You can thank/blame Vibe for all of this
The ‘Fast’ series all started with a magazine article
Furious 7 is poised to make US$115-million this weekend, shattering April box-office records. That’s an absurd amount of money, but what’s even more mind-blowing is that the Fast & Furious series has lasted nearly 14 years and is stronger than ever. And still, one of the more surprising facts is how the multi-billion dollar franchise started: a magazine story.
Yes, print journalism is responsible for some of the flashiest, most action-packed movies of our time. You can give credit to Vibe magazine freelancer Kenneth Li, now the editor-in-chief at tech site Re/code. In May 1998, while working as a reporter for the New York Daily News, Li was intrigued when he spotted the street-racing culture in Queens while visiting an auto shop. He had never seen anything like it.
“I was completely fascinated,” Li says. “It snowballed from there.”
He ended up writing a story about the scene for the Daily News, but pitched a longer feature about the “underground” aspects to Vibe. It was a compelling read focused on a racer named Rafael Estevez.
Estevez, a 30-year-old Dominican drag racer from Washington Heights, is considered an original figure among a growing legion of speed junkies terrorizing the back alleys, highways and legal racetracks around New York. The urban drag-racing frenzy was started in the early ’90s by a tightly knit crew of Asian-American teens in Southern California and is now hitting hard on the east coast. The hundreds of kids who line New York hot spots such as Francis Lewis Boulevard in Queens or the Fountain Avenue strip in Brooklyn every weekend are an urban polyglot of Puerto Rican, Dominican, Chinese, Filipino, Jamaican, Italian and other ethnicities who have one thing in common: They love hurtling metal, meat and rubber through the concrete jungle at dangerous velocities.
For the first time, Vibe dug the story out of the print archives this week and posted it online. Back when it was first published, Universal Studios saw the potential and optioned it for a movie. About three years later, The Fast and the Furious hit theatres, made $207-million worldwide and started an empire.
Next week, Vibe will publish a new piece involving Li. Generally around the launch of the previous movies, Li says, he hears from friends who still poke fun at him for not getting any residuals for the franchise. Even though the movies have grossed approximately $2.3-billion dollars worldwide, he hasn’t received compensation since his onetime payment when Universal optioned the movie.
Li, involved in only the first film, says the amount was in the low six-figures, but “it wasn’t life changing.”
“For the longest time, my friends blamed me for more cars in the street,” he jokes. “I didn’t invent cars, by the way.”