Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety (2003)

Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety, a documentary by Atlanta-based filmmaker Bret Wood, chronicles a dazzling lapse in official good judgment: the highway safety films (or “drivers’ ed scare films,” as they’re more familiarly known) of the late ’50s and ’60s. Once commonly shown in classrooms throughout the U.S., the films achieved a kind of mythical status among those who saw them (or whose older siblings could scare the daylights out of us just by describing them). Indeed, they defined the term “unflinching” for young audiences who had never before been exposed to such carnage, on-screen or in real life. As Richard Wayman, founder of the Highway Safety Foundation, which produced many of the films, said, “We showed you the injured, the dying, and the dead.”

And how. Mechanized Death (1961) can still force you to look away, 42 years, Peckinpah, and The Exorcist later. Much of the footage could be cut into the Faces of Death series unedited. (And the films, though shown mostly to captive audiences, indicate the possibility of a pre-video market for sensationalistic reality TV, although thankfully nothing so far available on the small screen can match them.)

Of course, not every one of these “educational” films includes images of nearly decapitated salesmen or mangled teens. Hell’s Highway succinctly and compellingly tells the story of how a genre of utilitarian filmmaking evolved from such winsome featurettes as 1936’s We Drivers (in which the animated homunculi Reckless Rudolph and Sensible Sam battle for control of a motorist’s consciousness) to the awe-inspiring bloodbath of 1969’s Highways of Agony. And within its larger subject, it finds a fascinating secondary one: the Highway Safety Foundation.

So it is that Hell’s Highway tells Wayman’s story, that of a civic-minded, insomniac insurance adjustor who began his career as the nation’s leading spokesperson for highway safety by taking black-and-white photographs of auto accidents in the late ’50s, and effectively ended it with a disastrous telethon hosted by Sammy Davis, Jr., in which Paul Anka, Howard Cossell, and President Richard Nixon appeared, in 1972. This telethon, produced by and benefitting the Foundation, lacked the advance pledges an experienced producer would have secured, ultimately costing far more than it brought in. Wayman retired from the business of producing films immediately afterward, dogged by complaints that he had let the Foundation expand too far, and by charges — of which he was cleared — of mismanagement of its funds. He died in 1983.

Along the way, director Wood weaves a relevant, far-flung web of narrative that encompasses everything from Jimmy Hoffa’s association with the Foundation, to a sensational double child murder, to hidden surveillance footage of homosexual activity in a public restroom, to apparently baseless charges of pornography brought against Wayman. It also introduces us to many of his associates, a likeable group who seem about as likely to reach for sensationalism as the Cleavers. And it presents a nagging dilemma. What Wayman did in Ohio, anyone with a camera might have done anywhere; you can accept his contributions as an act of altruism, but what drew him to the slaughter in the first place? It’s part of Hell’s Highway’s special fascination that this enigma remains.

Among those who appear before Wood’s camera is Rick Prelinger, an articulate educational film historian who provides valuable context. He reveals that the original sponsors of educational, and especially industrial, films were insurance companies, and that these films often sought to draw attention away from unsafe working conditions and dangerous cars by portraying the human recipient of grievous injuries (or another reckless worker or driver) as their cause. While reducing workplace accidents would be an obvious goal for an insurance company, what could be its motive for winking at unsafe working conditions? Hell’s Highway doesn’t say.

Martin Yant, a journalist and private detective whose exposés (it is unclear for what newspaper) led to the charges of funds mismanagement within the Foundation, is positioned here as something of a muckraker, on hand largely to present sensational asides. He brings up the issue of pornography, for instance, and even claims to have received a tip that the death of one of the Foundation’s female photographers was more sinister than the sudden kidney failure cited at the time. John P. Butler, a former Mansfield chief of police, provides believable, no-nonsense rebuttal, and indeed no evidence is provided in the film to support Yant’s claims. And Mike Vraney, of Something Weird Video, a distributor of all manner of exploitation films, provides some aesthetic insight into the Foundation’s films, observing what we are thinking all along: this is creepy stuff.

But the real highlights in Hell’s Highway are the films themselves, and Wood has presented a generous sampling of often flabbergasting clips: a giant crouches on a mountainside and physically pushes cars to faster speeds; a policeman explains the neologism “teenicide”; and (in one of the Foundation’s attempts to branch out into law enforcement training films) a shoplifter serenely stashes what must be a 15-pound shoe-buffer up her skirt.

Did these films do their jobs? Wood leaves us with testimony rather than drawing a conclusion himself. Anonymous young drivers assert that the films did not, in fact, influence their driving, while in Mansfield, Ohio, former Foundation associates Earle J. Deems and John R. Domer reflect rather touchingly that somewhere, out there on the freeways of America, there drives a person who wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for their work.

Wood’s humanist tendency emerges despite the enormous amount of carnage he presents on the screen; the images, after all, belong to the original filmmakers and not to him, and it’s their unseemliness that drew him to his subject in the first place. He’s respectful toward the now elderly Foundation associates he interviews, and he leaves the last word to Butler, the former chief of police, and Wayman’s primary apologist. Butler’s eyes tear as he explains that the night before the interview, he promised the long-departed Wayman, “It’s payback time. Richie, I’ll do a good job for you.”

Charges of funds mismanagement and questions regarding the motives of insurance companies fall by the wayside in Hell’s Highway, but one primary concern remains. Did the kind of film produced by the Highway Safety Foundation, Signal 30 or Wheels of Tragedy, somehow scar those who saw them at a young age? Wood seems reluctant to assign, or even to admit the necessity of, blame on this issue, although he takes the testimony of people such as Vraney, who admits the possibility. (An exception is an interview with two 40something baby-boomers who describe with horror a truly unsettling Foundation film, entitled The Child Molester and showing corpses, that they saw in school at something like age six.) In the end, the only crime Hell’s Highway sees committed by the Highway Safety Foundation and its ilk carries a light sentence: bad taste.