The Race Is On : Warner Bros. and Disney are neck and neck in making a film about the life of Olympian runner Steve Prefontaine.

Take Exit 192 off Interstate 5 in western Oregon, turn west and you’ll find yourself in Eugene, an idyllic college town full of wide boulevards, espresso bars and big houses with well-tended yards. But head east and you’ll wind up in Springfield, a town of trailer parks, auto body shops and rundown apartment buildings.

Steve Prefontaine spent thousands of hours running through the streets of both cities. And while he could have been elected mayor of Eugene, he chose to live on the other side of the tracks--almost literally, since train tracks run alongside Springfield’s River Bank Trailer Park, where Prefontaine lived in a tiny single-wide trailer. He may have turned Eugene into Track Town USA and helped make Nike a household word, but even at the height of his short-lived athletic career, Prefontaine identified with the hard-working, blue-collar folks who make up Springfield and all the cities like it.

“He was a maverick of sorts,” says filmmaker Steve James. “That’s something that appeals to any time.”

And it’s certainly something that appeals to Hollywood, where, nearly 21 years after Prefontaine was killed in an auto accident, two big-screen versions of his life story are in the works. James and partner Peter Gilbert, who teamed up on the critically praised “Hoop Dreams,” a documentary that followed the ups and downs of two high school basketball stars, are working feverishly to finish a script for Hollywood Pictures. The project, tentatively titled “Pre,” will be distributed by Disney’s Buena Vista Distribution Co.

Warner Bros. also has a film in development under the same name. Robert Towne (“Chinatown,” “Personal Best”) and two-time Olympic marathoner Kenny Moore--who were originally part of a team pitching a script to Disney--are polishing their completed screenplay. Towne will also direct the movie with Moore serving as an executive producer.

Although early word was that both studios hoped to have their picture in theaters by July, in time to take advantage of the hype created by the Olympic Games in Atlanta in July and August, the fact that neither movie has advanced past the development stage makes an early summer release improbable. But with competing studios working on identical films at the same time, speed has become almost as important as content.

“I love to race. I’m the right guy for this,” Moore joked. “Pre would love this.”

Moore, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, was a frequent training partner of Prefontaine’s and the two were teammates on the 1972 U.S. Olympic team. He first approached Towne about a film treatment of Prefontaine’s life in 1977, and they’ve been batting the idea around ever since.

“For me, the emotions have been spread out over many years,” Moore says. But, he adds, the delay isn’t likely to lessen the appeal of Pre’s story.

“He is an important American athletic figure,” Moore says. “He was so riveting to people; he affected people so deeply. We have to see if we can make the next generation understand him.”

James and Gilbert, who see sports as a vehicle to explore larger issues, also see Prefontaine’s story as one with a natural, timeless allure that needs no tie-in.

“His was a very interesting, truly American story,” says Gilbert. “He was a . . . complex person. His background is very complex. The way he ran was very interesting, the way he died was very ironic.”

Although he had the aggressive mentality of a football player and the muscular build of a wrestler, distance running was the sport at which Prefontaine excelled. As a high school senior in Coos Bay, Ore., he set a national prep record for the two-mile run. At the University of Oregon, he set seven national records and at one time was the fastest American in history at every distance from 2,000 to 10,000 meters.

But while he won more than 75% of his races during an eight-year career, he never earned an Olympic medal, finishing fourth in his only try. That race, the 5,000-meter final at Munich in 1972, ended with a wild four-man sprint won by Finland’s incomparable Lasse Viren. News photos of the finish show a spent and dejected Prefontaine leaning toward the tape, as if trying to force his barrel chest across the line ahead of the jubilant Viren.

“It was one of the most amazing Olympic races of all time,” says Gilbert, who plans to make it a focal part of his film. “That was one of the only races Pre didn’t lead from the beginning. Munich, I think, changed him quite a bit.”

Prefontaine’s German-born mother, Elfreide, has long called the loss the biggest disappointment of her son’s life. Others say it made him more human. It definitely made him more political: After Munich, Prefontaine became a leader in the fight for athletes’ rights.

In fact, according to Jack D. Welch, a respected journalist who has written about running for nearly 20 years, Prefontaine was the first athlete to sign a contract with Nike, accepting $5,000 to wear their shoes. But in his first race with the new shoes, the company’s trademark swooshes--which had been glued to the sides--came loose and fell to the track.

