Phar Lap and Secretariat were both supremely successful chestnuts who shared the nickname ‘Big Red’. Legends of the racetrack, they have appeared on postage stamps, been honoured with statues and researched by historians – and both have had films made about them.
Although Secretariat still holds some track records to this day, and is arguably the faster horse, Phar Lap was a big weight carrier. They never competed against each other as their careers were decades apart, so it is unlikely the debate will ever be solved.
The Australian film Phar Lap was made back in 1983 and was featured in the February 2021 edition of Equestrian Life. Secretariat, made by Walt Disney Films, came out much later, in 2010, starring Diane Lane, who played Colorado housewife and mother of four, Penny Chenery, and John Malkovich as racing trainer, Lucien Laurin.
It is largely based on William Nack’s Secretariat: The Making of a Champion, published in 1975, although there are some fictional scenes included in the screenplay. The film chronicles the life of the 16.2hh stallion and how his owner takes over the stables of her dying father despite her lack of racing knowledge. With the help of the veteran trainer, Laurin, she navigates the male-dominated business ultimately fostering the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years.
Secretariat had strong bloodlines, sired by Bold Ruler out of Somethingroyal, with the grandsire being Nasrullah and the damsire Princequillo. When he was born in March 1970, he stood almost instantly, astonishing observers who had never seen a newborn foal get up so quickly.
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Throughout the picture Diane Lane wore a blonde wig, in the style of Jacqueline Kennedy, which she named ‘Peaches’.
In total, 35 horses were used with five portraying Secretariat. Rusty Hendrickson, the veteran head wrangler, had put out the word he was looking for handsome chestnuts who were calm and sound. As the picture was about a muscular horse with a short back and round hip, Quarter Horses were considered as well as Thoroughbreds, resulting in one being selected named ‘Copper’. The rest were TBs including ‘Sky’, who was one of the famous stallion’s descendants.
The real Penny Chenery chose ‘Longshot Max’, and ‘Trolley Boy’ who did most of the close-up work with the actors. ‘Trolley’, who was the stallion’s great-great-grandson, had similar markings of three white socks, a star and a narrow stripe.
“In racing you only get one shot
when the gates open. Luckily,
with acting I had several chances.”
It was the job of assistant wrangler Lisa Brown to ensure all horses looked the same. “Many were dangerous to paint and they’d try and kick you,” she recalls. “I learned to be very quick and efficient.”
It was wrangler Mark Warrack, now working on Yellowstone, who helped educate the leads. As Hendrickson explains, racehorses have little physical interaction. “They’re in separate compartments with dividers so they won’t kick each other when being transported, and you can’t put all of them into one big pasture for the same reason. Most of their lives are spent in a 10’x10’ stall. But they’re herd animal so no wonder they get cranky living the way they do. With the two used for the major scenes I turned them out together but, before doing that, Warrack regularly rode them in a western saddle and gave them some manners.”
One of the humans was also a thorn in the side of the horse department. John Malkovich, playing trainer Laurin, kept bringing his horse peppermints. “We never handfeed, it teaches them to bite – I had to look the other way,” sighed Hendrickson.
Up on the screen there was little interaction between actor and horse and many film critics wrote that Malkovich was over-dramatic while wearing garish hats. After being cast he had said: “It wasn’t so much the role that appealed, it was the story of the racehorse. Within my own early adulthood, it was probably one of the massive and significant sporting events in America. Secretariat was magnificent, unbelievably beautiful and powerful. It’s always nice to see something that close to perfection. He was adored then and is still adored now. So I was fascinated by the story.” And spent a lot of time away from the set spoiling the animals.
The characterisations of Secretariat’s devoted groom, Eddie Sweat (Nelson Ellis), and jockey Ronnie Turcotte (Otto Thorwarth) were realistic. It was the first acting role for Thorwarth, who had formerly been a jockey. “In racing you only get one shot when the gates open,” he explains. “Luckily, with acting I had several chances. Malkovich’s advice was to take as many shots as I needed to get it right, which was a huge relief.
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Nelson Ellis, portraying the stallion’s groom, was stomped on and bitten in the stomach during filming. The actor, who struggled with drug and alcohol abuse for years, went on to star in HBO’s True Blood. Sadly, he died in 2017 while attempting withdrawal on his own. He was 39.
