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| Through The Esses - Michael Keyser - A Man Fast With Words, Cameras, And Wheels |
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Eventually we hooked up with a distributor, not one of the big studios. He agreed to pay us $1,800,000, plus a percentage. The fly in the ointment was that I only received about $250,000 up front. It was really a tax scam they were playing. They made a feeble attempt to market the movie, showing it here and there around the U.S., at a lot of drive-in theatres, exhibiting it just enough to prevent suspicion by the IRS. Then they pulled the plug and wrote off the balance of the $1,800,000. The IRS soon closed that loophole.
In 1987 the rights to the film reverted to me, per the terms of the contract, and I've been selling it in various formats ever since, through my Autosports website and through various distributors. After more than 30 years I haven't gotten my investment back, but that's beside the point. I was able to make a film I hope is a credit to motorsports.
No matter how much of a financial advantage one might enjoy going into the sport of racing as a participant, history teaches us that virtually all fortunes will diminish in size with every waving of the next checkered flag. As the often times repeated saying goes: To make a small fortune in motorsports, start out with a large one'. This was the case for Keyser in 1977.
When BMW showed up in IMSA in 1977 with David Hobbs driving their 320i, I knew things had become too expensive for me to continue racing. I sold my two Monza's and drove for a few people in Ferraris and Corvettes off and on, and with John Paul Sr. in his Porsche 935 once. That was about it.
In 1979 I started a balloon business. I was one of the first people to deliver balloons instead of flowers in the U.S. I called my company Balloons Over America and obtained a trademark on the words Balloons Over, starting several franchises around the country. We used to do the White House Easter Egg Roll every year. We had to blow up 20,000 balloons before 10 A.M.! I finally got sick of that business and sold the company in 1981.
Then I wrote several books. One, Token Soldier , was the story of a friend of mine who was in Vietnam in a mortar squad. He was wounded twice, almost court marshaled, then involved in a theft ring. A second book is A Prancing Horse Ransom . It is a novel about a kidnapping in Italy. Neither has been published, but they may be one day.
I next got into the dog fence business; something like Invisible Fence I called it the Guardian Pet Containment System. That's a long story.
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