Spidey as Phil Hill? I can believe it

[Historybuff]

I found this on the net, supposedly from the Hollywood Reporter. Haven't heard about casting but I think since Phil Hill drove Cobra roadsters, Daytona coupes and GT40s for Shelby there will have to be some Shelby American scenes. And I think Tobey Maquire can play the almost-too-sensitive-to-be-a-racer Hill.

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Tobey Maguire to play Phil Hill in The Limit
by Noah Joseph (RSS feed) on Apr 2nd 2009 at 5:20PM



Gentlemen, Start Your Engines. The late, great Formula 1 racer Phil Hill is poised to come back to life in the near future on book shelves and the silver screen. First up is "Limit", a book by Michael Cannell that chronicles the relationship between Hill and his Scuderia Ferrari teammate Wolfgang von Trips over the course of the 1961 F1 season. That season saw (spoiler alert!) Hill crowned World Champion and von Trips killed in crash at the penultimate Italian Grand Prix. But for those of us who are too A.D.D. to crack the spine of a book, the movie rights are already being acquired for big screen production.

The project is being spear-headed by Maguire Entertainment, the production company headed by Tobey Maguire of Spiderman fame, who is slated to take the wheel as the legendary Phil Hill. Screenwriters and producers are already being lined up, but no word on who would co-star as the ill-fated von Trips. Given all that goes into a major Hollywood production these days, don't expect The Limit, as the film will be billed, to come to a theater near you quite so soon, but when it does, we hope it'll be closer to McQueen's Le Mans than to Stallone's Driven.

[Source: The Hollywood Reporter | Image: Noah Graham/Getty]
Filed under: Celebrities

Tags: 1961, book, f1, formula one, FormulaOne, hill, limit, maguire, michael cannell, MichaelCannell, movie, phil hill, PhilHill, the limit, TheLimit, Tobey Maguire, TobeyMaguire, toby maguire, TobyMaguire, trips, von trips, VonTrips

[Historybuff]

I guess pictures of Phil Hill must be plentiful, I think the guy writing the book (not me) has enough art on Hill (especially when I think the book discusses mainly one year, 1961. ) But the search for pictures , articles, interviews (in any language) of Count Wolfgang "Taffy" von trips. I saw a book on him at a swap meet just last Sunday but lost the lady's number . I will try to find her as she's the daughter of Clive Cussler the famous novelist and car collector (over 100 cars but no Cobras!) I guess I could always writethe Cussler Museum in Colorado.
That book had a black and white picture of Count von Trips and a swatch of orange on the hardback cover and was about 15" x 12". If anybody has this book I will put together some Cobra photos and memorabilia to trade for it, no matter how battered the cover is. Write photojournalistpro@hotmail.com

[Gunner]

Originally Posted by Historybuff

...Clive Cussler the famous novelist and car collector (over 100 cars but no Cobras!)

Really? I thought he owned a copy of every car his hero drives - in fact, for my taste he makes a little too much in each novel of whatever classic car he bought with the last novel's proceeds.

His hero drives a Cobra in Raise the Titanic. I was just looking for a copy of that the other day to re-read the passages - good, Gumball Rally stuff about driving such a beast in the fuel-starved, dismal mid-1970s.

But then, RTT has become something of an embarrassment, steamrollered by reality... and let's not even get into the Moller flying car of a later book...

[Historybuff]

It won't include his time with Cobras. The author wants to solely build up
the story to the year 1961 when Hill and his team-mate, a German count, were both on the Ferrari team but battling each other for the world title in F1. The screenwriter is the guy who just wrote a movie about soccer with Matt Damon. Not a car guy but you could say a sports movie guy.