46 SIDELINES APRIL 2014
FOR HORSE PEOPLE • ABOUT HORSE PEOPLE
playing Mark Allen, it wasn’t a stretch. I’ve been in my fair share
of bar fights, just like he has, and we both love horses,” Christian
said.
50 to 1
is Christian’s fourth movie featuring horses, and he
said being around the racehorses was a humbling experience.
“Anything done on horseback is a gift, but racehorses are royal.
This is a great horse movie because it concentrates on the heart
of the horse, but it’s also character driven. The movie was about
these two guys, but our director Jim made the horse a main
character too. Skeet [actor Skeet Ulrich plays horse trainer Chip
Woolley] and I didn’t mind taking a backseat to the horse.”
While Christian was at home on the set, he was still
awestruck by some of the characters in the movie – and not just
the horses. “Jockey Calvin Borel is in the movie and he stole the
whole thing. He was amazing. He had never acted in his life but
his personality just filled the whole screen. I got to give him a leg
up on Bird in the movie and you can put that on my tombstone –
I put Calvin Borel on a horse!”
While Christian, who is also a musician and has a monstrous
Twitter following, loved his interaction with Calvin, he still says
his favorite part of the movie was actually watching it when it was
complete. “It was the first time in my career this has happened. I
knew what happened at the end, but it felt like I was watching it
for the first time. I was on the edge of my seat and I had tears in
my eyes. You’re thinking, ‘There’s no way this horse is going to
win.’”
Horseman William Devane
While the horse does win in the real-life story and on the big
screen, the movie also wins thanks to actor William Devane,
who signed on to play Mine That Bird’s co-owner, Leonard ‘Doc’
Blach. “When I read the script, it read like an old John Wayne
movie. It starts out with a bar fight and the little guy wins. It was
really well written,” he said. “I haven’t done enough movies with
horses, so to get to do this was a real treat. Of course, I had
followed the real-life story of Mine That Bird. If you are a horse
person you always watch the Kentucky Derby. The blimp shot of
him coming down the stretch is fantastic.”
People may remember William for his role as President John
F. Kennedy in the 1974 movie
The Missiles of October
, or as
the cad Greg Sumner on the long-running television show
Knots
Landing
, but in reality William is a true-blue horseman.
An avid polo player, William got his polo start when actress
Stephanie Powers was trying
to raise money for
the William Holden
Wildlife Foundation.
“She wanted to
have an indoor
polo match and
she called and said
she would give me
polo lessons at the
Los Angeles polo
center,” he said.
That kicked off a
life-long obsession with the sport and the actor still tries to ride a
polo pony every morning.
“I have a development called Deer Creek, and I’ll play on
a made horse while the pros play on their green horses. My
development started 24 years ago and has a polo field, racetrack
and 15 ranches. All the people living there are horse people. For
a long time I also played with other celebrities in Chukkers for
Charity. We traveled all over the world raising money. For the first
six or seven years we were sponsored by Piaget.”
While William didn’t get to ride in the movie, he spent a lot of
time in the stable watching the horse who was cast as Mine That
Bird. “I was also intrigued with the guy who trained the horse.
When I had downtime, I would watch the trainer and the horse
doing his tricks – pick up the hose, take off a hat – that was really
amazing. The main horse was really intelligent.”
While William admits that owning horses is “like setting your
money on fire,” he also said horses understand him. “Two-legged
animals don’t, four-legged animals do.”
Despite that sentiment, William’s girlfriend and her sisters were
extras in the movie and he took them to a screening. “They
couldn’t stop talking about how good it was. They were crying at
the end.”
It’s All About The Horses
There wouldn’t have been a movie without the horses, and
an “actor” horse was needed to play the part of Mine That Bird.
As the film’s director, Jim said the first person he called was
head wrangler Rusty Hendrickson, whom he had worked with
on
Dances With Wolves
,
Wyatt Earp
and
The Postman
. Rusty
was experienced in the making of horse movies, having worked
on
Seabiscuit, Secretariat,
True Grit, Flicka,
Dreamer
and
Django Unchained –
t
o name a few. “He’s
done big movies
and he was my go-
to guy. We hooked
up on
Dances
and I
have worked on and
off with him for 20
years. He was the
first one I called and
when he came onboard that was a coup. I knew if we had Rusty,
we would be OK.”
Rusty put Jim in touch with a horse trainer in Washington
State named Bill Lawrence, who searched the Pacific Northwest
and Canada for a horse that not only looked like Mine That Bird,
but one that was also smart enough to pull off tricks. “He found
a horse named Sunday Rest, a 3-year-old Thoroughbred with
racing experience. He had raced four or five times. He was the
same height as Mine That Bird, but he was missing the star, so
we penciled that on every morning,” Jim said. “We used him in all
{
While William admits that owning horses is
“like setting your money on fire,” he also said
horses understand him. “Two-legged animals
don’t, four-legged animals do.”
- William Devane
}
Mine That Bird (Sunday Rest).
