Next week's premiere of "Cars," the latest release from Disney/Pixar studios, is expected to draw a record 30,000 people to Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C., where they'll take their seats in the Turn 2 grandstands and watch on four custom-built outdoor movie screens, each six stories high and 10 stories wide. And NASCAR executives are doing celebratory burn-outs in advance, confident that a surge of young stock-car racing fans will follow in the wake of the June 9 release.
NASCAR may be America's fastest growing sport, claiming a fan base of 75 million and a TV audience second only to the National Football League's, but NASCAR executives are aiming far higher. In 2000 they became the first major sport to open a Los Angeles corporate office, charged with becoming the most aggressive athletic player in cultivating the entertainment industry.
Six years later, that initiative has spawned a lucrative, if unlikely, partnership between Tinseltown and stock-car racing: Hollywood is tapping NASCAR to sell its latest movies, TV projects and music; NASCAR, meantime, is hitching onto Hollywood vehicles to extend the boundaries of its impassioned fan base, known as "NASCAR Nation."
With Hollywood's help, NASCAR officials are integrating NASCAR drivers and story lines into every form of entertainment imaginable: From cartoons for the pre-kindergarten set to soap operas; from reality TV to made-for-TV dramas; from MTV videos to live race-day concerts; and now, major studio releases.
"Cars," the story of a brash stock-car racer named Lightning McQueen who learns that life is about more than trophies, could be the highest-grossing Pixar movie yet, Hollywood insiders predict, topping "The Incredibles," "Finding Nemo" and "Toy Story."
NASCAR expects another big splash with the Aug. 4 release of "Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby," a farce featuring Will Ferrell as a top NASCAR driver. Female audiences are in the sport's marketing crosshairs, too, targeted by a series of NASCAR-branded Harlequin Romances that debuted in February.
As NASCAR seeks to extend its brand, no demographic is being overlooked. "From Main Street to Wall Street!" says Dick Glover, NASCAR's vice president of broadcasting and new media.
From Hollywood's perspective, the alliance is a no-brainer, says Howard Burns, editorial director of the Hollywood Reporter. "If you're tying in with NASCAR, you're tying in with a hard-core, dedicated audience," Burns said. "If you're looking to get the word out and market your movie, it's all there. For Hollywood to get involved makes perfect sense."
For TV viewers who don't care about cars going around in circles, it used to be easy to tune out NASCAR. Just change the channel.
But NASCAR personalities have been popping up across the dial lately. Driver Carl Edwards had a bit part as a Homeland Security officer on a recent episode of the Fox hit, "24." Rookie David Stremme turned up in the audience of "American Idol" in April. And Jamie McMurray had a cameo on "The West Wing," playing a NASCAR driver who riled the president's wife by kissing her in Victory Lane. All of this was orchestrated by NASCAR's Los Angeles-based Entertainment Group.
"We've always thought we could do a lot better than we've done [in media penetration] by tapping into the Hollywood entertainment machine, if you will," said NASCAR chairman Brian France. "But we had to have people that were on the ground and very skilled at that."
France started by hiring Glover, a former ESPN and Disney executive. He then met with the head of every major studio to introduce stock-car racing to the uninitiated and dispel stereotypes that it was a strictly down-scale, red-state phenomenon. France's pitch was direct: NASCAR had 75 million brand-loyal fans who were three times as likely to buy products associated with NASCAR than rival brands. He also stressed NASCAR's openness to corporate tie-ins -- whether splashing ads for movies on its cars' hoods; inviting movie stars to wave the green flag at its races; or getting involved with movie production by providing NASCAR footage, racetracks or consultants for racing sequences.
It stood in sharp contrast to the posture of Major League Baseball, which beat a frantic retreat when fans balked at plans to put logos for "Spider-Man 2" on the bases during inter-league play to promote Columbia Pictures' 2004 movie.
"You'd have thought Heaven and Earth was going to fall!" Glover said during a recent interview in the garage at Richmond International Raceway. "There was a big negative reaction, whereas in our sport, we're just the opposite. We have always embraced sponsorship!"
As Glover spoke, a 6-foot tall red M&M candy walked through the garage dressed as a pirate and brandishing a sword.
