By Joanne Davidson, Special to The Denver Post
This is a story about Dr. Scott Falci, a world-famous neurosurgeon who loves fast cars and sees no limits as to what technology can bring.
It’s also a story about Sam Schmidt, who became a quadriplegic after crashing into a concrete wall at 200 miles per hour during a 2000 practice run at the Walt Disney World Speedway, breaking his neck and severely damaging his spinal cord.
Prior to his accident, Schmidt had raced at four Indianapolis 500s, earned the title of IndyCar Rookie of the Year, and won the Las Vegas 500.
And, it’s about “Reengineering Sam,” the movie that seven-time Emmy winner Brian Malone of Castle Rock made about the race car that Falci helped develop to enable Schmidt and other qualified quadriplegics to literally get back on track.
“What this movie does,” Malone said, “is illustrate what is possible in giving people like Sam back many of the freedoms they thought they had lost forever.”
After its Oct. 23 debut at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, “Reengineering SAM” had its regional premiere last week at the 39th Denver Film Festival. On Sunday, Malone will find out if it is the winner of the festival’s True Grit Award.
The 82-minute film gives viewers a look at the difficulties those living with paralysis face every day — Schmidt’s wife and nurse spend up to three hours just getting him out of bed, showered, shaved and dressed — while celebrating how some of the brightest minds in engineering technology, were urged on by Falci, the chief neurosurgeon at Englewood’s Craig Hospital, and dared to dream big.
Falci, who Malone laughingly describes as “a great hustler,” talked engineers at Arrow Electronics, Ball Aerospace and the U.S. Air Force into lending their expertise to develop the Semi-Autonomous Motorcar (SAM Car) that let Schmidt fulfill his dream of driving once again on the track that means so much to him: the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, on a race day.
In less than a year, they outfitted a 500-horsepower Corvette Stingray with groundbreaking fighter pilot technologies, including infrared cameras and sophisticated electronics that respond to Schmidt’s head movements in real time, enabling him to control the steering, acceleration and braking.
Schmidt first “drove” the car in a simulator at Ball Aerospace laboratories and within minutes had achieved simulated speeds that approached 220 miles per hour.
On the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, he made four historic laps in front of a race day crowd, starting out at 12 miles per hour and reaching a top speed of 152 miles per hour.
In September, Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison from Schmidt’s home state of Nevada presented him with the nation’s first restricted drivers license that will allow him to drive the SAM Car on public roads.
Falci, Malone said during an interview conducted in the Sie Film Center lobby immediately before his film’s screening, “Finessed the whole project brilliantly. He got two huge corporations to put their best engineers on the project. They all volunteered their time. I’m just the guy who showed up with the camera.”
Malone had met Falci at Craig Hospital, where Malone had produced videos for the hospital’s signature fundraiser, the PUSH Dinner, and for other in-house uses.
Falci had also asked Malone to document the development of the first SAM Car, which was inspired after one of Falci’s paraplegic patients, also a former race car driver, said he would give anything to be able to return to the track.
“Driven: From Wheelchair to Race Car” was Malone’s first film collaboration with Falci.
Falci celebrated the first car’s successful debut by asking the obvious: “If we can make it so a paraplegic individual can drive, why couldn’t we make it so a quadriplegic individual can drive?”
Thus began the journey to film “Reengineering Sam.”
Malone said his movie is at the start of “a long festival run,” which he hopes will lead to a general release. “We have support from (Academy Award winning director) Daniel Junge and Diana Holtzberg, who is our sales agent in New York City, so we have high hopes for it.”
In addition, the owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has invited him to show the film again at a special event taking place in the spring.
Malone’s path to the filmmaking industry was filled with twists and turns.
He attended Casper College in Wyoming on a music scholarship, but “I hated to practice and I had no discipline, so I dropped out. I had this crazy idea that I could weasel my music into movies, as background music,” which was OK for a while. Eventually he went back to school, receiving a degree in journalism from the University of Northern Colorado.
He worked as a television news producer for several Denver stations, where he developed an interest in editing raw footage. “That’s how I became interested in documentary journalism; by looking at raw footage, I could see how stories developed, and I loved telling real stories.”
Today he’s the owner of Malone Media Group and Fast Forward Films, working side by side with his wife, Cindy, an Emmy-winning producer. “She graciously handles all the thankless, un-fun parts, stuff like getting all the rights and clearances for the third-party footage and the insurance.”
“Forgiveness: The Steven McDonald Story,” his film that chronicles how New York Police detective Steven McDonald has rebuilt his life following a Central Park shooting that left him paralyzed, won two Emmys in 2013; this year he won a Heartland Emmy for Best Documentary (Topical) for “Education, Inc.,” which uncovers the national move by hedge fund managers to privatize America’s public education system.
His mother is vocalist Peggy Malone, a member of the Colorado Country Music Hall of Fame, and his sister, Beth, was nominated for a Tony for her role in Broadway’s “Fun Home,” an experience that she says “Is the craziest thing that ever happened to me.”
For all his accomplishments — Malone is also co-creator of the popular YouTube series “Energy 101” and has produced programs that have aired nationally on PBS and cable networks — remains humble and mindful of his roots.
We met through the Denver Film Festival when he asked:
“If you’d at all be interested in a sibling story about a couple of rednecks from Castle Rock breaking through, I’m sure Beth would be up for it.”
Joanne Davidson: 303-809-1314, partiwriter@hotmail.com and @joannedavidson on Twitter
