Dick Wallen, legendary auto racing filmmaker and author, passes away at age 90
Dick Wallen, the legendary auto racing filmmaker and author who documented the golden age of the sport, passed away on August 22, 2024. He was 90 years old.
The Los Angeles, California native witnessed his first motorsports event, a midget race at San Bernardino’s Orange Show Stadium in 1947. By 1958, Wallen, then in his early 20s and working in a grocery store, had purchased a new 16mm camera for the sum of $300.
According to Dave Argabright’s profile of Wallen in the May 1989 edition of Open Wheel Magazine, after filming the 1958 Riverside Grand Prix, Wallen earned $50 for his work. So impressed was Fred Bailey of Race Film Productions, Wallen was hired to work on his crew for the 1959 Indianapolis 500. Soon after, Wallen made the long eastbound trek to take up full-time residence in Indianapolis, Indiana to pursue filmmaking full-time.
In addition to filming a voluminous number of USAC, CRA, NASCAR, SCCA, IMCA, etc. racing events from coast-to-coast, Wallen earned his living by selling his films to movie studios. After selling his footage of a racing crash to Universal Studios in 1961, Wallen’s footage was utilized in over 500 movies and television shows.
Furthermore, Wallen produced a plethora of commercial films for use by manufacturers in the auto racing industry such as Champion Spark Plugs, Wynn’s Oil, Firestone, Ford and General Motors. Wallen also produced commercially available short racing films such as 1973’s Hard Driving Man and 1980’s Close to the Edge.
By the decade of the early 1980s, Wallen was phasing himself out of the racing film business. However, his treasure trove of racing films that he and his crew shot from the 1950s and the 1980s created a second life for his archives. During this time, as the VCR was quickly becoming a household staple, Wallen converted footage from his 8mm and 16mm films to video, thus creating the Dick Wallen Racing Classics series, which made his massive library of racing footage available to the public at large for the first time ever and was arranged in several different volumes for people to learn and reminisce about the sport.
In time, Wallen also published several books on racing history. Among them were Board Track: Guts, Gold & Glory as well as Fabulous Fifties: American Championship Racing and the 50 Years of USAC book released on USAC’s golden anniversary in 2005. Wallen was inducted into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 1997.
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