In his latest visit to the cinema, our equine film correspondent gets in the Kentucky Derby mood with 50 to 1, a movie where the truth was more unlikely than any fiction.
50 to 1 (2014)
directed by Jim Wilson; starring Skeet Ulrich, Christian Kane
It’s that time of year. Anticipation is high, attention is focused, and still there are hours to fill before post time for the 149th Kentucky Derby on Saturday, May 6. In that spirit, you’d think there must be a good Derby movie out there somewhere to at least kill a little time.
Sporting Blood, from 1931, is not that movie. Once past the noxious racial stereotypes of the era, the viewer has to swallow a young Clark Gable as a gambler’s lackey who dopes a horse named Tommy Boy just enough to set up a score, then pawns him off to an unsuspecting Madge Evans. They fall in edgy movie love, the horse perks up, and here comes the Derby. He wins because of a broken rein. It sounds better than it is.
How best to describe The Return to October? This 1948 release was the first major billing for former child star Terry Moore. Her Uncle Willy dies and is reincarnated as a racehorse who wins the Derby. The fuzzy details include a conflicted psychology prof played by Glenn Ford who embezzles school funds to buy the horse. This was not based on a true story.
In 1988, television audiences were treated to the two-part Bluegrass, with Cheryl Ladd, that began with an attempted rape and a barn fire and ended in the Churchill Downs winner’s circle on Derby Day. In between there was enough soap to scrub a battleship.
The guy who directed Bluegrass also gave us Phar Lap, which only proves that the real thing beats any racing story anyone can make up.
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 shows up with his horse at Churchill Downs on crutches thanks to a badly broken right leg sustained in a motorcycle wreck. Both Allen and Woolley sport black Stetsons. Dr. Blach wears a jacket and tie.
It can be argued successfully that the performance unspooled by Mine That Bird over a wet track on Derby Day 2009 was unlike anything witnessed in the history of the race. From a hopeless last, ‘Bird’ and jockey Calvin Borel commenced a run approaching the far turn while hugging the rail and began passing horses like they were wearing snowshoes. They tipped neatly around one horse before diving back to the inside, then proceeded to put the Greatest Race on Earth on ice by nearly seven 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 everything we needed to make it look like film.”
Just like that, Wilson had his climactic movie ending. For the rest of the story he turned to his partner, Faith Conroy, to craft a script that would embrace Mine That Bird’s cast of human characters. They settled on a lighter touch, leaning toward as much humor as could be portrayed while taking the impossible Derby quest 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 fight straight out of a John Ford western, with Christian Kane of TV’s Leverage as Allen, and Skeet Ulrich, late of Law & Order: LA playing Woolley in a pretty good homage to John Wayne and Lee Marvin, complete with light-hearted banter between punches.
When they hit the Derby scene, the Mine That Bird crew were known to one and all as The Cowboys. No one took pains to correct the image. Conroy conveys in her writing a New Mexico horse culture that toggles between the hardscrabble world of Woolley and his brother to the nouveau riche excesses of Allen, who spent $400,000 on a two-year-old gelding from Canada and never let a weekend go by without a party 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, brief dialogue that cover nicely for the rider’s inexperience on camera. At one point, a montage of slapstick mishaps played as Borel learns of Derby mounts falling by the wayside puts the viewer firmly in his corner as the race approaches.
“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 builds relentlessly to the race. The NBC footage is interspliced seamlessly with cutaways to the film characters – including representations of Bob Baffert and Sheikh Mohammed – as well as inserts of isolated shots with Borel as Borel aboard his Mine That Bird lookalike, an Arizona-bred gelding named Sunday Rest. Even for those who have seen the race before, the 2009 Kentucky Derby as presented 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 showing of 50 to 1 at which Wilson and Conroy will sign posters and offer a Q&A session for a packed house. “It’s local lore here,” Wilson said.
The lore was enhanced a few years ago by the appearance at those Ennis showings of veteran actor William Devane, who plays Leonard Blach. Devane brings to 50 to 1 the solid weight of a TV and movie career that includes everything 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 nothing compared to the way jaws dropped last year at the sight of Rich Strike winning the Derby at odds of 80-1. Wilson and Conroy were among the millions watching 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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