In his latest see to the movie theater, our horse movie reporter gets in the Kentucky Derby state of mind with 50 to 1, a motion picture where the reality was more not likely than any fiction.
50 to 1 (2014)
directed by Jim Wilson; starring Skeet Ulrich, Christian Kane
50 to 1 (2014)It’s that time of year. Anticipation is high, attention is focused, and still there are hours to fill prior to post time for the 149th Kentucky Derby on Saturday, May 6. In that spirit, you’d believe there should be a good Derby motion picture out there someplace to a minimum of eliminate a little time.
Sporting Blood, from 1931, is not that motion picture. Once past the poisonous racial stereotypes of the age, the audience needs to swallow a young Clark Gable as a bettor’s lackey who dopes a horse called Tommy Boy simply enough to establish a rating, then pawns him off to an unwary Madge Evans. They fall in edgy motion picture love, the horse liven up, and here comes the Derby. He wins since of a damaged rein. It sounds much better than it is.
How finest to explain The Return to October? This 1948 release was the very first significant billing for previous kid star Terry Moore. Her Uncle Willy passes away and is reincarnated as a racehorse who wins the Derby. The fuzzy information consist of a conflicted psychology prof played by Glenn Ford who embezzles school funds to purchase the horse. This was not based upon a real story.
In 1988, tv audiences were dealt with to the two-part Bluegrass, with Cheryl Ladd, that started with a tried rape and a barn fire and ended in the Churchill Downs winner’s circle on Derby Day. In in between there sufficed soap to scrub a battleship.
The person who directed Bluegrass likewise offered us Phar Lap, which just shows that the genuine thing beats any racing story anybody can comprise.
Jim Wilson knows this. The producer of the Oscar-winning Best Picture Dances With Wolves has been a racing fan since childhood and has owned racehorses as well. He could have dreamed up a racing movie any time he wanted, but he waited until a story came along that begged to be played high and wide on the big screen.
That story became 50 to 1, the 2014 release based on the 2009 Kentucky Derby victory of Mine That Bird, whose boxcar payoff was not even the most remarkable part of a tall racing tale, which is exactly why Wilson went to work on his movie before the horse cooled out.
For those who need a refresher, 50 to 1 tells the story of the pocket-sized gelding who was precocious enough to earn a Canadian championship as a two-year-old. In late 2008, Mine That Bird was bought by New Mexico rancher Mark Allen, who made a pile of money in Alaskan oil. Allen partnered in Mine That Bird with veterinarian Leonard Blach, owner of a clinic in Roswell, which also happens to be ground zero for a cottage industry in UFO sightings.
Mine That Bird was trained by Bennie ‘Chip’ Woolley, who appears with his horse at Churchill Downs on crutches thanks to a severely damaged ideal leg sustained in a bike wreck. Both Allen and Woolley sport black Stetsons. Dr. Blach uses a coat and tie.
It can be argued effectively that the efficiency unspooled by Mine That Bird over a wet track on Derby Day 2009 differed from anything seen in the history of the race. From a helpless last, ‘Bird’ and jockey Calvin Borel started a run approaching the far turn while hugging the rail and started passing horses like they were using snowshoes. They tipped nicely around one horse prior to diving back to the within, then continued to put the Greatest Race on Earth on ice by almost 7 lengths at the wire.
“It was mind-boggling,” Wilson said. “Visually the most stunning race you could imagine. But I knew there was no way we could recreate the race for the movie. One of the first calls I made was to NBC, to find out if they would make the video of the race available, and then to find out if the quality of the footage could be transferred to the big screen. They assured us that when we were ready to go to post-production, we’d have whatever we required to make it appear like movie.”
Just like that, Wilson had his climactic motion picture ending. For the remainder of the story he relied on his partner, Faith Conroy, to craft a script that would welcome Mine That Bird’s cast of human characters. They decided on a lighter touch, favoring as much humor as might be depicted while taking the difficult Derby mission seriously.
