Dust to Glory Some years ago we had the chance to talk with Robby Gordon briefly about off-road racing. There came to his eye a glint and an unabashed enthusiasm to his voice that was altogether missing in discussions about NASCAR or Indy car racing. All that stuff was business, but Gordon ever more will find his greatest glory in off-road racing where he is regarded as a mega-star god. While you’ll learn that fact from watching Dust to Glory, and you’ll spend an enjoyable few minutes with grand marshal Mario Andretti—even see a snippet of Steve McQueen and James Garner back in the day when they raced the Baja 1000—the true stars of this documentary film are people you’ve never heard of unless you are already an off-road racing fan. But here’s the thing—by the time you switch off the DVD you will be a fan. Bruce Brown took documentaries from droning voices and one-step from high school A/V club to a whole new art form back in the 1970s with The Endless Summer, a brilliant tribute to surfing—about which almost no outsider knew anything before this film. Most of Brown’s work was some variation on surfing, except On Any Sunday in 1971, about motorcycle racing and an Oscar® nominee the next year. It was no surprise that his son Dana has also become a documentarian, and one with an equally deft hand. He’s done surfing, too, but his presentation of off-road racing in Dust to Glory is both brilliant and stunningly beautiful. Dana Brown used 50 cameras, including small helmet and car-mounted cameras to capture the action, but the essence of the film is in getting to know a few people well and following their progress in the race. Gordon is one of them, but 2003 was not his best year. In fact, he fell out before the end, but you get a sense of the taskmaster Gordon is with his team and with himself. There is also the McMillan family, including 16-year-old Andy who finishes 6th overall on a three-month-old driver’s license. Indy car racers Jimmy Vasser and the Groff brothers who team up, clearly, just to have a lot of fun. Johnny Campbell is a seven-time winner in the motorcycle class and even more popular than Gordon in Mexico. But it is Mike “Mouse” McCoy (who is also the film’s producer) who provides the drama as he attempts to be the first motorcycle racer to do the race solo. We won’t spoil the ending for you by telling you how it comes out, but remember this is Baja, they are racing on real highways (with real traffic, including cops pulling over competitors for speeding), off into the desert and onto the beach, and just about anything can—and does—happen. “It’s a hell of a race,” understates the narrator (Brown) at the end, but it’s also a hell of a movie. A love for racing is always difficult to explain, but if it’s NASCAR and you win a lot of money and fame, even a non-fan can understand that to some extent. For people who genuinely love racing for the sake of racing—for the person test and the euphoria of not knowing what’s literally around the next bend (it may be a herd of cattle wandering across the road), this is the best film for communing with people like that. This is one of those films that you’ll watch more than once so you can catch all that is packed into it so neatly and so well. NASCAR should be drooling in envy. Type of Racing: SCORE off-road racing Tracks: No track; Baja peninsula of Mexico Reel Racers: None Real Racers: Robby Gordon, J.N. Roberts, Johnny Campbell, Andy Grider, Mouse McCoy Year of Release: 2005 DVD Length: 97 minutes Approx. On-Track: Entire film Color/B&W: Color Watch for: . . . 200,000 fans but nobody pays. No grandstand, no catch fence (at most, a rope), and a spectator dies in 2003—killed by another spectator on a motorcycle going the wrong way. . . . J. N. Roberts won 27 races in a row in the Mojave Desert, and once won the Baja after getting lost and making a 14-hour side trip. . . . The motorcycle guys are crazy. The beating they take from the terrain is unreal. But the truly certifiable people are in Class 11—unmodified pre-1982 Volkswagen beetles. You cannot believe what they subject themselves to in this race. . . . The racers all hate the silt beds—areas in which dry dirt-like sand is a couple of feet deep and can bog down a truck or buggy—and toss a motorcycle over the handlebars. They often can’t see driving through the beds because of the gigantic rooster tails, and racers say that silt oozes out of their eyes for days after the race. . . . A driver pulls cactus spines out of his arm after a driver exchange. . . . “You’ll have 10,000 close calls on the road in a lifetime,” says one racer, “but in this race it all happens in one day.”