“The racing sequences were a lot harder than I imagined. They were very adamant about all the horses being in the same spots as they’d originally been back in the day with the same amount of length in between them. When you have 12 horses on set this was tough. We tried to duplicate that as best as we could, but it was certainly a challenge. The acting part was surprisingly very easy and fun. I really enjoyed it.”
Thorwarth remembers that on set there was a bulletin board that had colour-coded thumb tacks representing where the horses were to be positioned and how far the riders, who were real jockeys, needed to be from one another.
“That gave us a visual of what to go for,” he says. “Sometimes we needed to do a few takes but we got it. And at times they’d even ask my opinion on which of the five horses on set would be appropriate to replicate that scene. It was very much a collaborative effort.”
“There’s one moment,
just as he crosses that line,
where he’s airborne —
all four legs off the ground!”
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Actor/rider Otto Thorwarth, who played Secretariat’s original jockey, Ronnie Turcotte, is now an ordained minister working as a chaplain in Kentucky. He holds bible studies each week at Horseshoe Indianapolis Casino and Racetrack and baptises new Christians in a horse trough.
The bulletin board was the idea of the cinematographer, and director Randall Wallace. He had grown up a Southern Baptist attending tent revivals, which is probably why Disney hired him for this squeaky-clean racehorse film which never once referred to bookmakers.
Australian cinematographer, Dean Semler – who was mentioned in the article on Dances with Wolves in our December issue – shot adventurous and unique high-action footage. In many sequences he used an Olympus PEN camera. “It could sit inches above the track, a few feet behind the horses, close to their noses or chests, or on the jockeys’ faces or hands. What’s more, if something happened, it could be pulled out immediately. The safety advantage was huge. It was used in the dirt, right behind the horses’ hooves, and looking forward down the track as they broke out of the gate. I also put one at the top of the starting gate, looking straight down on Secretariat as he went out. It was a quick piece, but it’s the final cut.”
Semler was very proud of a slow-motion sequence at the winning post. “In real time it was no longer than a half-second, but in slomo it was 30. You see every muscle, every hair. There’s one moment, just as he crosses that line, where he’s airborne — all four legs off the ground! We did only two takes. It’s just spectacular!”
This film was responsible for one of the actors taking up the cause of retired Thoroughbreds in the US that are often shipped for slaughter after finishing their racing lives. James Cromwell, who played billionaire stockbroker and breeder Ogden Phipps, became a voice for giving a fair go to horses leaving the track. And when starring as Farmer Hoggett in Babe several years before in Australia, he had become a vegan motivated by working with a lot of animals and trainers.
The 82-year-old actor is clearly a committed animal activist. After the 2011 Kentucky Derby he wrote to the Jockey Club that “these magnificent animals shouldn’t end up on a meat hook after a terrifying journey to a terrifying death”. And in May last year, he superglued his hand to a Starbucks’ counter protesting the coffee chain’s extra charge for plant-based milk.
Critics appreciated his performance in Secretariat, saying he “convincingly portrayed a man who, by all rights, ought to be snobbish but ended up a delight”.
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In the scene where Secretariat pees near a man’s feet, the urine was added digitally.
After the film’s success, the real Penny Chenery also actively supported animal welfare by establishing the Secretariat Foundation in Kentucky to serve as a non-profit charitable organisation within the Thoroughbred and equine-related industries. It supports research into horse lameness; Thoroughbred retirement and rehabilitation facilities; therapeutic programs and general funding for related established charitable programs.
Aged 19, Secretariat suffered from seriously debilitating laminitis and was euthanised in October 1989.
The film earned $60 million on a $35 million budget and many reviews were reasonably favourable about the leading actors. “Although the horses who played Secretariat didn’t capture the majesty and physical presence of Big Red, the equine stars did well enough, considering there isn’t a horse alive who could have done justice to him,” wrote Steve Haskin in The Blood Horse.
Secretariat is available on DVD and streaming services. You can also view Secretariat – a full documentary on YouTube. EQ
Next time in Horses & the Movies, the ’60s documentary The Horse with the Flying Tail.
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