The Legacy of Motorcycle Filmmaker Peter Starr
Words & portraits by Nic Coury | Archive Images courtesy Peter Starr
Not much has changed in the way Peter Starr perceives the world of motorcycles. As a filmmaker, he has been documenting bikes and their riders for over 50 years, including in his most notable feature film, Take it to the Limit, released in 1980. To this day, he has not lost that passion for two-wheeled storytelling.
When talking about motorcycles—even now, at 77—a childlike purity emerges. His pale blue eyes light up, and he cracks an infectious, crooked smile, like he’s sharing an inside joke. There is an old-school reverence to his demeanor, especially when he talks about riding bikes. It’s especially noticeable when he describes the first time he saw a racing motorcycle at age 14 in Coventry, England, near where Triumph motorcycles had its factory.
In the same way a schoolboy might check out a cute girl in class, Starr ogled a BSA Goldstar 350 that was raced during the summers by his art teacher, Bob Gallon. Gallon would ride to school on an early 1950s Norton with a sidecar platform, on which he would carry the BSA.
“It turned my head completely when I first saw that bike, and there was an automatic symbiosis,” Starr says. “From then on, I was a motorcycle fanatic. I would dream about them all day and doodle them on my schoolbooks.” Something about that bike sparked something within Starr, and since those early days he has lived a life others can only dream of: traveling the globe aboard two speeding wheels, stunt-riding for major Hollywood films, endless endurance races, riding almost every bike imaginable, and creating his own feature films.
For Starr, motorcycles made a lot of sense in his formative years as a young boy trying to compete with others. “It was just pure excitement,” he says. “It was really an extension of masculinity for me, because I wasn’t the biggest or fastest, but suddenly I found something I could do.”
In 1961, at age 17, Starr began working at Triumph, using the money he earned to buy his first motorcycle—against his parents’ wishes. He started riding and eventually caught the racing bug. Prior to that period, Starr would pedal his bicycle 18 miles to the Mallory Park racetrack to watch his favorite riders compete. “That’s where I found my real heroes, like Mike Hailwood and Bob McIntyre, who won the Isle of Man TT three times,” he explains.
Years later, when Starr began racing with no outside support, one of his heroes took notice. “Bob McIntyre came over and asked if he could help with my bike, and he adjusted the tire pressure,” says Starr. “He then came back over after the race and asked how I felt.” McIntyre died in 1962 from injuries in a racing crash in England, but Starr took his late hero’s genuine personality to heart, and it still influences how he interacts with people in the motorcycle industry today. Only twelve years after buying his first motorcycle, Starr began producing films. His lack of experience didn’t stop his ambitions to become a successful filmmaker. His first project was called Bad Rock, and it documented the two-day, 450-mile dirt-racing qualifier in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. At the time, dirt bike riders were the wild, long-haired cowboys of the sports world, receiving very little attention, and Starr saw an opportunity to create a glimpse into that world.
“I had never made a film before, but I just felt like I could do it,” he says. Hodaka put up half of the $12,000 needed to create the film, but Starr had to find the rest on his own. He called Fred Smith, who was running Pennzoil at the time, and Smith gave him $7,000. Starr convinced Hodaka to match that, and subsequently produced the film for $14,000. Datsun became the official sponsor and helped with distribution, and on a Sunday night—June 2, 1974—Bad Rock debuted on KTTV in Los Angeles. The TV station’s sales manager was an avid dirt biker and loved the idea, and the film doubled the station’s ratings overnight. Starr’s vision of sharing his passion for two-wheels had become a literal overnight success.
“There was a story to be told,” he said. “Whether I could tell it or not was immaterial. I hired people I knew could do the technical part of the job, and I told the story.”
As he moved forward in filmmaking, Starr wanted to better understand the process, so like everything else he had done without prior knowledge, he took it upon himself to figure it all out. “Over the first five or six films I made, I tried to do something technical on each film, so eventually I had done everything,” Starr says. “I wanted to understand all the people I’ve hired and the process to create a movie—I’ve been a cameraman, a soundman, an editor and much more—so eventually I knew pretty much exactly what I wanted to do.”
