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Testing 'Limits'

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Meanwhile, at home, Towne's divorce from his wife of three and a half years, Julie Payne, had precipitated a nasty custody battle over their daughter, Katharine, now 20 (Towne won). Towne was also plagued with chronic allergies — later diagnosed as ''allergic tension fatigue syndrome'' — and often found himself unable to work on anything more than script polishes. (The fatigue syndrome symptoms gradually alleviated over time.)

By 1994, Towne was in need of a hero, and he got one when Tom Cruise, whose 1990 race-car drama Days of Thunder Towne penned, expressed interest in playing Prefontaine. ''I was looking for things to have Bob direct me in, and I thought this was a great story for him,'' says Cruise. However, when Cruise read the script — cowritten by Towne and sports journalist Kenny Moore of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED magazine — he realized he was too old to play a part that ranged from age 16 to 24. ''We had heartbreak about that,'' Towne recalls, ''but Tom said, 'I'll make sure it gets made.''' Ironically, Cruise took the project to Warner Bros., where he has a production deal.

While Cruise was negotiating with Warner, television producer John Lutz, who had bought the rights from the Prefontaine family and had discussed working with Towne, set up his own project at Disney. ''I was very disappointed, but we had Towne,'' Cruise says. ''And the job of a producer is to support the director.'' Which put Warner Bros. in an unenviable position: Saying no to a commercial risk, now made all the riskier, would also mean saying no to Tom Cruise. Remembers Towne: ''All I know is that Tom went into [Warner cochairman] Terry Semel's office, and when he came out, I had a $25 million budget.''

For the role of Steve Prefontaine, who was the U.S. champ at all outdoor events above 2,000 yards, Towne talked to Ethan Hawke and Leonardo DiCaprio. ''The problem with Leo is, he's tall and lanky like a classic distance runner, but Steve wasn't,'' says Towne. He ultimately settled on the relatively unknown Billy Crudup (who, as it happened, was competing with DiCaprio at the time for the lead in Titanic). Crudup, who knew nothing about Towne's reputation before filming began, says, ''What struck me was how profoundly he understands the metaphorical power of sports, how they're finite events with winners and losers and stand for all the daily struggles we go through with life. You feel the endeavor is not just imperative, but poetic.''

Warner Bros. agreed to Crudup, but the studio requested a star in the role of Prefontaine's coach. Towne tried to lure Tommy Lee Jones and Harrison Ford, ''but they were too much money or unavailable,'' says the director. He grudgingly cast Donald Sutherland, which he now sees as the right decision: ''Sometimes, you make a choice, and then you get lucky,'' Towne says.

Despite his admittedly obsessive last-minute rewriting, Towne's luck held up through the technically demanding shoot, in which real-life runners raced against Crudup for days on end in 103-degree heat. The director himself didn't feel the heat until postproduction. Only weeks before Warner Bros. was scheduled to see the film, a new editor was brought in to construct a new cut of the film. Shortly thereafter, Towne realized that he had grossly under-calculated the cost of the movie's score: ''I hadn't done a movie in years, so I didn't know that [music] is a million now, not $300,000.'' Because Towne's own history could easily be titled Without Limits as well, the director had guaranteed his own paycheck when he signed off on the $25 million budget — and he eventually handed over his salary to pay for the soundtrack. ''It was the only way to get the movie made,'' he says. ''I'm a fool for love.''

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