Hollywood Hoofbeats Read online

  Hollywood Hoofbeats

  Project Team

  Editor: Andrew DePrisco

  Design: Mary Ann Kahn

  i-5 PUBLISHING, LLCTM

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  Copyright © 2014 by i-5 Publishing, LLCTM

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of i-5 PressTM, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mitchum, Petrine Day.

  Hollywood hoofbeats / by Petrine Day Mitchum ; with Audrey Pavia.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-62008-133-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Horses in motion pictures. 2. Western films--United States--History and criticism. I. Pavia, Audrey. II. Title.

  PN1995.9.A5M56 2014

  791.43’66296655--dc23

  2014015367

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62008-171-6

  This book has been published with the intent to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter within. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the author and publisher expressly disclaim any responsibility for any errors, omissions, or adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

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  Dedication

  To the memory of champion trick rider and stuntwoman Donna Hall, who once said, “They ought to build a monument to the picture horse.”

  Donna Hall 1928–2002

  Introduction

  Robert Mitchum rides Steel in their second film together, West of the Pecos, 1945.

  Hollywood Hoofbeats represents decades of research, not only the fourteen years I and my indispensible co-author, Audrey Pavia, collectively spent uncovering amazing stories but also years of work by film historians, journalists, movie buffs, and horse lovers. To these we owe an enormous debt of gratitude.

  My own journey down the Hollywood Hoofbeats trail began in 2000, when I began researching a documentary film for a colleague. The film never materialized, but I was hooked on the subject of horses in film. As a child, my favorite TV shows were Westerns and National Velvet, and I was lucky enough to grow up on a horse farm and have my own pony. But I never thought of horses as actors.

  Actors? Actor is not a word that usually springs to mind when contemplating the many roles horses have played in our history. Their contributions to mankind have been well chronicled and celebrated in the arts, yet we rarely think of horses as entertainers. Since the rise of the internal combustion engine, however, horses in developed nations have flourished primarily as sources of amusement rather than labor. Equestrian sports may be big business, but their real raison d’etre is entertainment. Wild West and Civil War reenactments, medieval jousting exhibitions, and a variety of touring equestrian shows have been enthralling audiences for decades. So have horses in movies. But actors?

  As my research of movie horses expanded, I discovered what I had long suspected: some horses are natural actors. In my childhood, my family owned a big bay Quarter Horse named Woody who feigned lameness to avoid work. One day he would be lame on his right foreleg, the next day on his left. There was nothing detectably wrong with Woody besides a preference for his pasture over the saddle.

  Unlike Woody, movie horses—the good and well-treated ones—love their jobs. Time and again, the men and women who have worked with equine actors—the trainers, wranglers, stunt performers, actors, and directors—told me stories of horses who knew when the camera was running and took direction with uncanny awareness. I heard tales of specially trained stunt horses who loved to show off, and lived long and pampered lives. I also heard about equine star tantrums and unruly performers whose diva behavior was tolerated because of their box-office cachet.

  It is true that stunt horses were sometimes subjected to cruelty in the past and that far too many equine fatalities occurred in the name of entertainment. It is also true that there were movie horse trainers working in silent films, and the early decades of filmmaking, who today would be called “horse whisperers,” a moniker they would most likely mock and modestly reject. The best trainers currently working in the film industry utilize the same basic methods of those film pioneers.

  Hurried production schedules have not always allowed for the time needed to properly train horse actors, but overall conditions for equine thespians—and all performing animals—have vastly improved in recent decades thanks largely to the vigilance of the American Humane Association’s Film and Television Unit. These days it is considered de rigueur for the AHA’s certification to appear in the credits of any film that utilizes animal actors.

  There’s that word again. Actors. In the course of writing Hollywood Hoofbeats, I watched scores of movies. Certain horses stood out from film to film, and I developed favorites: a black-and-white Paint named Dice, whose deadpan expressions belied his hilarious tricks; Highland Dale, a stunning black American Saddlebred stallion who, unlike old Woody, learned to limp on command and won numerous awards during his long career; Steel, a handsome blaze-faced chestnut gelding who supported a galaxy of Hollywood stars. One of these was my father, Robert Mitchum, who lied to the producers of his first western, Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943), and told them he could ride. He learned on the job—barely—and when he won his first starring role as Jim Lacy in Nevada (1944), the producers were smart enough to pair him with a seasoned equine actor, Steel. They made two movies together.

  Watching so many films of multiple genres, I began to realize that the movies as we know them would be vastly different without horses. There would be no Westerns—no cowboy named John Wayne!—no Gone with the Wind, no Ben Hur, no Dances with Wolves, no Gladiator, no Seabiscuit or The Black Stallion. In fact, the movies might not exist at all since the entire motion picture industry evolved from an experiment with a camera and a horse.

