ShareThisDiane Lane, who plays owner Penny Chenery Tweedy, has promised that moviegoers would be treated to "dirt-in-your-teeth" realism in "Secretariat."
Thanks to the use of what co-producer Mark Ciardi described as little "off-the-shelf" digital cameras, the Disney moviemakers got it. Cameras were taped to sticks that a man hanging out of a car held up close to the horses in racing scenes -- producing wondrous views of jockeys, thundering hooves and snorting horses.
That's not to say the movie is perfect.
There are little things wrong, which Chenery, who dropped the name Tweedy after a divorce long ago, called inconsequential but predicted that horsemen would "nitpick."
Although my entry into horse racing came as a turf writer 12 years after Secretariat's 1973 Triple Crown sweep, I'm about to do the same.
-- Jockey Ron Turcotte and the late trainer Lucien Laurin are French Canadian, but speak without any discernible accent. They do have some exchanges in French that would have benefited from subtitles.
-- Only people used to watching races will realize it was Angle Light who won the Wood Memorial two weeks before the Kentucky Derby over Sham and Secretariat.
-- Poor Riva Ridge, who won the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes for Meadow Stable the year before Secretariat's 1973 sweep. He's not even mentioned in the film. ("I felt sorry for Riva," Chenery said. "He was always swept aside.")
-- Some of the racing scenes appear to have been speeded up. Perhaps it's because the horse actors in the movie couldn't race as fast as top thoroughbreds.
-- There is at least one scene where no one holds the shank of Secretariat while he is bathed. I doubt very much that the Secretariat team would have taken the risk of a multimillion-dollar champion rearing or running.
-- There are too few reporters asking questions at the news conferences. Horse racing was still considered a prime-time sport back then, and Secretariat brought even more coverage, appearing on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated in the same week.
But Disney got more right than wrong. For example, there are three unforgettable moments in the real footage of Secretariat's crown-clinching victory in the Belmont Stakes, and they're all there on the big screen: The long view of him hitting the wire 31 lengths in front -- so far that no other horse is visible; Turcotte looking back under his arm to see where the other horses are; and Chenery jumping up and down and waving her arms in triumph after the finish.
The sound work also is superb -- especially that of Secretariat laboring to breathe as he tired in the Wood, when he had an abscess in his mouth and hadn't trained up to the race with the usual rigor.
And, finally, here are answers to some questions the new-to-racing moviegoer may have:
-- To get five stand-in chestnut (red) horses to look like Secretariat, a film crew member carefully painted them with his distinctive markings: three white socks and a star and stripe on his face.
-- Secretariat wore different numbers in each race because they are assigned to horses according to the starting gate they drew a couple days before the event.
-- The fields for the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes were small, probably because many horsemen thought Secretariat and perhaps even rivals Sham and Angle Light, too, were unbeatable. In any other year, Sham probably would have won Triple Crown races; his time in the Derby was one of the fastest in history.
-- Reporters often leave the friendly confines and great view of a track press box to watch from the rail as Bill Nack and Andy Beyer do in the film. They may not see the race as well (because I'm short I watched a lot of disembodied legs go by at the big races), but they get quicker access to the human participants.
-- The production used the real Triple Crown trophy, which was loaned by the Kentucky Derby Museum. The cup was created by Cartier after Affirmed won the 1978 Triple Crown in preparation for the next winner, whenever -- if ever -- that may be.
(Reach Pohla Smith at psmith(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