“Rather than doing a very realistic piece, we elected to put in more humor, and poke fun at various folks in racing, which I think is not difficult to do,” Wilson said. “Every time I’d go to the track, I was watching not only the horses, but also the trainers, the owners, the jocks. They’re bigger than life figures to me.”
And so, 50 to 1 opens with a rollicking roadside bar battle right out of a John Ford western, with Christian Kane of television’s Leverage as Allen, and Skeet Ulrich, late of Law & Order: LA playing Woolley in a respectable tribute to John Wayne and Lee Marvin, total with light-hearted small talk in between punches.
When they struck the Derby scene, the Mine That Bird team were understood to one and all as The Cowboys. No one took discomforts to fix the image. Conroy communicates in her composing a New Mexico horse culture that toggles in between the hardscrabble world of Woolley and his bro to the nouveau riche excesses of Allen, who invested $400,000 on a two-year-old gelding from Canada and never ever let a weekend pass without a celebration at his Double Eagle Ranch.
“The idea was to make a film people could enjoy, something they could cheer for,” said Conroy, who has a background in journalism. “I’ve spent a lot of time with cowboy types, so it was easy to put words in the mouths of our characters.”
Once the NBC footage was secured, the key to telling the rest of the story was getting Calvin Borel to play Calvin Borel. At that point, Borel was becoming a household racing name as the winner of three Kentucky Derbies in a span of four years, with Street Sense (2007) and Super Saver (2010) bracketing Mine That Bird.
Wilson was wise to direct Borel’s scenes with crisp, quick discussion that cover perfectly for the rider’s lack of experience on cam. At one point, a montage of slapstick incidents played as Borel discovers of Derby installs falling by the wayside puts the audience securely in his corner as the race methods.
“It would not have worked without Calvin,” Conroy said. “We needed him because of what he brought to the actual race footage. The emotion of his reaction to winning, when he raised his eyes and wished his parents had been there, was movie magic.”
For all it’s good-natured frolics, 50 to 1 develops non-stop to the race. The NBC video is interspliced flawlessly with cutaways to the movie characters – consisting of representations of Bob Baffert and Sheikh Mohammed – in addition to inserts of separated shots with Borel as Borel aboard his Mine That Bird lookalike, an Arizona-reproduced gelding called Sunday Rest. Even for those who have actually seen the race previously, the 2009 Kentucky Derby as provided in 50 to 1 continues to defy reality.
As if his role as producer, director, and co-writer was not enough, Wilson took the lead in the promotion of 50 to 1 with a barnstorming bus tour that included cast members to promote the nationwide release of the film. The official red carpet premiere took place on March 21, 2014, at the classic Kimo Theatre in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where city fathers roped off a block of downtown so that a pen could be set up for an appearance of Mine That Bird himself.
50 to 1 opened to mixed reviews from critics, but those have faded into the ether as the years have passed, while the name of Mine That Bird still stirs memories of a bonafide Derby miracle.
Today, Wilson and Conroy live on land hard by a national forest near the tiny town of Ennis, in southwestern Montana. At least once a year, the town’s Madison Theatre will host a proving of 50 to 1 at which Wilson and Conroy will sign posters and provide a Q&A session for a jam-packed house. “It’s local lore here,” Wilson said.
The tradition was improved a couple of years earlier by the look at those Ennis provings of veteran star William Devane, who plays Leonard Blach. Devane gives 50 to 1 the strong weight of a television and motion picture profession that consists of whatever from Marathon Man and Rolling Thunder to Knots Landing and 24.
“It turns out he lives half the year 20 minutes from us,” Conroy said. “One day we were in a little place near here w
here you can get a hamburger, and Bill walks in. He saw us and could hardly speak.”
That’s absolutely nothing compared to the method jaws dropped in 2015 at the sight of Rich Strike winning the Derby at chances of 80-1. Wilson and Conroy were amongst the millions seeing from home.
“We had a few phone calls that said, ‘What about a sequel? You guys have to do it!’ That was pretty funny,” Wilson said. “I’ve never made a sequel and I doubt I ever will. Nothing wrong with good original tales. Anyway, somewhere in our hearts, Bird was the one for us.”
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