In 1974, Scott Von Doviak was seven years old when his “real-life superhero,” Evel Knievel, bungled a much-hyped stunt to jump a rocket-powered motorcycle across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon. After the Skycycle X-2’s launch, Knievel’s drogue parachute malfunctioned and prematurely released, causing too much drag. He anticlimactically landed at the canyon’s bottom, sustaining just minor injuries.
While doing research for his debut work of nonfiction 30 years later (2004’s Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema), Von Doviak came across a piece of gonzo reporting from Showgirls screenwriter Joe Eszterhas for Rolling Stone called “King of the Goons,” about Knievel’s Snake River debacle. Eszterhas’s outrageous rendition of the “horrific shitshow” of an event read like a redneck-ified Mad Max spin-off, something that never quite left the researcher’s mind.
