One of the sharpest visual gags in Ben Stiller’s showbiz satire Tropic Thunder only lasts for a couple seconds. Near the end of the film, Stiller’s doofus action hero Tugg Speedman receives his happy ending by winning the Academy Award for Best Actor. But for a split-second, a screen also displays images of Speedman’s fictitious fellow nominees, such as Tobey Maguire as a gay priest, Sean Penn as a blind man, and Tom Hanks in a wheelchair on a runner’s track. It’s a clever lampooning of the sorts of roles that actors take and pictures that studios seek out in order to pad their résumés come awards season.
And so today, it’s with a complete lack of cynicism that we report that Dreamworks has acquired the rights to Phenomenon, a biography of trailblazing track star Betty Robinson, written by Roseanne Montillo. At the ripe old age of 16, Robinson set a new world record for the 100-meter dash, though her achievement went undocumented. But at the 1928 summer Olympics in Amsterdam, Robinson made history by becoming the first woman to medal in the track and field competitions. In the first year offering athletic categories for women competitors, Robinson took home the gold for 100m and another silver medal for the 4x100 relay race. That, however, is not the crazy part.
In 1931, in the prime of her life and at the top of her game, Robinson was involved in a tragic plane crash. When a passersby saw her among the wreckage-strewn aftermath, he gathered up what he thought was the corpse of Betty Robinson, stashed it in his trunk, and burned rubber on the way to the undertaker’s. Except Robinson was not yet dead, only slipped into a deep coma, a condition that the undertaker noticed instantly upon inspecting the body. After more time in the coma, further time spent in a wheelchair, and a couple of years in physical therapy, Robinson regained the ability to walk in time for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Nobody favored Robinson to win, and yet a slight slip-up from the German team during the relay race afforded her yet another Olympic title. Against all odds, Robinson triumphed over adversity. Cue the gold statuettes!
No, wait, we promised the Dissolve NewsForce 5’s in-house therapist that we’d all try to dial back the cynicism a little. And the fact of the matter is that, studio angling for awards or no, Robinson’s is a tremendously inspiring story that little girls and boys alike the world over ought to know about. It deserves to be told. History has a way of scrubbing out accomplishments from women in male-dominated fields, and so when extraordinary women like Betty Robinson come along, immortalizing her greatness goes beyond good business sense for studio executives. It becomes civic duty.