"That M&M is actually really important!" Glover said, chuckling at the irony. "That M&M is a pirate because the number 38 car [sponsored by M&M's] has a paint scheme that's promoting the new Disney movie, 'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest' That's part of what we do! If our cars went out without any sponsorship, our fans would be upset. They'd say, 'That's not right!' Whereas in baseball, you put something on the bases and, 'Oh my God !' It's a different tradition."
According to Mark Dyer, NASCAR's vice president of licensing, behavior studies of NASCAR fans indicate they devour eight hours of programming about the sport each week. In addition to watching races on TV, they're following stock-car racing online, through specialty publications, video games and other means.
"We are a sport brand, but we are also an entertainment and lifestyle brand," Dyer said. "The wonderful thing about this sport is, it seems like there is no end to the avenues we can create for fans to follow this sport."
Enter Harlequin Romance, whose NASCAR-licensed yarns cater to the sport's estimated 30 million female fans.
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Despite the constraint, Pamela Britton, whose previous titles include "Red Hot Santa" and "Honk if You Love Real Men," said she has been floored by the response to her first NASCAR-licensed effort, "In the Groove," which finds an ex-kindergarten teacher falling for a hotshot NASCAR driver in a tale that has been described as "a mix of lust and lugnuts."
"They say NASCAR fans are incredibly brand-loyal, and they flocked to this book," Britton said, sharing an e-mail from a reader in Cape Cod, Mass., as proof. "I have never read a HQ before this," wrote Andrea Vannier. "They are not my thing, but NASCAR is. This (in my eyes) is way bigger than Harry Potter!!!! Never stop!!!"
"Talladega Nights," meantime, targets NASCAR's and Hollywood's meal ticket: 18-to-35 year-old males. The movie was reportedly sold to Sony Pictures on nothing more than a six-word pitch: "Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver."
NASCAR officials got wind of the project when someone phoned their Los Angeles office and asked how to spell "Talladega," stock-car racing's famed, Alabama superspeedway. They jumped on the chance to get involved, offering racetracks, drivers and expertise. NASCAR had a representative on the set every day of shooting, and two of its executives ended up with production credits.
"It's very important to us, as it was to them, that the movie be authentic," Glover said. "It would be a comedy; it would be over the top. But the racing would be right; everything would look right."
NASCAR didn't collaborate on the jokes, which take shots at the quirks of stock-car racing. But France, who has seen a rough cut, insists the lampooning will be worth it.
"It is gut-wrenchingly funny," France said. "There's no question there's going to be razzing and a little fun with stereotypes that aren't even there anymore, but I'd say that's no different than the stereotypes about journalism in 'Anchorman,' " Ferrell's spoof of TV news.
Added Glover: "Their position was one of respect, not mean-spiritedness."
That includes, presumably, the scene featuring a stock car sponsored by "Julio's Thongs for Men"
Why not, asks racer Dale Earnhardt Jr.? "It's good that NASCAR can sort of pick on itself or at least allow somebody else to," Earnhardt Jr. said. "Anytime a driver gets on MTV, or a documentary or any show, it's great. You could go into California and race five or six years ago, and it wasn't cool. Now, if you go race and happen to go to a party in the middle of town in the middle of the week, all of Hollywood is wearing NASCAR hats and stuff."
Though Ferrell is a proven a box-office draw, it's hardly a given that "Talladega Nights" will be a boon for NASCAR.
Sylvester Stallone's Indy car movie "Driven" serves as a cautionary tale. Faced with a waning audience, Championship Auto Racing Teams did everything possible to accommodate Stallone's 2001 project with the hope that the maestro behind "Rocky" and "Rambo" would work magic for their sport, too. But "Driven" died at the box office and horrified racing officials with its outlandish on-track sequences, including one in which a tire flies off a car and hurtles toward toddlers playing in an infield sandbox.
Still, the NASCAR brass is abuzz over the promise of "Cars," including seven-time champion Richard Petty, who has a cameo as a 1970 Plymouth Superbird fittingly known as "The King."
"It's a neat deal," Petty said of the movie, which stars the voices of Paul Newman and Owen Wilson. "What you gotta figure is, for us to survive, every time we lose one of the old fans, we gotta gain two fans. That means two-to-one in order for us to keep growing -- not stay even. If we stay even, we're just spinning our wheels."