Nevertheless, Prefontaine became so closely linked to Nike that the shoe company was approached by both Warner Bros. and the Gilbert-James team to act as a creative consultant. And while Nike is supportive of both projects, public relations manager Tom Feuer says the company is working closer with Hollywood Pictures because “they approached us first.” Moore’s close friend Geoff Hollister, a former national-class distance runner at Oregon and a Nike employee who served as a consultant on last spring’s CBS documentary “Fire on the Track: The Life of Steve Prefontaine,” will lead Nike’s effort.

While Pre may have been a rebel, he wasn’t a revolutionary. Eugene, like many college towns, was a hotbed of anti-war activities when Prefontaine enrolled at the University of Oregon. And by confining their energies to sports, many college athletes, like Prefontaine, were immediately seen as part of the establishment. This is one part of the story that especially interests the Hollywood Pictures team.

“I was an athlete around that time,” says James, who was playing high school basketball then in Hampton, Va. “It was my experience at that time that athletes were viewed as being one step removed from the ROTC, if even one step removed. It was not a popular time to be an athlete.”

But, Gilbert adds, “He grew with his time.”

And Eugene grew with him. Before he graduated from Oregon, Prefontaine had developed such a following that the school’s Hayward Field track stadium would regularly draw overflow crowds--even in a driving rain--to see him run. His fans’ trademark cry of “Go Pre!” could be deafening, and it spooked more than one unwary opponent.

At the 1972 Olympic Trials in Eugene, elfin Gerry Lindgren, a well-known prankster, pulled off his sweats to reveal a T-shirt adorned with a huge red traffic sign and the words “STOP PRE.” It was meant as a joke, but the Eugene faithful looked on it as sacrilege and Lindgren nearly needed a security escort out of the stadium after his race.

Gather a group of runners from Pre’s era around a pizza and pitcher of beer at Mazzi’s, still the hangout of choice for Eugene’s sizable stable of world-class athletes, and such stories are recalled without end. A movie about Prefontaine, then, won’t lack for material. Making the story believable, however, may be the greater challenge.

Most running-related movies have suffered because the dramatic athletic scenes looked exactly like what they were: shots of unathletic actors trying to appear Olympian. Susan Anton’s performance in “Goldengirl” is perhaps the most laughable example of this.

Among the few exceptions: “On the Edge,” a low-budget film featuring competitive runners Bruce Dern and Walt Stack; “Running Brave,” a biopic based on the life of Olympic champion Billy Mills that starred Robby Benson in the role of Mills, and the Oscar-winning “Chariots of Fire.” (The closing scenes in Towne’s “Personal Best,” a movie which featured Moore, are also quite believable.)

Gilbert, who says he runs every day, is aware of Hollywood’s poor track record.

“There’s so few of us who would look at [a movie] and think of the form and things like that,” he said. “[But] to create the Olympics with runners like [England’s Dave] Bedford and Viren, you’ve got to have real runners. You’ve got to make it look like the Olympics.”

Prefontaine died almost within sight of the track he made into a mecca. He had run--and, of course, won--a race at Hayward Field earlier in the day, then attended a post-meet party at Hollister’s house. Later, in the wee hours of May 30, he visited Moore’s house near the top of Eugene’s hilly Hendrick’s Park; driving back down the hill he lost control of his gold MGB convertible coming around a turn and crashed into a rock wall. The sports car flipped over, landing on top of Prefontaine, the car’s weight preventing him from breathing.

Although there was speculation that Pre, just 24, may have been speeding on the curvy, rain-slicked road, or perhaps had had too much to drink at the party, the official investigation said he was unable to negotiate a turn after taking his eyes off the road to change a tape in his car stereo.

Eugene mourned its hero, then quickly set out to honor him. Five miles of gentle and scenic wood-chip running paths were constructed in a city park and dubbed “Pre’s Trails.” A world-class track and field invitational, called the Pre Classic, was scheduled for late spring at Hayward Field. It remains an annual event.

“There’s a whole generation of people who know nothing about Steve Prefontaine and what he accomplished,” says James.

That figures to change shortly.