For the 75th Anniversary (1941) Random House is re-issuing the series with new covers. What do YOU think!
Thanks for reading … and writing! – tim & pam
Coming in July this summer! The all new Criterion Collection Special Edition remastered Blu-Ray edition of “The Black Stallion”!!
This is the DIRECTOR APPROVED – SPECIAL EDITION, by Carroll Ballard.
This is sure to be a winner as the digital transfer was supervised by master cinematographer Caleb Deschanel himself!
It has loads of special features – here’s what’s going to be included;
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
**New 4K digital transfer, supervised by director of photography Caleb Deschanel, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
**Five short films by Carroll Ballard, with introductions by the director: Pigs! (1965), The Perils of Priscilla (1969), Rodeo (1969), Seems Like Only Yesterday (1971), and Crystallization (1974)
**New conversation between Ballard and film critic Scott Foundas
**New interview with Deschanel
**New piece featuring photographer Mary Ellen Mark discussing her images from the film’s set
**Trailer
**PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Sragow
The exciting new cover art is by Nicolas Delort.
It will be great to see it again as it should be seen! It’s about time!
Be sure to get a Bucephalus of your own – better than popcorn!
Check back close to the release as we’ll try to get discount codes for purchasing this fantastic NEW edition of “The Black Stallion“!
Here’s a blast for your Black Stallion history, an interview with Kelly Reno about working on the classic movie!
He and his wife, Dawn post on the forum so if you have any questions you may find the answers there already. You can always leave a special note to them – BlackStalGal.
Our friends at Horse Illustrated published this last fall but if you didn’t get a chance to read it then you can now. Stop by their site at www.HorseChannel.com and see all the latest stories.
For a bit of Alec’s magic pick up your own Bucephalus at the Gift store!
Thanks for reading … and writing! – tim
It was 35 years ago when a young boy from Colorado named Kelly Reno thundered down a pristine beach against an aquamarine sea with outstretched arms, riding bareback
on a black Arabian stallion named Cass Ole. Together, they became the embodiment of the boy and horse in Walter Farley’s classic tale, The Black Stallion, giving life to Alec Ramsay and the wild stallion The Black in ways that only the extraordinary visual storytelling of Hollywood conveys.
As timeless today as when the Academy Award winning movie was released in 1979, Reno was only 11 years old with no acting experience when filming began. In contrast, riding was totally ingrained from growing up on his parents’ 10,000-acre cattle ranch.
“Basically, my whole childhood from birth was sitting on horseback somewhere,” says Reno, now 47. A family friend spotted an advertisement in The Denver Post for the lead role in a new movie based on Walter Farley’s book, The Black Stallion, and told Reno’s mother. The idea of getting out of school to go to Denver for auditions held immediate appeal to the young boy. “One thing led to another and I happened to be what they were looking for, and I wound up getting the part,” says Reno. “I had never done any acting, but I was always kind of a ham.” The actor who played Alec Ramsay recalls his classic role.
By Elizabeth Kaye McCall
This is the link to the full story with photos;
HI Kelly and the BlackStallion
Ride on!!!
Here’s a nice article on the Black Stallion in the movies written by our friend Elizabeth McCall.
This were great days in Italy with so much to see, do and learn. Very talented people working on a “small” film like Black Stallion was very, VERY exciting.
Let’s Do it Again!!
