Written by: Gregory Mann
“The Last Race” is a cinematic portrait of a ‘Long Island’ stock car race track as it’s 87 year-old owners struggle to maintain an American racing tradition in the face of a real estate development boom.
‘Long Island’ was the birthplace of American stock car racing. At it’s peak, there were over forty racetracks on ‘Long Island’, but today, only one remains; ‘Riverhead Raceway’. This quarter-mile track somehow managed to slip through the cracks as progress transformed ‘Long Island’ from a stretch of sand with sleepy main streets and mom and pop farm stands, to a maze of highways connecting shopping malls to buy-in-bulk shopping centers. When it was built in 1949, the racetrack sat on the edge of a small country road surrounded on every side by miles of farmland. Years later, the country road expanded into a highway and eventually corporate retail discovered that the steady flow of traffic from the rest of the island made it a prime location to set up shop. First came an outlet mall, and as the outlet mall grew, the usual suspects of big retail followed. The surrounding farmland was gobbled up by box stores plastered with corporate logos, and today ‘The Riverhead Raceway’ is the only piece of land on the commercial strip of ‘Old Country Road’ that hasn’t been developed. The land the track sits on is valued at well over ten million dollars, while the money that it generates in ticket sales on summer weekends is barely enough to keep the lights on.
The fact that the ‘Riverhead Raceway’ remains open defies the laws of capitalism, and the only thing standing in the way of the bulldozers are 87-year-old Barbara and Jim Cromarty. Barbara and Jim bought the track in 1977 and they continue to run it even as multi-million dollar offers roll in, tempting them toward a well-deserved retirement. Barbara and Jim fight to keep it open because they understand that ‘Riverhead’ carries the burden of being the last bastion of stock car racing on ‘Long Island’, and when ‘Riverhead’ goes, it’s all over. Unlike the box stores that surround it, ‘The Riverhead Raceway’ wasn’t designed in a corporate boardroom for maximum efficiency and maximized profit margins. It grew out of a place and a community that loved to go fast. It started with old wrecks racing around a dirt oval in an empty field. After spectators started turning up for the races, someone decided to lay down asphalt, then stands, and eventually the Cromartys made a business out of it by charging admission and selling hot dogs and tee shirts. But what they sell is more than the spectacle of racing and empty calories; it’s membership to a tribe of blue-collar workers who work with their hands to build racing machines out of metal and grease.
They live for speed, the chaos of the race, and the drama of the pits. They’re fighters and adrenaline junkies, whose identity is inexorably linked to a slice of land where blue-collar glory triumphs over white-collar profit. Beauty at ‘Riverhead’ takes it’s most primitive and visceral form. Like visiting a remote jungle tribe, a trip to ‘Riverhead’ reveals the creations of a community that has passed down building techniques through the generations and crafted their vision of the world with the tools and materials at their disposal. The cars are their weapons, sculptures, flags and family crests rolled into one. They’re built from pieces and parts that the drivers salvage like treasure hunters in junk yards; relics of another era, a time when cars were constructed with nuts, bolts, and welding torches, not silicon and plastic. The dents on their paneling and the scars on their bodies are the records of their past. The announcer is the narrator who tells the story of their battles to the audience of ‘The Coliseum’. The cries of the engines are their music, and the race is their triumphant dance that erupts every weekend in a violent swirl of color, sound, and emotion. Barbara and Jim are old; their health is failing.
It’s not clear how long they will be able to continue running the track, and it’s even less clear what their plan for succession is. Developers are waiting at the gate with million-dollar offers and leasing agreements. If Barbara and Jim give in, the laws of capitalism will have triumphed, and the chaos of ‘Riverhead’ will give way to cinder block construction, an orderly parking lot, and a sterile interior. The racers and their fans know this. They see their universe slipping away from them, swallowed up by the same globalized system of commerce and culture that’s replacing indigenous life around the world. It’s easy to let that happen. When the track finally goes, corporate retail will be there to take its place. The land occupied by ‘The Riverhead Raceway’ will become indistinguishable from the myriad commercial strips that cover the American landscape. Saturdays will be spent pushing shopping carts through the aisles of neatly packaged products. It won’t smell like gasoline and burnt tires. The roar of engines will be replaced by the barely perceptible hum of pleasant music. There will be no speed, no thrills, no fights, no victories, no crashes, and no glory. There will be calm. But that calm is deadly.
Bellmore in 1960. The images of Wink Herold or Jerry ‘Red’ Klaus scraping off the walls in turns two and four left their own scratches and paint on our childhood. ‘The Riverhead Raceway’ is a way to reconnect with Long Island’s simpler past; the long Tuesday and Saturday nights at ‘Freeport’; the smell of burnt rubber and clutches; the heat radiating off the cars as they drove through concession areas blocked off by sawhorses on their way n to the pits; the sight, sometimes seen from a hole in the fence, of railroad ties rammed loose and lodged like spears in wheel wells, protruding like lances as cars circled the tar track, sparks flying. The cars exit for the last time, driving on flat tires, dragging bumpers, or being towed, oil leaking and engines smoking. On the last day of racing, Sept 24th, 1983 Peter ‘Buzzie’ Eriksen become the last track champion. Sadly, it seemed the perfect metaphor for ‘Long Island’, even more so when the construction crews tear the track down to make way for a giant strip mall that opened, and closed soon after. Another heap for the junkyard. ‘Riverhead Raceway’ is the last track on the Island. It’s only a matter of time before the bulldozers move in and ‘Riverhead’ goes the way of other tracks before it, replaced by a shopping mall, or some other piece of disposable architecture. That’s what people want, and that’s okay. But when it goes, something will be lost.
