Too hot to be busy but what choice do we have?? Someone has to get them fed and watered! Let’s head to the river …or better yet, the beach!
Did you see the video of the Arabian Nights sales last weekend?
The end of an era, kinda sad, but the horses are all going to great new homes!!!
Take a look and drop us a line on the forum when you get a second (or facebook, too)
Mickey Rooney passed away yesterday, a sad loss to the entire entertainment world. Mickey started at two years old and was still making movies this year at 93! His legacy will endure as history has already shown. His performance as Henry Dailey, with Kelly Reno as Alec Ramsay, in Carroll Ballard’s classic “The Black Stallion” for MGM /UA brought an Oscar nomination for Mickey, many yeas after he was a an MGM contract actor. His work when he was the young heartthrob for the studio only brought him a marriage to young Ava Gardner – every inch a classic at 5 foot three!
I had the pleasure and honor to ride to the set every day with Mickey and heard a lot of his wonderful stories as the miles swept by. Sometimes those rides were the highlight of my day … and that’s saying something as those were exciting days. To see him perform, a true entertainer, singer, dancer & actor was a treat not to be forgotten. He had boundless energy that shows in every frame of film.
After his work on “Black Stallion” in 1979 Mickey went on to Broadway with Ann Miller and “Sugar Babies”, a tribute to his song and dance Vaudeville roots. It was a hit running for over three years with rave reviews and awards.
In 1988 we had the pleasure to team up with Mr. Rooney again with the TV show “Adventures of the Black Stallion” for a three year series. Mickey continued his role as Henry Dailey with Richard Cox as Alec.
Here’s a great article on Mickey – good or bad boy – he was a REAL original;
Mickey Rooney Was the Last Old Hollywood Star Standing
He was an astonishing actor, a galvanized entertainer and a star who could never diminish his own glory (though he tried). He was Puck and Baby Face Nelson—only in America. But it is not enough to say that we have lost an actor, a vaudevillian, an artist, and a national treasure. It is the force that is gone, and the sense of that force as part of our history. We know what it is to admit that there is no one left alive who fought in the trenches of the Great War. Soon there will be no one left who existed in a Nazi concentration camp. So Mickey Rooney was the last male left alive who had been a true star and a phenomenon in the 1930s, when Hollywood believed it ran the show and had established the idea of some spunky, brilliant kids doing it. After all, the show was hardly a thing for which one could expect adult participation.
Joseph Yule Jr. was ninety-three at the end; he had been five-feet-two once; and there had been eight wives and nine children, many of whom may have tottered away from the experience in exhaustion and disbelief. He was not easygoing, and not restrained by reality or fact. In the late ’30s, when he was the number 3 champion at the box office (following Clark Gable and Shirley Temple), he let it be known that Mickey Mouse had been named after him. Walt Disney did not recall it that way, but why would anyone attend to his rather grim, clerical manner when the wide eyes and the wider imagination of the Mick were on offer? Years after the death of Judy Garland, Rooney looked back on their screen association. He said their love affair—which had never been an affair—was intense beyond description. It meant, he said, in 1992, that Judy was not really or exactly or simply dead. She lived on in him. Such talk is easily taken as show business hyperbole, and by 1992 that had become an alien language. But the truth is that Mick meant it. He believed. Stranger things had happened—notably the way he was Andy Hardy in fourteen films at MGM, as well as Judy’s partner in films where the couple put on a show, climaxing in Babes in Arms, which was one of the biggest box-office hits of 1939, even bigger than The Wizard ofOz.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Mickey Rooney and Ava Gardner in 1942.
The story of how MGM and its father figure, Louis B. Mayer, tried to keep Mickey and Judy kids forever and out of trouble would make an astonishing movie. There is only one drawback to the plan: No one now can match or understand the ferocious acting-out dynamic of all three parties. Mayer may have hoped that the vast sexual energy in both kids might be married off, but Mickey became a serial marrier. He started with Ava Gardner, who was nowhere near a star yet and was four inches taller than he was. He moved on to Martha Vickers, who is Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep, the nymph who tries to sit down in Bogart’s lap while he’s still standing up. The mere idea of Mickey and Martha together (1949-52) tends to eclipse the nuclear testing that was so popular at that time. I know, that’s excessive and vulgar, but we are talking about Mickey Rooney.
Anyone would have anticipated that the Mick would burn out. By about 1950, the generation of child stars he had grown up with were looking for careers in stockbroking and settled marriages. Judy was cracking up, but Shirley Temple, Freddie Bartholomew, Deanna Durbin and Jackie Cooper were all facing up to reality. Rooney went broke—god knows what happened to his money. He should have subsided, or come to a bad end. He never stopped. Only a few years ago, I was driving in rural Oregon and came to a settlement, with a casino and dinner theatre, and there he was doing one of his shows.
