The Real Don Steele Went Hollywood in “Death Race 2000,” Co-Starring a Young Sylvester Stallone

This popular deejay found a new audience with his film roles, such as this outrageous b-movie, co-starring a future Hollywood legend.

by Rich Watson 

This post is part of the Favorite Stars in B-Movies Blogathon, a blog event. At the end I’ll tell you where to find more posts like this.

After a tour of duty up and down the radio stations of the Pacific Northwest and the Bay Area during the fifties and sixties, Don Steele found a home in Los Angeles, at KHJ. Their new “Boss Radio” format, the same one Tom Donahue forsook in San Francisco, turned Steele into a star on TV as well as radio.

In 1975, he appeared in the first of a handful of films, albeit a B-movie. He shared the screen with an up-and-coming actor who was one year away from superstardom.

The Real Don Steele and “Boss Radio”

There were no imitation Don Steeles running around the west coast. Donald Steele Revert called himself “The Real Don Steele” just because. 

The Boss Radio concept was a refinement of the Top 40 AM format. In the early sixties, deejay and programmer Bill Drake, with business partner Gene Chenault, set out to improve Top 40 radio. They looked at market research and ratings demographics to see how to get more listeners. 

They developed a simple formula: less deejay talk, fewer commercials, more music:

• Not only were the hits played more often, they were played in sets of three or four in a row.
• News updates came at unusual times of the hour as counter-programming. 
• Station IDs became jingles, short and distinctive. 
• As one hit song ended and faded out, another began and faded in. 
• There were lots of contests and promotions. 
• Deejays like Steele became stars, or “boss jocks.”

Drake tested Boss Radio at stations in San Francisco, Fresno, Stockton and San Diego. In 1965, he brought it to KHJ, the station most associated with Boss Radio.

They became number one in months.

Steele was the biggest of the Boss Jocks. He co-hosted the KHJ-TV show, Boss City. By 1970 he had his own TV show, The Real Don Steele Show. Though his popularity led to a tragic incident once, Steele personified Boss Radio on KHJ until 1973, when he left.

Other TV appearances and Death Race 2000

Hollywood was an outgrowth of Steele’s fame. He had small appearances on Bewitched and a short-lived series called Here Come the Brides.

Then B-movie producer Roger Corman recruited him for several of his movies. First Steele had off-screen parts in the early Peter Bogdanovich thriller Targets and the sexploitation flick The Student Teachers. 

In 1975, Steele appeared on-screen in a movie for the first time. 

Death Race 2000 was a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film based on a short story about a popular coast-to-coast car race. Contestants are encouraged to eliminate pedestrians as well as each other, making the race a fight for survival. Director Paul Bartel went on to some success as an indie filmmaker in the eighties.

David Carradine, fresh off of the TV show Kung Fu, starred. He played a black-clad driver named Frankenstein, the favorite to win the race. Forces outside the race conspire to stop him, but no one knows he has a secret agenda of his own.

Steele played a TV announcer who comments on the race action as it happens—a role not too different from himself. 

The movie is satirical and far over the top in its depiction of graphic violence. Steele plays into that mentality. Like many B-movies meant for the drive-in market, it’s not meant to be taken too seriously.

DR2K was a stepping stone to bigger things for one co-star: Sylvester Stallone.

Sylvester Stallone pre-Rocky

The story of how Stallone’s signature movie, Rocky, got made, is known. Less known are the circumstances that led to that stage.

He had small parts in seventies film (Woody Allen’s Bananas, The Lords of Flatbush, The Prisoner of Second Avenue) and TV (Kojak, Police Story—where he plays a character named Rocky), in addition to some theater work. 

His most notorious pre-fame role, however, is his first: a softcore porno called The Party at Kitty and Stud’s. He made it for two hundred dollars when he was broke, homeless, and sleeping in New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. Nearly all reviews claim it’s horrible. Post-Rocky, it was re-released with the new title Italian Stallion.

The rights to the Rocky franchise currently belong to parties other than Stallone. Recently, he said he doubted he’d get them back.

Stallone in Death Race 2000

In DR2K, Stallone’s character, Machine Gun Joe, is Carradine’s antagonist. There’s not much to his role. He’s a stylized gangster jealous of Frankenstein and wants to beat him in the race. He dresses like a thirties wise guy and his car has machine guns on the front. Stallone did write some of his own dialogue, though.

Corman cast Stallone after seeing him in Flatbush. Stallone’s car, like Carradine’s, was a custom-built Volkswagen. He did most of his own driving, except for when the crew shot on public streets, since the cars weren’t street legal.

In this making-of documentary, Corman admits he had  thought Stallone wouldn’t amount to more than villain roles.

Steele’s later work

Steele continued working with Corman and Bartel, in the films Grand Theft Auto, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Eating Raoul. He had a voice-only role in Gremlins and reunited with Carradine in Nowhere to Run.

As a deejay, he bounced around different LA stations after KHJ. In 1982, at KRTH, he had a radio show called “Live From the 60s.” 

He not only played sixties songs, he recreated the time period, playing news reports, presidential speeches, TV show clips and more as if they happened in the present. (His partner was M.G. Kelly, a.k.a. “Machine Gun,” like Stallone’s character in DR2K.)

Recently, the 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood used KHJ air checks, especially Steele’s, to recreate the feel of LA as it was in 1969, when Boss Radio was in, The Real Don Steele was king, and Tina Delgado was alive.

@byrichwatson

Post-script: This recent People article talks about a much bigger Boss Jock.

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More entries in the Favorite Stars in B-Movies Blogathon can be found at Films From Beyond the Time Barrier, from March 31-April 2.