A mere five years after making Bad Rock, Starr directed and co-wrote his first feature-length film—and the most famous film of his career, Take it to the Limit. The film debuted in 1979, and brought all facets of motorcycles to the main stage. It featured the heavyweight road racers of the 1970s, like Mike Hailwood, Kenny Roberts and Barry Sheene, but also brought nearly every other style of moto racing to the big screen. Starr admits the film’s overwhelming success was a total surprise.
“I never thought Take it to the Limit would be accepted by the general audience, like Easy Rider, which was made for everybody,” he says. “The whole concept was to show what it was like riding a race bike and competing with all of those legends who were at the zenith of their careers at that time.” The film featured now-classic music from the era, including songs from Foreigner, Tangerine Dream and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
The process of creating that film helped Starr develop a signature style that continued in 1980, when he mounted a camera to a motorcycle during an actual race. This was decades before smaller video cameras and GoPros. The bikes had to carry a large 16mm or 35mm camera, so Starr had to build chassis modifications to support this heavy equipment. The first of these experiments was at the 1980 AMA National Superbike race at the world-famous twisty Laguna Seca circuit in Monterey, California. “We actually built a sub chassis for a Suzuki racebike. This led to a complete race ready camera-bike built at Honda’s Special projects shop in 1981 with the support and expertise of Dix Erickson. Honda and Erickson became an integral part of making those films in the early ‘80s. We married their race bike engineering with my camera expertise to allow filming at race speeds without upsetting the equilibrium of the rider or bike” says Starr.
As Starr continued to film racing, it opened doors into Hollywood, where he spent almost a decade doing stunt camera riding for movies. In 1992, he used a Honda Gold Wing 1200 to film chase scenes for Lethal Weapon 3 and other films, including Apollo 13 and Batman and Robin. “People saw what we were doing with my films, and it got me hired for commercial work with brands like Pepsi,” he says.
Starr now lives in Southern California and still rides when he can. With the exception of a few crashes and injuries when he was a younger racer, the inherent danger of motorcycles has only started to enter Starr’s mind in the last year, in his late seventies. “I’ve had some second thoughts in the last six months, and my future will just be riding outside of cities like Los Angeles,” he says. “I’m 77, for Christ’s sake! If I had one bad accident, that might be it. I still enjoy riding and there’s a lot of riding to do—just not commuting in L.A. traffic.”
Starr still looks at motorcycles the same way he did at 14. “Riding bikes is full of clichés. You want to feel the wind through your hair,” he says. “It is the essence of freedom—you get to experience so much more on a motorcycle. You find that people will treat you differently when you’re on a motorcycle; they’re much more friendly and accommodating.” That freedom and sense of community is what keeps Starr moving forward all these years later.
Aside from his mortality, Starr hasn’t really contemplated what he’s leaving to future generations. “I didn’t think about legacy until I was inducted into the AMA Hall of Fame,” he says. “I never thought I’d make it there. It was a total surprise to me, because I didn’t think anyone was paying attention to what I had done.” Aside from his technical accomplishments, though—from being the first to put a camera on a motorcycle during an actual race to being the first to broadcast live from a racing bike—Starr wants to be known for one thing: integrity.
“I’ve always tried to be honorable, and that doesn’t just mean with people, but with the quality of my work,” he says. “I wouldn’t film certain things because I didn’t think it would do any good for the motorcycle community. I just wanted to make films that showcased some of the greatest people in the sport. I lost a lot of work because I wouldn’t do certain stunt work that I didn’t believe in. For me, that includes anything that would put motorcycling in a bad light.”
Despite numerous crashes and health concerns, including surviving cancer, Peter Starr looks back on a life lived fully with fervor. “I’ve never gotten rich from it,” he says. “But I’m very proud of everything I’ve ever done. And I’m so happy I can say that.”
