Roadracers

Roadracers
Directed by	Robert Rodriguez
Produced by	Robert Rodriguez Lou Arkoff David Giler Debra Hill Willie Kutner
Written by	Robert Rodriguez Tommy Nix
Starring	David Arquette Salma Hayek John Hawkes Jason Wiles William Sadler
Music by	Paul Boll Johnny Reno
Cinematography	Roberto Schaefer
Editing by	Robert Rodriguez
Distributed by	Showtime Network
Release date(s)	July 22, 1994 (U.S.)
Running time	95 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$1,000,000

Roadracers is a 1994 made-for-television film directed by Robert Rodriguez, his second feature film following the success of his 1992 debut, El Mariachi. The film originally aired on Showtime Network as part of their Rebel Highway series that took the titles of 1950s-era B-movies and applied them to original films starring up-and-coming actors of the 1990s (including the likes of Alicia Silverstone and Shannen Doherty) and directed by established directors such as William Friedkin, Joe Dante, and Ralph Bakshi. Rodriguez was the only young director to participate in the series.^[1] The series was produced by the son and daughter of Samuel Z. Arkoff, the co-founder and producer of American International Pictures (AIP), the distributor of the films this series takes its titles from.

Robert Rodriguez's take concerned a rebel named Dude (David Arquette) who dreams of leaving his dead end small town and becoming a rockabilly star but gets caught up in a nasty feud with the town's local sheriff (William Sadler) and his son (Jason Wiles). Salma Hayek plays the Dude's girlfriend.

Soundtrack Album

Although a soundtrack album is listed in the ending credits of the film as being available on A&M Records, the album was never released.

Trivia

• Salma Hayek made her United States film debut with Roadracers.
• The film was shot in 13 days.
• Rodriguez was used to shooting films very fast and ran into resistance with his Hollywood crew (most notably the director of photography). He discusses these conflicts in the now out-of-print book, Roadracers: the Making of a Degenerate Hot Rod Flick.

DVD

A Special Edition DVD release was scheduled for December 13, 2005 but for some unknown reason never happened. Rodriguez said in an online chat what the specs were for it: "It has a ten minute film school on it, commentary and a new digital color correction i worked on for a quite a long while... it looks really good, and i remixed the sound in 5.1 and beefed up the sound on it. One of my favorite movies. I shot it in 13 days, and the making of shows how to make a feature in 13 days..."

On the director's commentary for Planet Terror, Rodriguez mentions that the DVD will be released very soon.

It has been released on dvd in Australia and France.

References

External links

• Roadracers at the Internet Movie Database
• Roadracers at Allmovie