John Zack is a 39-year-old film-aficionado from Bloomfield, NJ and Karima Spates is a 44-year-old Newark native, who has three sons and is a Rutgers graduate. They will be on one of the teams participating in The Great Grass Race, which debuts on a new online streaming channel, Menace Vision on July 9th. The race involves two-person teams - they don’t know each other ahead of time - who will race 3,000 miles across the continent - on lawnmowers. They will have no food, no money, and no gas. Instead, they must trade or persuade people they meet along the way to help them.
In a summer where a crippling pandemic has slowed down everything exponentially, this might just be the bonding experience everyone needs, says show creator/executive producer Denis Oliver, a native of Neuville-les-Dames in France, who will host a launch party with the contestants July 9 in Tarzana.
“I wanted a show that everyone could relate to while also forcing people, including strangers, to work together toward a common objective,” said Oliver . “This long lawnmower ride is a metaphor for our longing to bridge the tremendous distance we feel between each other right now.”
Oliver says he got the inspiration for the three-month race -- which starts at 9:00am on July 10 in Moorpark -- while watching “The Straight Story,” a David Lynch-directed drama about Alvin Straight, a World War II veteran who travels by lawnmower across Iowa and Wisconsin to visit his dying, estranged brother.
“Mr. Straight can’t qualify for a driver’s license, so he does the trip however he can — like the Argentine man who circumvented a coronavirus quarantine by sailing for 85 days to visit his dying father ,” said Oliver. “We have super-fast cars slumbering in the garage with dying batteries as we lament that we can’t visit our loved ones. But the human spirit can triumph over all things.”
And that’s a good thing, because the diverse contestants — who include a hairstylist/pre-law student from Newark, a martial artist from San Francisco and a mom of three boys from Oklahoma — will choose their own courses across the country while wheeling and dealing for food, shelter and even gas.
Although the show will be available on a growing number of platforms including Amazon Fire TV, the Apple App Store and Google Play, Oliver says he created his own site rather than partner with a Netflix or Amazon so he could generate enough revenue for charity and for other shows in development, which include Spice Wars, Under Pressure, Airborne and $$$ Chase — a treasure hunt that starts Aug. 7.
About the Jersey contestants:
Pennsylvania-native John Zack (not a stage name) moved from Allentown, Pennsylvania to Bloomfield, New Jersey when he was 12-years-old and has lived there ever since. Diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2015, John has now been clear without any relapses for about two years.
A film aficionado, John went to the movies over 400 times in 2018 and even sat through the Marvel All-Movie Marathon two years in a row (almost 60 hours straight). His passion for movies began when, after graduating from Bloomfield High School, John got a part-time job at Blockbuster Video where he was quickly promoted to General Manager, and decided to stay with them until they closed their doors. He now works as the General Manager at Modell’s Sporting Goods.
John was excited to be a contestant for The Great Grass Race because he wanted to “get completely out of my comfort zone.” As an employee of both a sporting goods store and a movie rental store, he feels extremely confident about winning. And, even though he has never actually mowed a lawn before, his knowledge of “outdoorsing” should give him enough of an advantage to make it far.
“I think my love of movies, more specifically horror movies, could end up both helping and somewhat hurting my strategies. In movies, you can think of almost any scenario imaginable, which is where it would help,” he said.
Life is an adventure and Karima Spate is not the kind of person who’s going to let an opportunity pass her by. When she heard about The Great Grass Race she knew it was something she wanted to do: She loves people and sticks to a goal until she gets it.
The news that she’d be racing a lawnmower across the country didn’t really surprise her three sons, Quran, 23, Kahlel, 19, and Khahir, 14. "My sons are laughing at me, ‘Now what are you getting into? You don’t want to be an astronaut anymore?’’’ she said.
Ever since she was a little girl, Karima’s been competitive and glamorous in equal measures. She went to hair school when Quran was born and enjoys doing hair and weaves. “And I’m always in makeup and eyelashes. Even if I’m home and I’m going to cook, I need to look pretty,” she said. But what about spending months on the road, during the summer? “I’ll still be able to put on makeup. It gives me extra energy!”
She initially aimed at becoming a psychologist, which combines her nature as a perceptive listener with her passion to help the community. The goal of becoming an attorney bloomed during a senior year criminology class at Rutgers. The instructor, a black judge, selected Karima to be the prosecutor in a mock trial “and I thought, that’s me, that’s my personality, always having that tongue, quickly seeing things in context, judging what’s right and wrong.”
Asking strangers for help with food, gas, and shelter could be challenging, she confessed, because “usually people are asking me for help. I’m not always good at asking.” Yet she’s confident people she meets throughout the race will open up to her. “It’s a heart thing... you show people what’s in your heart in the way you talk, the way you treat people. Not so much what you have on, or who’s your team — it’s the last impression that you leave with somebody that stands out more than anything.”