  While it is virtually impossible to cite every horse who left his mark on celluloid, with Hollywood Hoofbeats, I have attempted to pay tribute to the spirits of the marvelous equine actors who have traversed cinema’s varied terrain since its inception.

  Petrine Day Mitchum

  Santa Ynez, California, March, 2014

  1. The First Movie Stars

  “The horse, the horse! The symbol of surging potency and power of movement, of action, in man.”

  —D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

  Abe Edgington and the twelve frames that changed the world.

  The first cowboy star, Broncho Billy Anderson, in character with some of his equine cast members in Niles, California, where many of his Westerns were made.

  The first movie star was a horse. Equus caballus, that potent symbol of human aspiration, had been capturing the imaginations of painters, poets, songsmiths, and sculptors for centuries when he was finally captured in action by motion pictures on a fine June day in 1878. Before Thomas Edison and D. W
. Griffith began their careers as film pioneers, before the first cowboy actor on a trusty steed galloped across a silent screen, before the entire film industry exploded to the sound of thundering hooves, there were a revolutionary series of motion pictures starring a Standardbred harness racer with the unlikely name of Abe Edgington. This equine performer blazed unchartered terrain by virtue of a bet that involved his hoofbeats.

  The Horse in Motion

  Abe Edgington’s place in history was guaranteed in 1878 when his owner, wealthy railroad magnate and one-time California governor Leland Stanford, hired British-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his horses. Stanford hoped to prove that a racing trotter going full speed would, for a split second, be completely airborne. On a June day in Palo Alto, California, Muybridge began by shooting a series of photos of Abe Edgington pulling a sulky. Members of the press witnessed this historic event, which utilized twelve cameras with unique lenses and an electronically controlled mechanism designed to operate special shutters. Wires placed underneath the racetrack at 21-inch intervals triggered the release of the camera shutters as the sulky wheels made contact with the ground.

  It took half a second to take the twelve pictures, which clearly showed the high-stepping Abe Edgington’s four legs suspended in midair. Stanford had his proof, and the world had the beginnings of a new art form: motion pictures.

  Four days later, Muybridge successfully photographed Stanford’s horse Occident being galloped under saddle. Excited by the results, Stanford—who adored his horses and forbade farmhands to speak harshly to them—funded more of Muybridge’s photographic experiments. Within two weeks, Muybridge had produced six more sequential photographs of Stanford’s horses, depicting them walking, trotting, and galloping. The pictures were published as The Horse in Motion.

  This revolutionary series aroused international interest, and the University of Philadelphia commissioned Muybridge to take “moving pictures” of a number of animals, including horses. By the time he had completed this work, Muybridge had shot 20,000 pictures, many featuring randomly chosen horses, named Daisy, Eagle, Elberon, Sharon, Pandora, Billy, Annie G, and Bouquet. Along with Abe Edgington, Occident, and Stanford’s other horses, these animals ranked among the world’s first movie stars.

  The train robbers made the mistake of dismounting their getaway horses as they are confronted by posse members in this shot from The Great Train Robbery.

  Native Americans and their ponies reenact an encounter with cowboys in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, circa 1908.

  Edison

  In 1894, sixteen years after Muybridge began his unique way of photographing horses, inventor Thomas Alva Edison patented the first motion-picture camera. Edison’s Kinetograph camera and his film-viewing device, the Kinetoscope, had admittedly been inspired by the work of Muybridge, who had invented the first film projector, the Zoopraxiscope, in 1879. Muybridge had shown Edison his invention in 1888 and proposed collaboration, but Edison declined the offer, having his own vision to pursue.

  Credited with starting the American motion picture industry, on April 14, 1894, Edison opened a Kinetoscope Parlor in New York City, where awestruck audiences watched his short films. Perhaps again taking his cue from Muybridge, Edison turned to the visual excitement of horses to enliven many early films. A bucking horse, Sunfish, along with Colorado cowboy Lee Martin, starred in the aptly titled 1894 short Bucking Bronco, filmed at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. That same year, Edison filmed Buffalo Bill himself putting his beautiful gray horse Isham through his paces while Wild West performers twirled lassos around them. Technically, these two films could be called the first Westerns.

  An early Edison melodrama, The Burning Stable (1896), shows a real barn in flames. This nail-biter depicts four eye-catching white horses being led through the billowing smoke. In the sequel, Fighting the Fire (1896), two horses come to the rescue by pulling a fire engine to the burning stable. Perhaps the first film featuring “trick” horses was the Edison-produced Trained Cavalry Horses (1898), which shows Troop F’s mounts lying down and scrambling to their feet on command. Another 1898 Edison film, Elopement on Horseback, featured a bride sneaking out a window to land behind her beloved on the back of a tall but short-tailed bay. The one-scene thriller was photographed by Edwin S. Porter, who was on the verge of making his own mark on cinema history with the first “feature” film, a twelve-minute Western.