‘Long Island’ was the birthplace of stock car racing, and since it’s inception during the prohibition era, there had been over 40 different auto racing tracks covering the island. Every one of those tracks except ‘The Riverhead Raceway’ had closed, and an explosion of development around the track seemed to signal that ‘Riverhead’ was headed in the same direction. Forests surrounding the track were cleared overnight, and backhoes were breaking ground for big box stores. The value of the land far exceeded the earning potential of the race track, and it’s octogenarian owners, Barbara and Jim Cromarty, were facing health problems that made overseeing the operations of the track increasingly difficult. Although Barbara and Jim assured that they planned to keep the track open, we continually heard rumors from developers about the increasingly outrageous sums that were enticing Barbara and Jim into a well-deserved retirement. It’s about our gear and how we managed our media. Being accepted into the family of the track means we get access to some of the racers highest highs but also means we’re fair game as recipients for their angry explosions when they lost a race.
Wide frames and telephoto lenses allows to maintain distance between the audiences and the subjects. This, combined with a continually rolling camera inured the subjects to the filmmaking process. Likewise, the constant presence of the cameras in the cars during the races captures some of the most emotionally raw footage of the film, such as the explosive anger of a fight brewing after a race, the unabashed thrill of a driver winning the championship, and the intimate rituals of preparation before the start of a race. During the summer weekdays when the racetrack is closed, the film follows the drivers through their daily lives. The mundane drudgery of their work is a sharp contrast to the chaos and excitement at the racetrack. The unique character of their lives on Long Island reflected their passion for racing. Entering into the uniquely American race culture of ‘The Riverhead Raceway’ is both exotic and mysterious. The film brings a new analysis of the material that unearthed new images and ideas that may have been taken for granted through our cultural familiarity.
This is a film about stock car racing. The film captures the sculptural forms of the cars through large format photography and sculpture.The film pushes the boundaries of conventional documentary storytelling, express the intensity of the racing experience, show the strange beauty of life at the track, and document the culture of blue-collar American racing in previously unseen ways. “The Last Race” is the story of a place and people who’ve found a reason to live and a glimpse into their last gasp of passion before the bulldozers move in. It’s the portrait of a small-town stock car racetrack and the tribe of blue-collar drivers that call it home, struggling to hold onto an American racing tradition as the world around them is transformed by globalization and commercialization. In his first feature-length film, Dweck extends his exploratory repertoire by combining observational documentary, stylized imagery, and a symphonic merging of motion and sound. Experimenting with both form and subject matter, the film highlights the mysterious beauty and exuberant passion shared by the last custodians of a disappearing tradition. Aside from creating an artistic appraisal of class and American identity, the film allegorizes the broader, global epidemic wherein the sense of community and ritualistic traditions face extinction at the hands of mass conglomerate takeover.
“The Last Race” creates a visual narrative that supported the underlying story. This process led to the evolution of a narrative based on unexpected visual connections and contrasts. Unlike many conventional documentaries, the images are not merely used a visual facade to cover a structure built on information and narrative conveyed through audio; rather, images occupy a deliberate position and work as building blocks of the story itself. The film captures the intensity of the car racing in a way that people have not seen or experienced before. To do this, the film employs an array of small lightweight and inexpensive cameras that allowed to frame shots in extremely vulnerable positions and explore new perspectives to capture the race. For every race, cameras are placed around the track and on a variety of angles on the cars. One car has as many as five different cameras capturing different perspectives in a single race.
Certain sounds, such as the voice of the track announcer, are captured from numerous different recording positions to reflect the many perspectives that the audio could be perceived from locations in and around the track. Racing sounds and a variety of different car sounds are also recorded from various perspectives to provide the sound designer with a broad palette of sounds to pull from for the racing sequences. The intention is for every car and every race sequence in the film to have a unique personality expressed through the audio. The film creates a blur of music and crowds, and transition the sound design from scene to scene in a dreamlike way, with sonic elements slipping and sliding in layer. Perspective shifts, audio pre-laps, extended transitions, abstract sound design, and both diegetic and non-diegetic sound, and non-diegetic music, often all in the same sequences, throughout the film.
Errol Morris’s early work such as ‘Gates Of Heaven’ and ‘Vernon, Florida’ provides inspiration for capturing candid interviews with idiosyncratic characters and the distinct personality of a region. Classic racing films like ‘Grand Prix’, ‘Le Mans’, ‘Days Of Thunder’, as well as contemporary ‘Nascar’ broadcasts also viewed as a context for how auto racing has been mythologized in popular culture and provided insight into how that mythology was reflected in the culture of the racetrack. The film discovers moments of beauty and something disaster. “The Last Race” is a celebration of a tribe of working class heroes and the track that has become the last bastion for their way of life. It’s an attempt to reclaim and capture the memories of our childhood so that the mysterious beauty might still be known after ‘Riverhead’ is gone. Moreover, this film is a creative effort to provide it’s viewers with a singular aesthetic experience, to become active participants, and witnesses, to the spirit of ‘Riverhead’. The film merges image and sound in a unique narrative form to bring the audience into the world of grassroots racing culture and explores a story that subtly grapples with questions of blue collar American identity that have taken on a profound relevance in the current political era.
The Last Race (2018) Release date: November 16, 2018 Director: Michael Dweck Starring: Marty Berger, Mike Cappiello, Barbara Cromarty
