keanu Reeves, who must remove a bomb planted under a Los Angeles city bus. The bomb is set to explode if the speed of the bus drops below 50 m.p.h.

That storyline started some nit-pickers among us to thinking.

Wasn’t there a novel called “Bullet Train,” by Joseph Rance and Arei Kato, in the late ‘70s, which told the story of the Japanese fast train that had to keep a pace of at least 50 m.p.h? (If not, a terrorist bomb would explode.)

The English-language novel was based on a Japanese story by Koto, which also spawned a popular Japanese movie called “Shinkansen Bakuha (Fast Train Explosion),” produced by Toei Co.

But wait, there’s more.

Just last year there was a short story titled “Murder in the Fast Lane,” from a book called “Kingpins: Tales From Inside the Mob,” by James A. Noble. The story was about a plot against a gangster’s wife in which she is told that if the car she’s driving slows to--you guessed it--50 m.p.h., a bomb will explode.

From an industry source, we heard that in 1975 a screenplay by former Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times columnist Bob Ellison circulated among the studios, and was optioned by producer Steven Friedman, but was never produced. The plot? A bomb is loaded on a bus headed for Chicago’s bus terminal.

But Ellison, who now works in Los Angeles, said there is no minimum speed for the bus in his plot. The twist in his story is that looking for a bus headed for Chicago is like “looking for a needle in a haystack,” since there are any number of buses headed for the city at any given time.

Perhaps the granddaddy of all these bomb-plot coincidences is Rod Serling’s 1966 TV movie “The Doomsday Flight.” In it, Edmond O’Brien played a madman who plants an altitude-activated bomb on a flight. If the plane lands, the bomb explodes.