The Entire Fast & Furious Franchise Started With A Story In A Magazine
Remember when the "Fast & Furious" franchise was just a street racing "Point Break" rip-off? (Right down to the fact that Johnny Utah's beer of choice in the film was even Corona!) You'd be forgiven if you had forgotten since the folks at Universal seem to have put those humble origins in their rearview mirror as well. These days, the "Fast" crew that started out boosting DVD players and trying to live their lives a quarter mile at a time have essentially become a combination of "G.I. Joe" and "The Avengers," as the most elite team of secret agents, hackers, and just all around badasses on the planet. Got a problem? You've got to call in Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel).
Given the fact that Dom and the gang have swung across chasms in cars, raced submarines in cars, parachuted out of planes in cars, and even launched themselves out of Abu Dhabi's Etihad Towers in — you guessed it — cars, it's pretty wild to think that the franchise was ever grounded in reality. And we do mean reality because the original film that spawned a multi-billion dollar box office behemoth was actually inspired by real-world events.
Amazingly, the "Fast" franchise can all be traced back to a 1998 article in Vibe called "Racer X," written by journalist Ken Li. And yes, believe it or not, that means that Dominic Toretto himself was (very, very loosely) inspired by a living, breathing human being named Rafael Estevez, who drove in illegal street races all over New York City. We don't know if Estevez was ever contractually obligated to win every fight too, but we sure like to think so.
That's where the similarities end ... mostly
As reassuring as it would be to live in a world in which a guy like Dominic Toretto and his team of experts — who somehow went from run-of-the-mill gearheads to a team of James Bonds with zero explanation — are out there keeping us safe from looming global threats, according to Ken Li, basically nothing carried over from his magazine article to the big screen. Not even in the original or Li's personal favorite, "Tokyo Drift." As he told Yahoo! in 2015:
"I think for 10 seconds they considered me to write the script, but it ended when they asked what I thought the story was, and I said, 'Did you read the story?' What they ended up doing was an 'American Graffiti' meets 'Point Break' meets 'West Side Story.'"
The weird part, though, is that the story "The Fast and the Furious" ended up with was in line with what Li had originally hoped his article would wind up portraying. Li got the idea to delve into the world of underground street racing when he witnessed a car being stolen. He added:
"I was trying to uncover some car theft ring, and edited that part out of the story. Oddly, they ended up taking my story, which had nothing to do with a theft ring, and then they ended up making a movie about that."
Unfortunately for Li, while he did make "six figures" from selling the rights to Universal, he's never really been able to further cash in on planting the seed that became a Hollywood juggernaut. But hey, at least he gets to take solace in the knowledge that, were it not for his article, we may have never gotten to see a Pontiac Fiero in space.