A New Steve McQueen Motorcycle Movie?

Yes, Steve McQueen has been dead for 25 years, but while he was alive he gathered together notes, photos, clippings and he wrote detailed script ideas for an epic movie called “Yucatan.” The material came to the attention of McQueen’s son about 10 years ago and he has since put it into the hands of Lance Sloane, a producer who is working on the project with the intention of making the film with Warner Brothers. McQueen had plans for quite a biker movie:

… an archaeologist from the Museum of London enlists a renegade Navy diver, who works for the oil companies and races motorcycles on the “shores of the Mojave,” in a plan to explore the cenotes, caves in the Yucatan jungle that reveal underground lakes. Here, a millennium before, Mayan priests sacrificed virgins covered in gold and precious jewels, a fortune rumored to still adorn their skeletons at the bottom of these sacred wells.

The writing is filled with a reverence for nature and sympathy to the class struggle in Mexico, and there is a motorcycle chase spelled out in illustrated storyboards that McQueen planned as the most elaborate ever committed to film. In William F. Nolan’s biography “McQueen,” the actor describes the film as follows: “Our story will center on a guy who takes his cycle into the Mexican wilds on a personal treasure hunt. Naturally, I’ll play the guy on the cycle.”

A couple of big names have been shown the story for a potential starring role, no one is committed yet. Sounds pretty cool.

Links: NY Times via BoingBoing

Image: NY Times