LI filmmaker's documentary 'The Last Race' captures Riverhead Raceway's gritty beauty

With its quarter-mile racetrack and kitschy American Indian statue, the nearly 70-year-old Riverhead Raceway may not be the prettiest locale on the East End. But for Long Island photographer and filmmaker Michael Dweck, whose documentary, “The Last Race,” arrives in theaters Friday, the track has become his artistic muse.

“All my work, photographically or on film, has to do with communities on the edge of extinction, and I do my best to prevent that or slow it down a little,” says Dweck. “With ‘The Last Race,’ I’m showing the beauty of this particular place.”

A Brooklyn native born in Bellmore, Dweck, 61, is best known as a visual artist; his 2002 book of photographs, “The End: Montauk, N.Y.,” showcased Long Island’s surfing culture. For his directorial debut, “The Last Race,” he turned to motion-picture film for an impressionistic portrait of Long Island’s last remaining racetrack. After its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Dweck’s movie earned positive reviews for its bumper-mounted camerawork, visceral use of sound and counterintuitive symphonic score. Magnolia Pictures, the distributor behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, “RBG,” and other art-house hits, picked up the film soon after. The film played at sneak-peek screenings at 90 Regal theaters around the country on Wednesday, two days before its official release.

Even with all the attention on “The Last Race,” Dweck’s movie may become a precursor to another, larger ode to the Riverhead Raceway. Dweck has been working on a series of fine-art pieces inspired by the track. For some, Dweck cut individual pieces out of several cars — brake pedals, transmissions, carburetors and such — then sandblasted them down to raw metal and photographed them “as you would sacred objects 100 years from now,” he says. He also took pictures of decades-old scratches in car-bodies and turned them into large canvases. These and other works, intended to be shown at international galleries accompanied by a 1,200-page catalog, will be “my biggest body of work to date,” says Dweck.

Dweck, who as a child frequented Long Island’s then-numerous raceways, initially envisioned “The Last Race” as a series of still photographs but soon realized that film would better capture the sights and sounds. Though he was a first-time filmmaker, Dweck set about welding his cameras onto cars at different angles and putting microphones just about any place he could, from the drivers’ helmets to the cars’ tailpipes.

“He just showed up to the track one day and came into my pit,” says Tim Mulqueen, 59, a longtime Riverhead Raceway driver featured in the film. “I actually threw him out because the race was starting. I said, ‘I’m here to race, not make movies.’ ”

Mulqueen, whose day job is running an auto repair and towing shop in Levittown, says he and others eventually took a liking to Dweck and even began helping him weld his cameras to cars. “We loved the publicity,” says Mulqueen, who worries that there’s scant awareness of the track’s existence on Long Island. “People just don’t know we’re here. Maybe this movie will change that.”

In addition to capturing drivers like Mulqueen, “The Last Race” also captures the track’s former longtime owners, Barbara and Jim Cromarty, in their last year there. The Cromartys, who began running the venue in the late 1970s, watched as malls and big-box stores popped up around them and drove up land prices, yet refused to sell to developers. It was in 2015, when Dweck shot the last of his 340 hours of footage, that the Cromartys finally sold the track for $4 million to another pair of spouses, Eddie and Connie Partridge of Wading River, who own a NASCAR team.

“The Last Race” tells a “sort of a love story,” says Barbara Cromarty, 84, a Hicksville native who is now retired and living in Miami Beach, Florida, with her husband. “It’s the racers and their love of racing and what they will do in order to keep going,” she says. “And it was our love of racing, also, that kept the track going. We made sure of that.”