That view of his undying thunderstorm could be amused and patronizing, so let me just say to those who hardly knew him and who lack the time to track down everything he did—he has 340 credits on IMDb—try these (going back in time):
Express Newspapers/Getty Images
Rooney in 1971.
Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion is a film that never fails with audiences. One reason why is that after the lyrical stuff on the island with the horse and the boy, the story moves on to horse-racing where Mick is the trainer who teaches the boy to be a jockey on the Black for the big race. It is one of the finest tributes to education in American cinema.
In 1957, for the big screen, he was the lead in Don Siegel’s Baby Face Nelson—brilliant, hilarious, demonic; and in the same year, on the small screen, directed by John Frankenheimer from a Rod Serling script, he did The Comedian for Playhouse 90—monstrous, inspired, terrifying.
Last, let it be first. In the Max Reinhart film of A MidsummerNight’s Dream, made at Warner Brothers in 1936, he was Puck. Many years ago, an English critic said of that performance, “Rooney seems inhuman, he moves like mist or water, his body is burnished by the extraordinary light, and his gurgling laugh is ghostly and enchanting.” Let that stand.
One co-star in the Dream was Olivia de Havilland, and she is still alive and (I hope) very well (she is the last female star from that era). I’m not sure if they met during the filming, but it’s pretty and tempting to picture the two of them together—Mickey sixteen, Olivia nineteen—with her offering him advice to calm down, behave and think of his career, while knowing that he was not going to do one damn thing she told him.
We’ll all miss you Mr. Rooney – but we’ll see you at the movies.
Tim, Kelly, Carroll, Doug, Caleb, Fred, Tom … and all your Black Stallion friends!
Here’s the discount code for the new Blu Ray of The Black Stallion!
Be sure to tell your friends and school too!
Post a note on the Forum about who all you watched it with and your favorite parts. Maybe Kelly will write a note about staring eye to eye with a cobra ;-}
http://www.foxconnect.com/the-black-stallion-37758.html
code word is; ALEC.
The release day is March 18 and the code is only good from then till the end of the month.
Chapter One Introducing….horses in film
The concept of a horse as a celebrity is easy enough to accept – because, after all, few celebrities become famous for actually doing much. But horses as actors? Isn’t their ‘acting’ all trickery and Computer Generated Imagery?
Well, one of the greatest film directors of all time, Steven Spielberg, who directed the moving film War Horse with some 280 horses, has said: ‘The horses were an extraordinary experience for me, because several members of my family ride. I was really amazed at how expressive horses are and how much they can show what they’re feeling.’ War Horse, released in 2012, tells the epic tale of how Albert, a young boy, and his beloved farm horse, Joey, are separated and undergo harrowing adventures in World War One. In the process of filming, yes, there were stunts, props, tricks and Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), but there was also great acting by the horse stars. The horse actors had make-up – and indeed their own make-up artist. But what shines through, what really impresses the audience, is the personality and inherent beauty of the horses. No amount of cinematic trickery or CGI can replace the genuine dramatic qualities of horses.
For example, horses provide a feast for the eyes. Throughout the history of cinema, audiences have fallen for the most glamorous screen stars. This is just as true for horse stars – especially the outstandingly beautiful ones with their gleaming coats of pure black or dazzling white, or the Palominos with a golden coat and flowing silver tail. Think of the well-toned bodies, with manes to die for, of horses such as Black Beauty, Gandalf’s horse Shadowfax or Roy Rogers’ Trigger. Lights! Camera! Gallop! will introduce you to all these and many more: the great stars and some lesser-known but still brilliant actors, from the beginning of film to the present time. You will learn about their film characters and their real off-screen personalities.
You’ll also find out about how some of the most awe-inspiring scenes involving horses were filmed and even how to spot some of the tricks of the trade. All the main genres of film featuring horses are covered: Westerns (great for stunts and exciting chase sequences), ‘wild horse’ movies (surviving against enormous odds), action films (even horses versus Nazis!) and comedies (horses on pianos, horses tricking humans – and a drunken horse).
A word on terminology: many of the great horse actors were stars in the days when – for example – Native Americans were routinely referred to as ‘Indians’ and frequently depicted as ‘the cowboys’ enemy.’
Here’s a great magazine article from Western Horseman about the star of The Black Stallion film, Cass Ole’. He was one fantastic black Arabian stallion who had exceptional training from Hollywood legend cowboy Corky Randall and became quite a STAR in his own right. There were amazing stunt horses and “trick horses”, quarter horse and others, to help make the impossible – possible, but that Cass Ole’, he was something else.
To honor Cass Ole’ we’ve put the Bucephalus on sale … something to bring you a little luck as you sail on the Drake towards your own adventures! We’ll be adding more articles, some that you may never have seen, and even a whole new section with magazines and Stallion history from all over the world. Check back again soon!