Back in the '30s, Hollywood stars gathered to watch the great thoroughbred Seabiscuit fly down the stretch at Santa Anita. Now director Gary Ross reteams with his Pleasantville star Tobey Maguire to bring Hollywood back to racing in this summer's Seabiscuit.
Clark Gable and Carol Lombard, Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby. Almost any Golden Age Hollywood star you can name probably spent glamorous afternoons out at Santa Anita Park in the days when racing was a national obsession. And when an unlikely, homely little horse named Seabiscuit suddenly started winning with an unlikely loser of a jockey on his back, Hollywood cheered the underdog along with the rest of Depression-era America. It was a story that might have been dreamt up by a starry-eyed screenwriter if it hadn't happened for real. Sixty-plus years later, Hollywood has taken a renewed interest in thoroughbred racing as the blockbuster bestseller Seabiscuit: An American Legend comes to the screen with one of our freshest and most gifted young actors on the marquee. Thoroughbred enthusiast and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Gary Ross had cast Tobey Maguire as his star in his directorial debut, Pleasantville, so he already knew how the role of Seabiscuit's jockey should be cast by the time he finished the first draft of the screenplay he would direct.
As naturally cinematic as thoroughbred racing may be, it's not a subject present-day Hollywood often takes to, but the sport itself is once again becoming a glamorous showbiz pastime. The passionate popular response to author Laura Hillenbrand's masterfully suspenseful tale of an equine hero has actually bumped up attendance at tracks around the country, and if Ross has done the book justice, Hollywood may well find that there are still throngs of rabid fans who are willing to cheer courage in the final stretch.
Michael Fleming: Though Seabiscuit is the center of the action in the movie, the main character is really his jockey, Red Pollard. Were you thinking of Tobey when you first bought the rights?
Gary Ross: No. I owned them for a long time. But early on in the first draft, I thought of Tobey.
Q: Did you share that with him right away?
A: Yes, why be coy? I called him and said, I'm writing this part for you. If you pass, I'm screwed, because I don't think anyone else can play it. God, I hope you do it.
Q: By this time, he'd become a big star off Spider-Man. How did he respond?
A: He said he couldn't wait to read the script. He called me the day Spider-Man opened, when I was at the Kentucky Derby last year, to tell me he'd just finished the book. He loved it.
Q: Why is it you had such passion for a story about a horse?
A: I bought it when Laura Hillenbrand had only written a proposal based on a magazine article she'd written for American Heritage. I'm a big fan of the sport, but I could see already this was not just about a horse. Seabiscuit was a folk hero, a galvanizing force in the Depression, an underdog that inspired people. This was an ugly little horse with knobby knees, a loser. And they felt like losers. If he could come back, they could come back.
Q: There was quite a horse race in Hollywood for the rights to the book, wasn't there?
A: As this bidding war was going on, I had a special point of reference that made a difference. I talked to Laura for a couple hours, mostly about when Secretariat won the Belmont in 1973 for the Triple Crown. Secretariat won by half a racetrack, and she and I agreed that was probably the greatest athletic event in the history of sport. We talked about how years later when Secretariat died, they found out he had a 16-pound heart. The average racehorse has an eight-pound heart, and Secretariat had a double-recessive trait that created a larger engine and more horsepower. So Laura knew this was more than a passing fancy for me and that she'd be in good hands. I think that's why she sold it to me.
Q: Was Tobey Maguire worried about the physical demands of the role? One of the things the book stresses is how dangerous riding a thoroughbred is.
A: He had concerns about being a believable jockey. I told him we had the great jockey Chris McCarron who'd teach him to ride, and that I'd developed this thing called an Equicizer.
Q: What is that?
A: It's the mechanical horse that we shot him on. I saw it while passing through the jockey's room at Santa Anita and asked, what's that? They said it was an exercise bike for jockeys--it's spring-loaded to duplicate the exact motion of riding. I figured that if I could mechanize one of those and put it on a truck with a camera platform, I could drive Tobey around the track and shoot him with the grandstand and the crowd whizzing by, in a totally safe environment where he couldn't fall. I'd be able to get the camera right next to his face. I had this thing built and it worked. There is another horse movie, which I won't mention, that wanted to borrow it because they weren't able to shoot closeups and they realized in the editing process that it was a big problem.
Q: That sounds to me like Hidalgo, Viggo Mortensen's first big movie after filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Did you share your Equicizer?
A: No, it was busy.
Q: Is that the sign of a little rivalry between horse movies?
A: It's a sign that I am proud I figured it out. This thing worked like a charm. I had to put Tobey in a horse race, and this was a safe way to do it.
Q: There was buzz a while back about Tobey's health and whether he could continue as Spider-Man. The rumor was he might have strained his back making Seabiscuit. Was there any hard riding, any fall?
A: Any talk about Tobey getting hurt is just bogus. He never sustained any injury. All the riding on the track was done on this contraption, because I would never put him in that position. It's too dangerous a sport.
Q: You've cast Tobey twice now. What did you see at the beginning?
A: There's just that thing where you see an actor who's special. Directors don't have a real high amount of practical skills. We can't operate the camera, we don't build the sets. We play our hunches. I saw in this kid something very complicated, focused, intelligent. And he's a way more accomplished actor now than he was the first time that I worked with him.
Q: You got Tobey back after he became very famous in Spider-Man. Had he changed?
