MovieChat Forums > Without Limits (1998) Discussion > why I watched this movie

why I watched this movie

posted 13 years ago by williamonthefloor
2 replies | jump to latest

I never HEARD of Prefontaine until my curiosity about some local point of interest got the better of me.

I moved here, to Eugene, from England, because to watch a movie in England, in a theater, you had to cough up the equivalent of TWENTY DOLLARS. From my years in Puget Sound, I KNEW about the 50 cent 4 month old movies at Gateway so after spending half a year in the west midlands, I decided to move to Oregon.

And while visiting the park a block from where I live, I kept seeing a sign that indicated "Pre's Rock", somewhere ahead. I had no idea what it meant and didn't care. But after a year, I decided to actually hunt it down. And that is where I found out who Steve Prefontaine was. From his last location on earth.

It's odd how there were TWO movies about this guy, so close together. The last time that happened was with Kevin Costner and Kurt Russel playing Wyatt Earp.

At least I knew who they were before I watched the movie.

[–] a-j-franzman 11 years ago

Why I watched this movie- I was in it... almost.

You may have read that this film cost some $25 million to make, and returned less than $1 million at the box office. This was said to be due to Warner's unwillingness to promote it after Disney's failure with "Prefontaine" the previous year. To add to the confusion, both movies were in production in 1996, and I believe both movies had working titles of "Pre" -- I know for a fact that Without Limits did, as I saved for a while the logo'ed baseball cap I was given when working on it.

I was an extra in the the 1972 Munich Olympics scenes, which were a significant part of the film's $25 million cost. The stadium used was at Citrus College in Glendora, southern California. There were hundreds (probably one or two thousand) of paid and unpaid extras as crowd in the stands, athletes, coaches and officials on the track and in the infield, security guards, a giant green-screen wall at one end, multiple cameras including a cable-cam flying overhead (which was still very new, having been introduced in 1994). Filming went on for two full days, covering races which took place both before and after the tragedy of the Israeli athletes' murders; the "after" scenes had the security guards all armed with submachine guns. Almost all of these scenes were cut from the released version of the film. What I could identify was mostly just a few seconds shown on a TV screen in the movie, with only a few of the other runners near Pre being recognizable. What a waste.

This signature intentionally left blank.

[–] ChrisCuda 11 years ago

A guy I used to work with played a track team member sitting in the stands at U of O when Pre shows up to run his senior year. He's right on camera in that scene, quite visible. I asked him how he got in the movie and he said he was working out and they came and pulled him out of the gym. He was a U of O student and they said they needed a couple of athletic looking guys to fill spots. Pretty cool....