The horse that won a rare Triple Crown in 1973 is the backdrop of a motion picture that Disney releases nationwide later in the week.
Just as “The Blind Side” is a story more about the personal values of a strong-willed woman than football, “Secretariat” is more a character study of the lady behind the record-breaking horse. Diane Lane (“Unfaithful”) stars as Penny Tweedy, a housewife and mother of four who broke some barriers of her own crashing through the male-dominated racehorse ownership world to take Secretariat great success.
Dylan Walsh (“Nip/Tuck”) plays Lane’s husband, an attorney used to calling the shots in the family. Other cast members include John Malkovich as the trainer and Scott Glenn as a dyed-in-the-wool Southern aristocrat breeder who instilled a competitive spirit in his daughter Penny.
Gordon Gray and Mark Ciardi, the producers of “The Rookie” and “Miracle”, oversaw this project from a script by Mike Rich (“Radio”) and directed by Randall Wallace (“We Were Soldiers”, “Braveheart”).
The first Triple Crown winner in 25 years and widely considered the greatest racehorse of all time, Secretariat didn’t make it easy on himself. He lost the Wood Memorial, the last big race before the Kentucky Derby, causing supporters and detractors to doubt his prospects. He eventually won both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness but only after running dead last for most of those contests. Finally, at Belmont, he literally hit his stride, pulling away with a fury unseen since, winning by an amazing 31 lengths.
Capturing the authenticity of the competitive action in any movie with a sports backdrop is crucial to the verisimilitude of the picture. Even though the story is about the journey of Secretariat’s female owner, the filmmakers knew it would not work without believable action on the track. They had their work cut out for them to get the racing scenes right both with the horses and the fans.
There were between three and five Secretariats throughout the movie, and at one point, 36 horses were utilized at once to recreate a race. Even more impressive, many of these horses had never been in a movie before “Secretariat.” Some were discovered through an online casting call.
“Owners e-mailed their photographs and I reviewed them. I was looking for three main qualities in the horses used to portray Secretariat: looks, temperament and soundness. says Rusty Hendrickson, a veteran horse wrangler whose credits also include “Seabiscuit” and “Dances With Wolves”.
A calm attitude was particularly key, since multiple takes would clearly be involved. Racing experience was not a necessity, and they didn’t have to be thoroughbreds — Secretariat’s short back and round hip were reminiscent of American quarter horses. Trolley Boy came to the movie by way of a Secretariat Look-Alike contest, held at the Secretariat Festival in Paris, Kentucky.”
Once the horses were assembled, Hendrickson had about a month to get to know them and to figure out their various strengths as athletes and actors. In addition to Secretariat, Hendrickson had to find suitable Shams, the great horse who ran second to Secretariat in the Triple Crown contest. And he had to have multiple horses who could serve the various Secretariat needs throughout the shooting day.
“We basically had two principal-camera horses,” says Hendrickson. “One portrayed Secretariat as a 2-year-old, and one that was a little bigger portrayed him as an older horse. We didn’t race them a lot; we kept them quiet, using them on the tracks individually so they wouldn’t get competitive and fractious. We had to have about four doubles for all the racing footage since they couldn’t all run all day. Every day we’d sort of handicap the horses to figure out who was the slowest Secretariat that day or the stronger Sham. If the sequence needed Sham to be in front of Secretariat, then we would match horses accordingly. And we of course had days where we needed stronger Secretariats and weaker Shams.”
The real Secretariat had a bright-red coat, three distinctive white socks and a white stripe and star on his face. His doppelgangers shared his chestnut coloring, but to replicate the rest, Lisa Brown, an experienced wrangler, painstakingly painted his markings on all the horses early in the morning, before cameras rolled. Her easy-going manner allayed any trepidation the horses might have had about their makeup ritual.
The production company spent a week at Churchill Downs recreating pieces of Secretariat’s run for the roses, following a week at Keeneland racetrack, where, among other things, the cast and crew reenacted Secretariat’s amazing Belmont win.
For director Randall Wallace, filming at the storied racetrack Keeneland and the legendary Churchill Downs was key. “It was impossible for me to think of shooting this film without being in Kentucky,” he says. “We certainly availed ourselves of everything Keeneland had to offer, including its amazing collection of documents and records on horse racing and Secretariat. But to go to Churchill Downs — I’d been there once and it was a magical experience, and I knew we had to have it for this film.”
Of course, Churchill Downs is not exactly as it was in the early 1970s. Production designer Tom Sanders, the art department and the visual effects team managed to take the paddocks and the track back in time.
The film’s 1970s time period made for a colorful bunch of extras—neon greens and oranges, peasant and mini skirts, plaids and polka dots, bell bottoms, leather vests and assorted hats and shaggy hairstyles. But because of the rarefied settings—Churchill Downs, for instance—the flamboyant commingled with the more streamlined, classic look of the moneyed horse set.
Those crowd scenes in Kentucky, perhaps the nation’s capitol of horse aficionados, attracted as many as 800 extras, all eager to support Secretariat some 20 years after his death. Their enthusiasm touched and inspired Wallace, who routinely invited them into the filmmaking process. “We had budgeted for large CGI shots in Kentucky, but so many people turned out to be in the crowd, we were able to do much of that in camera,” says the director. “I’m from Tennessee, so I felt a real connection to them. I told the extras in Kentucky that we were probably all cousins. I asked them to sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ which I had not imagined would be in the movie, but they sang it with heart. They became a living part of the shot. They brought so much excitement to the race. Those people made the stadium rock with energy.”