A: Not much. He understands he's famous. I don't think that's what he's enamored of. He likes being an actor. I mean, I love this kid. I had a great time with him. All the things that could happen when somebody becomes a movie star, in my opinion, they didn't.
Q: When the camera is not rolling, what's he like?
A: He has a huge sense of humor, but he's very driven, intense in a great way. Whip smart. Stunningly intelligent. He's self-taught, well-read. It's no secret that he never graduated from high school, that he's had a hard life. But he's more culturally refined than he will admit. He's one of the smarter people I've met.
Q: For the role of Seabiscuit's trainer, a guy who hardly talked to people but understood horses completely, did you think of Chris Cooper after seeing his Oscar-winning performance in Adaptation?
A: Yeah. Before anyone else had seen it. I thought he was amazing. But I'd already thought he was good in roles before that. And he really wanted to play the part.
Q: Was Jeff Bridges your top choice for the role of Howard?
A: He was certainly one of them, and I couldn't imagine anyone else now.
Q: Is your personal interest in racing more about gambling or something else?
A: It never was about gambling. I'm certainly interested in the gambling aspect--I remember going to the track when I was just 13, I think for my bar mitzvah, and I nailed the exacta and won 85 bucks, and was hooked. But I'm most fascinated by the sport. My wife was a huge fan of the novels of former jockey Dick Francis and I became reacquainted with the nuances of the racing world as she did by those books.
Q: Racing used to be a major glamour pursuit in Hollywood. The people seen courtside at Lakers games like Jack Nicholson today, would they have been at the track back then?
A: No question about it. You have to remember that in the days when Seabiscuit was running, there wasn't a major league baseball team in L.A. The Dodgers were in Brooklyn. If you lived in L.A. and wanted to go to a sporting event, you went to Santa Anita.
Q: I understand you own a thoroughbred now. How did that happen?
A: Steven Spielberg, Kathy Kennedy, Frank Marshall, Kate Capshaw and my wife, Allison, and I bought 10% of a horse named Atswhatimtalknbout. So I own, basically, a hoof, though my son says it's a nose, because that's the part that crosses the line. We became owners about two months ago when B. Wayne Hughes, who founded Public Storage and has been in the horse business for 20 years, generously included us.
Q: Safe to say you were invited in because you were involved in Seabiscuit and would generate a lot of attention?
A: Well, I don't think having Steven Spielberg aboard hurts either, but it's all designed to stir interest and passion. Steven had never been around horse racing. When we finished fourth in the Santa Anita Derby, he had a fantastic time.
Q: Do a lot of Hollywood people own horses?
A: I'm aware of a few. Burt Bacharach is a big horse owner. Gary Barber, who's a partner in Spyglass Entertainment, has a stable of about 40 horses. Jerry Moss, of A&M Records, is one of the biggest horse owners in California. Wayne Gretzky has gotten into it. You can see the benefits, what huge fun the sport can be.
Q: Is there a renewed interest in racing?
A: I've noticed an uptick in interest because of the book, and hopefully the movie will continue that. When Laura described the races in her book, you felt how enthralling and dangerous and athletic both the horses and jockeys were, and that inspired me to want to reveal it that way. We get the camera in places where it has never been, for a thrill ride of a horse race. We put you in the race, let you feel what it feels like, down to the interaction between jockeys. That was dangerous and required minute choreography. You're dealing with horses that could only do three takes in a day and then have to rest for two days. If you don't get the shot, you don't get another chance. We had to choreograph every single event.
Q: This is only your second film. Where did you learn to be so precise?
A: There was no other way to do it. Faced with daunting obstacles, you come up with resourceful solutions. I've got a guy on a techno crane out there, swinging a 30-foot crane arm when you're moving horses at 40 miles an hour. He has to know where the camera is going to be. It was like a war game. Chris McCarron, one of the greatest jockeys who ever lived, was a consultant on the film. I planned out each race and Chris would take that playbook and rehearse the jockeys. He was like a choreographer in a musical.
Q: Did you use stuntmen?
A: I only used professional jockeys because no stuntman could ride well enough for what we had to do in the film.
Q: One, Gary Stevens, has an important role in the film, doesn't he?
A: Like Chris, Gary is one of the greatest jockeys in the world--he just won the Santa Anita Derby and beat our horse to do it--but he could be a movie star. The star of our movie beat me! I'm so pissed off.
Q: Did you feel it was a privilege to work with Tobey again?
A: His work ethic is incredible. He would stay and do off-camera lines for a day player. There are actors who won't do that for their costars, much less a day player. But he was there because he thinks that is the respect you show for another actor.
Q: Your father--who cowrote Creature From the Black Lagoon, which the two of you are now remaking--was blacklisted. What was that like?
A: It wasn't as bad for him as it was for a lot of people. He was about to be subpoenaed, and it was recalled at the last minute. He was lucky, but still he went without work for a long time.
Q: Was your family ostracized?
A: No, because my dad could still write radio stuff. The thing about being a writer is that when you're out of work, it's not that weird. They sheltered me from it and the thing I'm most impressed with about my parents is they instilled in me a great sense of appreciation of the country, patriotism and democracy. A lot of belief in a country they could have turned on, easily, and didn't. That became an emotional connection for me because of what they went through and where I came from. That is why I wrote Dave and the satire of big business in Big and the obvious politics in Pleasantville. And it's why I wanted to write about the Depression in Seabiscuit.
________________________________________________________________
Michael Fleming