NEWS
‘Thoroughbred’ provides introduction to horse racing
Posted: Sunday, March 07, 2010 3:36 PM
by Frank Angst
The most visually powerful scene in Thoroughbred also answers the question newcomers surely will ask as they watch sheikhs spend millions at sales, owners despair over an ill-timed injury, and breeders, trainers, and gamblers devote time and money to the sport.
“Why?”
Thoroughbred, the first program funded by Kentucky Educational Television (KET)’s Endowment for Kentucky Productions, answers that question in a quiet, extended scene in a single stall at Stone Farm.
Before that powerful scene, the documentary provides a whirlwind introduction to horse racing. Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Wagner travels to Aqueduct, looking at everything from daily care of horses, to racetrack operations, to the thrill of picking a winner. Then it is off to Dubai to highlight Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Maktoum’s racing operations. The documentary zips into Lexington for a sale, visits breeding farms, and drops in at Churchill Downs in Louisville for Kentucky Derby (G1) week.
Wagner, who earned an Oscar for best documentary, short subject, for his work on The Stone Carvers in 1984, set a mileage record for this production.
“We tried—I hope it’s obvious—to get just a sampling, give people a little flavor,” Wagner said. “We only had the time to talk to a limited number of people, so we tried to select pretty carefully.”
In a rough cut of the film, those people include Sheikh Mohammed’s bloodstock adviser, John Ferguson; Stone Farm owner Arthur B. Hancock III; and Tom McCarthy, trainer of Grade 1 winner General Quarters.
Thoroughbred will premiere on Monday on KET at 8 p.m. EST. KET expects many Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) channels to pick up the broadcast, but those details are being worked out.
“We don’t want the film to look or sound stupid for people who really know the business. We want to have credibility there. But really, the audience is much larger and broader than that,” Wagner said. “We’ve said from the beginning that this is a film for people who watch the Kentucky Derby and that’s all they know about horse racing. That’s the approach we’ve taken.”
Wagner attended the University of Kentucky, where he developed a taste for racing at Keeneland Race Course and met people who worked at horse farms, but going into the project, that was the extent of his involvement.
“In a way, that’s good,” Wagner said. “I’m going to have the same questions the average person is going to have about all of this. Sometimes it helps to ask questions, dumb questions, to get people to kind of open up. That’s one of the fun things about documentary filmmaking in that you kind of immerse yourself in these subjects, these worlds.”
A veteran of 30 films, Wagner enjoys shining a light on worlds unfamiliar to the masses. The Stone Carvers looked at some of the country’s few remaining sculptors completing work at the Washington National Cathedral.
“In this case, it’s the exotic world of Thoroughbreds, which of course isn’t exotic at all for the people who live in it,” Wagner said. “But for the rest of the world, it is pretty exotic. They’ve never been on the backstretch at Aqueduct. They’ve never been in the sales ring at Keeneland. It’s kind of foreign territory for most Americans. I hope that we’ve been able to open the door, kind of part the curtain, to help them understand what that world is about; help them understand why people are passionate about these animals.”
As for a one-word answer on people’s passion for the sport? The film’s key scene suggests that answer is “hope.”
Frank Angst is senior writer for Thoroughbred Times