Life on the Set of the Black StallionWalter Farley’s son, Tim, talks about the filming of the movie just in time for its 35th anniversary.By Elizabeth Kaye McCall | November 2014 Tim Farley was wrapping up his photography degree at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif., when his father Walter’s 1941 novel, The Black Stallion, began its transformation to the big screen. Francis Ford Coppola’s Academy Award-winning feature film was released 35 years ago this fall, and it remains a cinematic classic. It’s the story of a young boy named Alec Ramsay, who is shipwrecked on a desert island with a wild Arabian stallion that he befriends and names The Black. After being rescued and later discovered by a veteran racehorse trainer, they enter a match race between two champions of the track. Inspiring millions when it debuted in 1979, the film’s exquisite portrayal of the horse-human bond is more appreciated than ever today. Kelly Reno, who plays Alec, grew up riding and was a natural when it came to the bareback scenes. When the movie first headed into production in 1977, Tim skipped his graduation ceremonies to work on it. Were you there from the start? What did you do? But actually my dad is the one who came up with the fun sequence in the jockey’s room before The Black races. It became a humorous scene in the movie, because they kept adding weight to this little kid. The way the script was originally written had Alec sneaking weight into his pockets, or putting on a weight belt or something. My dad said, “Nobody would ever do that because the officials add all the handicap weight jockeys must carry before a race. They would never sneak weight.” He came up with some helpful ideas. What was it like being on the set? It was exciting. Even though we had to take cold showers! Working on those beach sequences, there were no hotels out there. We stayed in an empty school with cold-water showers. Every once in a while you’d see a tourist come through for an hour or two, but we were pretty far out. Almost all the locations were like that. How were those galloping-on-the-beach scenes filmed? What stands out? The budget on The Black Stallion wouldn’t even pay for most TV commercials these days. I think that the actual budget, including advertising, was under $15 million. You took lots of photos on set. How was shooting Cass Ole? What else was memorable? It was fascinating driving to the set daily with Mickey Rooney in Toronto, the location for our 1940s New York scenes. Mickey had been in a long career slump, but The Black Stallion brought him an Oscar nomination and he returned to the stage. Corky Randall trained Cass Ole to come with the crack of a whip. Here’s to the 35th anniversary. What’s ahead? Speaking of Blu-Ray … ELIZABETH KAYE McCALL is an author, journalist, and media consultant based in Los Angeles, Calif., specializing in the horse industry, travel and entertainment. Her new children’s book about a talking horse, Rajalika Speak, was inspired by her own Egyptian Arabian stallion that “speaks on request.” President and creator of TheBlackStallion.com, the official Black Stallion fan site, TIM FARLEY is based in Florida, where he furthers the spirit of The Black Stallion legacy along with his work as co-founder of the HorseTales.org literacy program. |
TCM is broadcasting the “Black Stallion” a on Sunday. When you are tired of football get some popcorn and curl up on the couch and order your Christmas presents from the Trading Post while you watch :-)
Here’s the story;
by Emily L. Rice
One of the most critically acclaimed films from 1979, The Black Stallion, was based on the classic children’s tale written by Walter Farley in 1941. Despite the book’s popularity and that of its sixteen sequels, it was never adapted for the screen until Francis Ford Coppola purchased the rights. He planned to release the film as the first film in a series of classical children’s films. The second film in the series, The Secret Garden, was released in 1993. Coppola called on his former UCLA classmate, Carroll Ballard to direct the first installment, making The Black Stallion Ballard’s feature film debut. His first movie was a documentary entitled Harvest (1967) which was nominated for an Academy Award ®.
The Black Stallion is an exotic and often magical tale of a young boy and his horse. When the film opens, the boy and his father are traveling by ship when a disaster occurs. A fire breaks out and the boy finds himself adrift in the rough seas with an Arabian horse he saw on board. Both the boy and the stallion are washed ashore a deserted island where they overcome an initial mistrust to form a strong bond. Soon the two are rescued and return to the U.S. But the horse runs away and the boy eventually traces the animal to a farm owned by an ex-jockey. In time, the boy learns from the former pro how to be a first rate rider and trains the stallion for a championship race.
