When Lance Armstrong surged to third place overall Monday in the Tour de France, plenty of news crews recorded his heroics. But six of the video cameras trained on the 37-year-old cyclist's surprise breakaway weren't working for any newspaper, magazine, TV station or website -- they were sent by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Hollywood loves beat-the-odds stories, and Sony hopes that Armstrong's return to racing after a 3 1/2 -year absence could prove as enthralling as any make-believe film. The studio, best known for its "Spider-Man" franchise and a stranger to nonfiction filmmaking, is currently financing a feature documentary chronicling Armstrong's attempt to win the world's most prestigious bike race.
"In all of my sporting experience, I've never seen anything like it," Frank Marshall, the untitled documentary's producer, said from near La Grande-Motte, France, where Armstrong had just escaped with several dozen other riders from the main field (and all of the tour's pre-race favorites) to move from 10th to third overall in the race's third stage. "We're very pleased."
If Armstrong's Astana team (which includes 2007's Tour winner Alberto Contador) takes today's team time trial by a comfortable margin, Armstrong, who won the tour a record seven times (consecutively), could be wearing the leader's yellow jersey. Though an Armstrong victory, still a long-shot outcome with 18 stages of racing to go, would give the documentary an astonishing ending, his daily performance in the tour's peloton was never the film's focus.
"What interested me was the story of his comeback -- his will," said the documentary's director, Alex Gibney, the filmmaker behind "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and the Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side." "I wanted to understand Lance and what makes him tick. And the more I know, the more compelling the story gets."
Sony and Armstrong have a long relationship. For years, the studio has been developing a movie based on the cyclist's 2000 memoir, "It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life," which chronicles Armstrong's recovery from metastasized testicular cancer to his first Tour de France victory in 1999. The feature film, which Marshall is also producing, is now in the hands of writer-director Gary Ross ("Seabiscuit," "Pleasantville"), but has no start date or cast attached.
