You’ve got to hand it to the Daily Star. While their Big-brother-Z-List-celebrity-hyped paper is not always the most newsworthy, it certainly throws up some of the more amusing stories.
Today, they claim that Bruce Willis is set to play commentating legend Murray Walker in a film about the life of Michael Schumacher – inventively titled “The Michael Schumacher Story”.
I don’t know what is more laughable – the thought of Bruce Willis donning spectacles and getting overexcited everytime a puff of smoke appears at the rear of a car (even if it is tyre smoke)… or the prospect of a film about the life of Michael Schumacher.
While Schumacher is without doubt one of the greatest drivers F1 has known, his career wasn’t always the most exciting – and given the fact that Schumacher is purported to be involved, it is unlikely that the more controversial aspects of his career will be highlighted.
Schumacher drove in a period in F1 where his superiority was rarely challenged. If you were to make a true life film about “modern” F1, you’d probably make it during the 1980′s, where you had Senna, Prost, Mansell, Rosberg (Sr), and Piquet (Sr) all fighting for wins, and some of the real characters such as Gerhard Berger.
None of this will come to fruition, except possibly as a made for TV film, and while Murray did comment for the whole of Schumacher’s career, he was not always the greatest supporter of the German.
The main reason Willis has been linked to the role, is simply that he is probably the most famous aging bald actor in Hollywood. Apparently “an insider” claims that in glasses, Willis looks very much like a young Murray Walker. This is forgetting the fact that Walker was not a young man during the Schumacher period.