In his film debut, Kelly Reno plays the young, aspiring jockey; he had never acted before in any medium, and he was not even a fan of film or television. “Oh, if there’s a good movie, the family’ll take a bag of popcorn and go.” When asked what he considered a “good movie,” he responded, “I guess Star Wars (1977) — I’ve seen it twice. As for TV, I don’t watch it much, except for Soap,” he explained in the September 30, 1979 issue of The New York Times. But when Reno heard from a friend that a movie company was coming to Colorado to look for boys who could ride horses, he persuaded his parents to drive him to Denver for an audition. According to producer Tom Sternberg, “We’d considered all sorts of professional child actors. Then we began to search for boys who may not have acted, but who might be right for the role. We eventually interviewed several hundred from around the country and tested 100.” And the saddle-trained Reno was one of the lucky ones who earned a screen test in L.A..
The $4.5 million film took two years to make and involved five months of shooting in Canada, Rome, and Sardinia. For Reno, whose only trips outside Colorado were to North Dakota and L.A. for the screen test, the film became quite an adventure. His parents chaperoned him while on location, but he still admitted he got homesick. “In Rome, I’d have paid $10,000 for a McDonald’s hamburger – you never know how much you want that if after a week all you get is spaghetti. And I had me a little wine, but after a week, I started drinking cokes again.”
During the first week of shooting, Reno enjoyed the work, but he kept glancing at the camera in the middle of scenes. He recalled that the director, Carroll Ballard, “would tell me, ‘This is the way it is…do it.’ If I didn’t get it done, we’d just have to do it all over again. Lines weren’t a problem. I had a lot of them, but they weren’t in the whole, long scenes. And I could put in other words if the meaning was the same – that was all right with Carroll.” Reno also did all his own stunt work. He had to ride bareback and on a racing saddle, take falls from a galloping horse, and swim. The only time a stunt double was used was for racetrack sequences, which required his character to race a thoroughbred at top speed. “I was too small to hold him back,” says Reno.
The most demanding scene Reno recalled was the shipwreck sequence during a turbulent storm. For this scene, Ballard used the huge water tank at Cinecitta Studios in Rome. “It was all done at night,” says Reno. “And they had wind and rain and fire and smoke. I spent a lot of time in the tank, not being able to touch the bottom, while they made these waves that came far over my head.” Ballard also used a completely realistic model ship to burn and sink headfirst while the boy and the horse struggled in the foreground.
With scenes such as the shipwreck, the horse in this film, Cass-Ole, had to perform as few other horses ever have. Cass-Ole’s trainer was one of Hollywood’s greatest animal trainers, Corky Randall. He trained “Trigger” for Roy Rogers, “Silver” for the Lone Ranger, and all the horses in the chariot-race scene in Ben-Hur (1959).
Mickey Rooney plays the horse trainer in the film, a nostalgic reminder to audiences of his role as a former jockey in National Velvet (1944). Rooney also played a jockey in both Down the Stretch (1936) and Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937). He went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film. Rooney recalls how he first heard about the film, “Francis Ford Coppola got on the horn to tell me he’d purchased the rights to a children’s classic called The Black Stallion. He had a part in it for me, a former jockey called out of retirement by a little boy with a beautiful black Arabian horse and a dream about winning a race. Did I think I could play a former jockey? ‘Gee,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I never played a jockey before.’
The Black Stallion became a hit at the box-office and received great critical praise. In addition to Rooney’s nomination, the film also received an Academy nomination for Best Editing and the Oscar for Best Film Editing. A sequel, The Black Stallion Returns, was later released in 1983.
Producer: Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Roos, Tom Sternberg
Director: Carroll Ballard
Screenplay: Melissa Mathison, Jeanne Rosenberg, William D. Wittliff, Walter Farley (novel)
Cinematography: Caleb Deschanel
Film Editing: Robert Dalva
Art Direction: Aurelio Crugnola, Earl G. Preston
Music: Carmine Coppola
Cast: Kelly Reno (Alec Ramsey), Mickey Rooney (Henry Dailey), Teri Garr (Alec’s Mother), Clarence Muse (Snoe), Hoyt Axton (Alec’s Father), Michael Higgins (Neville).
C-118m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.