Film critic Barry Hertz's novel is out Nov. 25.Supplied
Praise Vin Diesel and pass the Coronas: The Fast & Furious megafranchise is celebrating its 25th anniversary next year. But, as The Globe and Mail film critic Barry Hertz explains in his new book, Welcome to the Family: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World (out Nov. 25 from Grand Central Publishing), the series only managed to hit the quarter-century mark by breaking all the rules. In an exclusive excerpt, Hertz details the scrappy origins of the Fast-verse, focusing on how a handful of Hollywood renegades forged a franchise from scratch.
While he would eventually become one of the most sought-after action filmmakers of his generation – collaborating with everyone from Brad Pitt to Jason Statham – in the early aughts, David Ayer was just another young screenwriter trying to make his mark in an industry infamous for brutal rejection. Good thing that he was used to taking a punch.
As a rebellious and fatherless teen growing up in Maryland and Minnesota, Ayer had been thrown out of his house by his mother and dropped out of high school. For a while, he wasted his days hanging out on the rough streets of South Central L.A., one of the few white kids in the largely Black and Hispanic neighbourhood. (His time in the area, where he routinely “got his ass kicked by the LAPD,” later inspired his screenplays for Training Day, Street Kings, and End of Watch.) Desperately seeking structure, Ayer joined the U.S. Navy. It was during his time serving as a submarine sonar technician aboard the USS Haddo that he got the idea for one of his first scripts – the sub thriller U-571 – which helped build his reputation around town as a writer who could develop muscular, character-first action. Soon Universal’s Scott Stuber was calling him for his thoughts on a script by Gary Scott Thompson called Racer X, which needed to be pumped up. And fast.
“When I first read the script, it was set in Brooklyn and there’s zero diversity in it. I told Stuber that if I was going to do it, I needed to set it in L.A., develop the diversity, and reflect the people who I knew and I grew up around,” recalls Ayer. “Car culture here was a real minor subculture at the time. I talked to guys at the very cutting edge of it, Vietnamese guys in the Valley who were importing engines, hacking fuel curves.”
While the Point Break angle and general structure were on the initial pages that Ayer received, the writer’s love and knowledge of L.A. started to open up the film’s world, giving a standard-issue cops-and-robbers story a genuine sense of place and vibrancy. Gradually, Ayer turned the heroic character of Brian O’Conner into more than an undercover cop; he became a fatherless thrill junkie mainlining speed to compensate for his own sense of familial abandonment. The charming thief Dominic Toretto, meanwhile, wasn’t just a street thug but a surrogate father figure who had turned to crime to provide a better life for his found family. According to Ayer, the script he delivered was a “totally different animal” from the one penned by Thompson. “It’s funny,” he says, “no one would have thought a movie like that, so multicultural, would get made. How could we cast this? Will anyone see this? But I just kept pushing.”
A still from Fast & Furious 6. Aware that the studio’s eyes were elsewhere, original The Fast and the Furious director Rob Cohen began diving deep into L.A. car culture for inspiration.Universal Pictures
Still, the film wasn’t exactly a high priority for Universal. The studio was more invested in the development of its summer 2001 tent poles, all of which were sequels: American Pie 2, Jurassic Park III, The Mummy Returns. By contrast, Cohen’s film was a mere $36-million “programmer” – not an event movie intended to hold up an entire season’s worth of box office but something that could be plunked down in the off-season and hopefully turn a quiet profit without embarrassing anyone. “When we were giving the green light, none of us thought that it could be a giant tent-pole or franchise in the making,” says Marc Shmuger, Universal’s president of marketing at the time. “It was more ‘Yeah, there’s something going on here if we can do it at the right price. It could be a compelling little programmer’ – ‘little’ being the operative word.”
Aware that the studio’s eyes weren’t trained too carefully on him, director Rob Cohen began diving deep into L.A. car culture for research and inspiration. Ayer took the director to under-the-radar “tuner” shows, where Asian and Hispanic teens showcased their tricked-out rides from dusk till dawn, hip-hop music blaring. The director also found a “spirit guide” to the city’s illegal street-racing culture in R. J. de Vera, who accompanied Cohen out on all-night adventures in the San Fernando Valley.
De Vera, who had immigrated from the Philippines at the age of seven with his family, had fallen in love with the import car scene in his early teens. Before he’d even had a licence, he’d been scraping together cash from under-the-table part-time jobs to purchase parts for a car that he didn’t yet own. “In SoCal, car culture was just a part of what Asian Americans were into at the time,” he says. “Everyone was known by either the dance crew you were in, the gang you were in, or the car crew you were in. Car shows for us were like house parties where these dance crews battle underground, and then a contingent of guys who would roll up to show off their rides.”
If the diversity of the scene felt both so natural and so naturally opposed to the white-bread image of West Coast car culture up until that point – all American hot rods and popped-collar rich kids – that’s because it was being developed by a generation of immigrants who could not afford to care about the past. “By modifying Japanese cars – Hondas, Toyotas, Acuras – we were doing exactly what the hot-rodders were doing in the sixties, we just didn’t know it,” says de Vera. “People would ask, ‘Why Hondas?’ Because it’s what we had. I’m sure many of us thought cool things about Mustangs and Camaros. But our parents couldn’t afford those. It was us working on our own to do this.”
For Cohen, the subculture clicked into place late one Saturday night. It was 2 a.m. in Burbank, and the director and de Vera were hanging out at the Bob’s Big Boy hamburger stand. Normally the preferred destination of wasted Valley brats looking to extend their evenings past last call, Bob’s parking lot transformed into a neon rain-bow of exotic danger in the span of a second. “All of a sudden, these high, whiny engines come ringing out in the distance, and I’m looking at cars that are yellow, orange, gold, green, and was like ‘What is this?’” Cohen says. “These kids are looking under each other’s hoods, making bets, snapping fingers. And then, on some signal that I didn’t see, they all jump in their cars and go to race.”
Brian (Paul Walker) investigates Dominic (Vin Diesel) in The Fast and the Furious. According to screenwriting David Ayer, the script he delivered was a 'totally different animal' from the one first presented to him.Universal Pictures via AP
Cohen hopped into his two-seater Mercedes – the farthest thing from the modified Integras, Supras, and Civics that swarmed Bob’s Big Boy – and drove out into the deepest, darkest reaches of the Valley in hot pursuit. The drivers lined up their rides, the girls took off their bras to use as makeshift flags, and the cars roared off, two by two. As Cohen was taking in the scene, the whoop-whoop blare of police sirens began to sound off in the distance. “And then you heard, ‘Po-po! Po-po!’ and like cockroaches when you turned the lights on, the cars were all gone,” Cohen says. “I went, ‘Holy shit, I just saw the first act of the movie.’”
Excerpted from WELCOME TO THE FAMILY: The Explosive Story Behind Fast & Furious, the Blockbusters that Supercharged the World. Copyright 2025 by Barry Hertz. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.