John Travolta wears a Rolex Day-Date

Don Aronow built fast boats in Miami: Formula by the end of 1962, Donzi in 1964, Magnum in 1966, and in 1969 the first Cigarette boat, which gave its name to a whole class of ocean racer. He won world championships in 1967 and 1969. Near the end of his life his USA Racing Team built the Blue Thunder, a 39-foot catamaran for the United States Customs Service, and George H.W. Bush, a Cigarette owner himself, helped test the boats before the government signed off. On February 3, 1987, Aronow was shot dead in his car at the end of 188th Street in North Miami Beach. He was 59. Bobby Young admitted to the shooting years later, and Ben Kramer, a powerboat racer already serving life for drug smuggling, pleaded no contest to manslaughter in a killing that grew out of a business dispute over Aronow's company.

Speed Kills retells the story with the names changed. John Travolta plays "Ben Aronoff," a champion racer running drugs on the side, in an adaptation of Arthur J. Harris's book about Aronow. The credited director is Jodi Scurfield, a name with no biography in the press notes or anywhere else, and reviewers suggested that co-writer John Luessenhop had kept his own name off the picture; the French watch press simply credited the film to Luessenhop. Matthew Modine plays George Bush, James Remar plays Meyer Lansky, and Katheryn Winnick plays Emily Gowen. The film reached theaters and VOD in November 2018 and holds a zero percent score on Rotten Tomatoes from seventeen reviews.

The watch is its own small mystery. Montres de Luxe identified a 40-millimeter yellow gold Rolex Day-Date on Aronoff's wrist, then looked closer at a trailer close-up and reported that "la fameuse couronne," the famous crown, is missing from the dial. Watch-ID, the only other site to examine the watch, saw the same absence. A gold Day-Date with no coronet is either a de-branded prop or a replica, and no production source has settled which, so the identification describes what the film presents rather than a confirmed Rolex. The Day-Date's own legend is worth getting right: Rolex gave the watch a bracelet it officially named the President, in tribute to the leaders who wore it, but the famous Eisenhower gold Rolex was actually a Datejust. The first president to wear a Day-Date in office was Lyndon Johnson, and by 1966 Rolex was running advertisements calling it "The Presidents' watch."