I was having my house painted in 1971 when the painter invited me to go to Hollywood Park horse races with him. I had never been to a track because I always looked at watching races as two minutes of action followed by 28 minutes of betting and drinking while you waited for the next one.
My painter was a heavy bettor on the races and knew everyone at the track. After the big race of the day he took me down to the paddock area where I got to touch the winning horse. It turned out that the horse was worth about $1 million, and I stood there with the sweat of that horse on my hand and was hypnotized by his beauty and strength.
My film-making curiosity kicked in and on the way home I got the name of the public relations director from the painter and called him the next day. I introduced myself and asked him if I could see any of the movies he used to promote the race track. Two days later, a half-dozen 16mm films showed up at my office and I eagerly watched every one of them. There was not one single extreme close-up of a horse. Just shots taken from the roof of the grandstand.
I got permission to go the race track and shoot a few rolls of film from my close up, arms-length point of view. Four days later, the PR director called me and said, “We saw your pictures and are only running races for eight more days this spring and we want you to make a movie for us. Can you start this afternoon?”
My cameraman Don Brolin and I showed up that afternoon and shot every race. After the last race that afternoon, I said, “Don, we need to rent a 24-to-240mm zoom lens for our Arriflexes as well as two 1,000-mm telephoto lenses. And you need to warm up the Mitchell so we can get 1,000 frames a second slow motion shots.”
By race time the next day we were ready. I had practiced tilting, panning and zooming with this exceptionally heavy lens pretending to get extreme close-ups of airplane engines at LAX just before the planes were landing. I was at the end of the runway and it was not an easy camera to move, but after about a 100 practice landings I was ready to go to work at the track.
That afternoon we really got underway and, at best, we could still only get one shot each per race, or 16 shots of horses running per day, and we only had six days left. In between races we shot everything, including, but not limited, people, horses, swans in flight, tractors. We shot a lot of background film.
Don put the 1,000-frame-per-second camera right under the inside rail on the turn. This camera expanded one second of action into 22 seconds of screen time as he got close-ups of the horses’ hoofs. He also got close ups of the head and shoulders of the horse and just the head and shoulders of the jockey. Don got great images that have never been captured before or since.
It was hot and smoggy and we had to wear coats and ties to work in the infield. We both bought sport coats at the Goodwill because we knew they would smell of animal sweat and horse manure when we got through with the job. Don climbed up into the starting gates and filmed the horses leaping out on the bell. We were able to get unusual shots because of our long experience of filming ski action under extreme conditions.
The thousands of feet of film was edited into a great (if I do say so myself) 23-minute film without narration – just music. The track eventually took three slow motion scenes and made a TV commercial out of it. When it ran to promote a special race the traffic jams getting to the track were so crowded that the man who played the trumpet to announce the call was over an hour late getting to the track and they had to use a tape recording to announce the first two races.
In the 50 years I made my ski movies, I also made over 100 other half-hour movies of sports besides skiing. This is the story of just one of them and it received more film festival awards than any of the other 99. Unfortunately, except for the TV commercials, it was never shown on television. Making that film, I learned how well arm’s length photography worked and practiced it for the last 25 years of my ski movie making career.