Farrah Fawcett and Grilled Spaghetti Sauce

Farrah smelled like trees.

If you’re a male heterosexual and the same age as I am, you knew that the most important attribute a prospective childhood friend could boast were parents who sprung not just for cable, but for one or more of the handful of premium movie channels that ran rated-R movies. My parents wouldn’t pay for cable, much less HBO, so I had to seek out bad words and boobs.

The Cannonball Run was not rated R so the most it showed were nipples outlined through thin shirts, but my parent’s inconsistent puritan streak got wind of inuendo in the film so I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theaters no matter how many times I told them that Bernard’s and Tony’s parents let them go. Thankfully Tony’s parents didn’t talk to my parents about such things so one night at a sleepover at his house I got to watch it on the same TV set that would later find fame as the giver of Purple Rain.

Looking back through my now-older eyes, I have to say that it’s a fantastic movie. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 29% from reviewers. No surprise there. It was always a proud bridge and tunnel set movie. What’s surprising is that Cannonball got made at all.

The guy who wrote the script was a writer named Brock Yates who had done work for Car and Driver magazine. It was based on his experiences as the originator of the real-life Cannonball race which he both organized and participated in beginning in 1971. The script got passed around Hollywood for a while without finding any takers. Somehow word got to the Australian director George Miller, who liked it and bought the rights with the intention of bringing it home and changing it from a race from Connecticut to California to one from Sydney to Perth.

The script went through an extraordinary number of rewrites and was almost scrapped when South Australia, out of the blue, made a scene promoting Adelaide tourism a requirement for filming permits. Costs were climbing before shooting had even started. Someone in the development team discovered how inexpensive it was to film in the more remote regions of the outback, more rewrites, and eventually there was a complete concept change.

Mel Gibson, who was cast in the J.J. McClure role later played by Burt Reynolds, remembers getting a call about the new direction. “I told one of the trade mag guys – that turned out to be a mistake, by the way – that it was a whole different film. Who was I though, y’know. I needed work, they gave me work. I’m not complaining.”

As you may have guessed, the movie Miller eventually made was Mad Max. Yates wasn’t happy. He wanted to see his script on the screen as he wrote it. Miller still had the rights, but Yates was able to argue to an L.A. jury that Miller abandoned any claim on the story because he didn’t use it within the contractually prescribed period and so, by contract, rights reverted to Yates. Miller tried to convince the court that since Max was developed from Cannonball he held the rights to Yate’s script as part of his rights to Max. Gibson’s interview with that trade magazine and his “whole different film” comment turned out to be the thing that swung the jurors towards Yates and allowed him to make The Cannonball Run as intended.

Now, if you’re a fan of either franchise, you know that Yates wrote The Cannonball Run and that Miller co-wrote Mad Max with Byron Kennedy and James McCausland and that that’s the only part of the above that’s true, but if anyone believed, especially with a “Wait…what?”, for a moment that the two movies were in the slightest intertwined much less that one emerged from the other, I feel my time was well spent. I don’t know. I had written this bit as far as Purple Rain when my wife came home from her sister’s house and told me they hung out and watched Fury Road. It just sorta of wrote itself.

But back to where I was going the Mad Max tangent, the most memorable thing about The Cannonball Run was Farrah Fawcett’s Oscar-deserving turn as environmental activist and tree enthusiant, Pamela Glover. Along with Mr. Foyt, played by George Furth, who’s best remembered as “Young Woodcock” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Glover’s role is to thwart the race.

In 1990, environmentalist Barbara Pyle teamed with mogul Ted Turner to produce Captain Planet and the Planeteers. The idea was to saturate impressionable minds with environmental zeal and make them sort recyclables before they get dumped in a landfill. That’s all well and good for indoctrinating young people, but if they really wanted to enlist prepubescent boys to their cause – really get their hooks in them – they should have filled the three thirty after-school and Saturday morning TV slots by rerunning The Cannonball Run, particularly when Fawcett, as Glover, waxes poetic about trees.

If I were of the Pyle/Turner mindset I’d just rerun the following exchange between Fawcett and Furth. Put it on a loop.

Pamela: You know what I like best about trees?
A.F. Foyt: No, what?
Pamela: Oh, that you can lie under them on a moonlit night with the breeze blowing and ball your brains out.