  Directed by Porter and released by the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1903, The Great Train Robbery told the story of four bandits in the Wild West. (The film was actually shot in New Jersey.) The train robbers made their getaway on horses, which provided a considerable level of action for the primitive film. The getaway mounts, two grays and two dark horses—it’s difficult to distinguish browns and bays from chestnuts in early black-and-white films—in western bridles and cavalry saddles, don’t appear until the second half of the movie. After the violent stick-up, the robbers leap from the train to mount their waiting horses and gallop into the woods; a posse of six sets off in hot pursuit. Thus Porter staged what would become one of the most enduring elements of cinema—the chase scene.

  This crude but exciting Western enthralled naïve audiences, and moviegoers began demanding more narrative films. Movies-only theaters sprang up around the country, and a new form of entertainment was assured its place in American life.

  Americans were not the only ones riveted by celluloid horses. France and Australia had their own developing movie industries, and horses played significant roles. The French Lumière brothers made a series of minimalist films in the late nineteenth century. Called “actuality” films, these mini-documentaries were remarkably similar to Edison’s earliest efforts. One such offering, Dragoons Crossing the Saone, consists entirely of eleven shirtless boys riding bareback into a river and swimming their horses to the other side. Another Lumière film, Pack Train on the Chilkoot Pass, filmed in the United States in 1898, shows huge pack mule teams being led by men on horseback through a rugged mountain pass.

  In 1906, the Australian brothers John and Nevin Tait produced a full-length feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, which employed fifty circus horses and a team of roughriders. The success of the eighty-minute “bushranging” film, the Australian version of the Western, launched a series of wild and woolly Outback features that attracted audiences with authentic—and often dangerous—horse action. In 1912, the New South Wales Police Department banned the films for allegedly making a mockery of the law. The Australians consoled themselves with Westerns imported from America.

  A terrified white horse is led to safety in this frame captured from Thomas Edison’s The Burning Stable.

  An early Australian movie horse hits the water in The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).

  The Father of Film

  Not long after the success of The Great Train Robbery, another player emerged to forever change the fledgling motion picture business. D. W. Griffith, an actor working for a flourishing New York production studio called the Biograph Company, stepped behind the camera for the first time as a director in 1908. Griffith, who would eventually be lionized as “the father of film” for his innovative staging and editing techniques, was primarily interested in human drama. However, he also had an instinct for popular taste and understood the undeniable appeal of horses cavorting on screen. Griffith’s first short for Biograph was The Adventures of Dollie, a gripping tale about a little girl kidnapped and hidden in a barrel by gypsies. In the melodrama’s climactic sequence, the gypsy wagon crosses a river, and the barrel containing little Dollie falls into the drink, headed for nearby rapids. The two horses pulling the gypsy wagon, a flashy dapple-gray and a brown, are essential to the suspenseful action.

  In 1908, The Runaway Horse, an immensely successful French film from the Pathé production company, was exported to the United States. This early “foreign film” inspired Griffith to copy its use of reverse motion to great comic effect in The Curtain Pole, which features a hors
e-drawn carriage as an integral part of the sight gags. While his comic potential was just beginning to be exploited, the horse as sight gag, clown, and “straight man” would become a reliable laugh getter in the years to come.

  A more sober subject, Custer’s Last Stand, inspired Griffith’s 1912 action drama The Massacre. Scores of horses stirred up the dust, particularly in scenes involving a “death circle” of Indians on cantering mounts, surrounding their subdued enemies in ever-shrinking circles. This dizzying use of equine action would become a staple of Westerns featuring confrontations between cowboys and Indians.

  Another of Griffith’s Biograph Westerns, The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913), employed a number of pinto horses, used mostly as mounts for Indian characters. During the climactic battle sequence, a gray horse ridden by an Indian rears and topples over in a stunning backward fall while another pinto horse hits the dirt in the background. This sequence is especially noteworthy as both these animals, as well as a brown horse in a later scene, appear to be trained falling horses.

  By the end of 1913, Griffith had left Biograph to concentrate on realizing his dream of directing a full-length epic. While he was undoubtedly out to shake up the world, his landmark film would have an impact far beyond anything he could have imagined.

  The 1915 release of The Birth of a Nation created a furor throughout the United States. Originally titled The Clansman, after the book upon which it was based, the controversial film incited charges of racism. In the film’s most thrilling and incendiary sequence, Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries” was played to accompany scores of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen, mounted aboard hooded and caped horses, as they gallop four abreast through the countryside and into town to avenge the death of a white girl. Masterfully edited, the sequence is remarkable not only for its shocking emotional impact but also for the preparation that must have been required to accustom the horses to performing in such elaborate gear. The powerful image of a hooded Klansman aboard a caped and hooded horse was used extensively in poster art and publicity photos for the film and undoubtedly fueled the emotional storm that raged around the movie’s release.