Even if you’ve never heard of her, you immediately recognize the type; brassy, sassy, the girl that hangs out with the guys and can put them to shame when it comes to prodigious swearing and large cojones.
Jessi Combs was that woman – she proudly admitted it. Her calling card since childhood was doing what the guys can do, only better. She parlayed a love of cars into master mechanic territory and then became a show host for 15 years on various car-oriented programs and segments.
A crew of aviation enthusiasts bought an old fighter jet (it took them a year to find one) and transformed it into a 4 wheel “car”, with the goal of setting new land speed records. They knew from the jump that they wanted a woman as their driver.
Well, one thing led to another and Jessi Combs became the person behind the wheel, smoking across Oregon’s Alvord Desert with an 8 mile trail of dust behind her.
In The Fastest Woman on Earth, filmmakers Chris Otwell and Graham Suorsa spent 7 years and who knows how many figurative miles of film to capture ups and downs of Combs and the money guys and grease monkeys – the folks who are the unsung heroes in most stories, but they get their due here.
The cameras are everywhere – in the cockpit, in the air, on the ground, you see it all. But the cameras are also inside the homes of family members, former colleagues and, in one unexpected and cool side trip – the South Dakota home of Kitty O’Neill, who was the fastest woman on earth from 1975 until, well, just a few years ago. O’Neill’s story begs its own feature length doc- a sexy young woman, profoundly deaf, who was a premiere Hollywood stuntwoman in the mid-1970s.
As Combs meets her, O’Neill is a reclusive alcoholic in the middle of nowhere, South Dakota. Again, it’s just a part of the overall film, but I found it poignant and something I wanted to learn more about.
Meanwhile, Jessi is pushing 40, no healthy relationships, a body that had been badly broken in her youth starting to rear its ugly head. The film asks “at what cost” is she willing to pay to reach the almost-within-reach speed record that had been held by O’Neill all these years.
I felt a pit in my stomach, a sense of foreboding, and it took all my restraint not to pause the film and look up Jessi Combs on Wikipedia, to find out her fate. I resisted and I recommend that anyone who doesn’t already know the history just watch the film in real time and allow the story to reveal itself in full.
The film debuts THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20 on HBO Max