If I had known what Greenpeace was at the time, I would probably be an officer by now.

I like grilling. Chicken is never better than slathered in Bar BQ sauce and cooked over an open flame. A long time ago I saw a cooking show where the host made a pasta sauce out of grilled tomatoes. It was simple as could be and the smokey flavor made it a regular in our fair-weather dinner rotation. I had to set grilling aside about four years ago.

We had a tree that loomed over our house threateningly. A tree guy said it was healthy as could be and that we shouldn’t worry about it, but we live in Birmingham where it rains for weeks at a stretch. Every thunderstorm had me wondering if this would be the one, if the next clap I heard would be the trunk through the living room instead of the devil beating his wife. But that wasn’t the tree’s worst sin.

It was a pine, and that made my roof a carpet of pine straw. Blow it off, and before you know it the carpet’s back thicker. I made the mistake of tracing a glowing ash from my Weber grill as the breeze took it; watched it circle, dip, and rise but always aglow until it landed on my roof carpet.

It didn’t catch fire, but knowing it could have and wondering if I could get the hose unwound and on target in time to stop any smoldering put me off outdoor cooking at my house. I didn’t like going without sticky charred chicken and I didn’t like not having an occasional smokey tomato sauce, but having to live in a cramped hotel room with my family while waiting on an insurance check sounded worse. The absence of either alone I could probably deal with, but both?

We recently cut the tree down. I don’t regret it and if you try this sauce you’ll understand why. It wasn’t easy to kill one of my youthful crush’s beloved trees. Given the choice between abandoning an imprinted notion of sexuality and this sauce, I chose the sauce.

Sorry, Farrah. I hope they let you ball your brains out in heaven.

Spaghetti with Grilled Tomato Sauce

• 10-12 Roma tomatoes – They were small this time. When plumper ones are available, I’ve done it with 6-8.
• 4-6 garlic cloves, chopped
• handful basil, torn
• red pepper flakes to taste
• olive oil
• salt to taste
• flat leaf parsley, chopped (optional)
• oregano, chopped (optional)
• spaghetti
• Parmesan, Romano, or some such, grated

Sorry I can’t pin down exactly how many Romas this takes but they’re not uniform. You have to imagine the amount of sauce you want and judge as best you can how many tomatoes it takes to fill that mentally projected space. The pictures should help.

Wash the tomatoes and pat dry. Put them in a mixing bowl and toss with olive oil to coat. This doesn’t do much if anything for the flavor, but the fat will cause the flames to dance and char the skins nicely. I salt them too. I don’t think that does anything at all, but I do it.

There are sausages in that picture. They aren’t a part of the sauce, but they make a nice accompaniment. I recommend them.

Put the tomatoes over direct heat and cover.

Check them every 4-5 minutes and turn as needed.

There’s no proper amount of time to cook the tomatoes. You want charred skin and a malleable flesh. My seemingly unhelpful but accurate advice is to let them go until you’re worried that you may lose one to tongs and fire. They should be just about perfect then.

Put the charred tomatoes back in the mixing bowl.

Add the garlic and red pepper flakes. The garlic will be raw and there’s no stewing period for the flavor to spread evenly through the sauce, so you have decisions to make. If you want an even sauce, mince the garlic. You can stir it to moderate homogeneity. If you want big blasts of flavor, smash it and throw in practically whole cloves. That looks cool and rustic. I’m in the middle. I love garlic and want it as a force rather than a background but I don’t want to find it intermittently. Mine is roughly chopped. Do as you will.

Smash.

Tear up a handful of basil – maybe two handfuls (handsful?)- and stir. I let my mood decide which herbs I use in tomato sauces. Any combination of basil, flat leaf, and oregano will knock your socks off. This time I wanted to keep it simple, was craving basil, and a recent freeze did a number on my oregano and parsley plants.

Salt to taste and serve over spaghetti.

Romano is better than Parmesan is better than Grana Padana, is better than Asiago but Asiago is cheaper than Grana Padana is cheaper than Parmesan is cheaper than Romano. Any of them will do.

Here’s me trying to be artistic.

I’d like to think Farrah would understand. Hope you enjoy it.