{"id":3882,"date":"2020-02-04T12:53:46","date_gmt":"2020-02-04T19:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/?p=3882"},"modified":"2020-02-04T12:53:46","modified_gmt":"2020-02-04T19:53:46","slug":"40th-film-anniversary-behind-the-scenes-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/40th-film-anniversary-behind-the-scenes-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"40th film anniversary!! Behind the scenes part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cowboys and Indians magazine<\/a><\/span> did a nice series of articles for the 40th anniversary of “The Black Stallion” (1979)<\/p>\n

Don’t forget to stop by the shop for a little luck!<\/span><\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

<\/p>\n

\n

The Black Stallion: A Heartwarming Epic For The Ages<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\n

BY Elizabeth Kaye McCall <\/span><\/p>\n

November 25, 2019<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n

Still fantastic at 40, one of the best-loved horse movies of all time almost didn\u2019t get made.<\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

It was 3 a.m. when Carroll Ballard\u2019s phone rang with a call<\/span> from Francis Ford Coppola, who was then in Sicily filming The Godfather: Part II<\/i>. The two had gone to film school together at UCLA and the middle-of-the-night call was Coppola telling him he thought they should do a film together. Months and ideas later, Coppola sent Ballard a copy of a novel that producer pal Fred Roos had heard about from his then girlfriend. It was her favorite childhood book: The Black Stallion<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t like the book when it was first presented to me,\u201d says Ballard, 83, in a rare interview at his hilltop home in St. Helena, California. \u201cI thought, What is this? Leave It to Beaver<\/i>? I wanted to make War and Peace<\/i>!\u201d But he finally \u201cwised up\u201d about the opportunity at hand, and in a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction convergence of events\u2009\u2014\u2009including a typhoon in the Philippines that destroyed the set on Coppola\u2019s Apocalypse Now<\/i>\u2009\u2014\u2009the modern classic, turning 40 this October, came to life.<\/p>\n

Ballard munches on a quesadilla in a sunroom looking out on the pond flanked by his vineyard, as recollections of years spent on his visual masterpiece return. \u201cI wondered for a long time, How is it that this book became such a big hit. Because I was dwelling on the old trainer and the kid talking,\u201d he says. \u201cStuff I thought was totally predictable. But, there is this thing<\/i>. I really didn\u2019t see it for a long time. There is a mythic element in the book. It\u2019s every child\u2019s desire to have a powerful friend who can do things and who will make him powerful too. That\u2019s what\u2019s in this film. It\u2019s mythic and in the form of a black horse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on Walter Farley\u2019s 1941 children\u2019s novel, The Black Stallion<\/i> is the story of a young boy named Alec Ramsay who survives a fiery shipwreck off the coast of North Africa. The accident kills his father (played by Hoyt Axton) and the boy finds himself stranded alone on a deserted island with a wild Arabian stallion that he befriends and names The Black. Later, after Alec is rescued, he returns\u2009\u2014\u2009with the horse\u2009\u2014\u2009to his newly widowed mother in America. There, after meeting a once-successful retired racehorse trainer who helps him enter a match race between two champions of the track, he puts his bond with The Black to the test.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Turning Farley\u2019s novel into a film proved daunting. \u201cI could never figure out how we were going to put the two parts of the story together,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cI agreed to try and make a movie, but it was three years later that we finally got the go-ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fate stepped in. \u201cI don\u2019t know that we would have, if it hadn\u2019t been for this huge typhoon in the Philippines while Francis was shooting Apocalypse Now<\/i>. It wiped out all their sets. It was a catastrophe. They had to cancel the whole production, and they all came back. He didn\u2019t have any money to finish the movie. A way out for him was to sell the script of The Black Stallion<\/i> to United Artists,\u201d Ballard says.<\/p>\n

The production was dead in the water, he says, when Coppola made the deal with United Artists to make the movie. \u201cNobody liked the script, but Francis had so much power in the business at that point that UA went for it\u2009\u2014\u2009they green-lighted the movie. It would never have seen the light of day without him.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that was just the beginning of a whole new set of problems. \u201cThere we were with a script nobody was too interested in, and I did not know what this movie was going to be about,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cI had a few little ideas, and then we\u2019re out there\u2009\u2014\u2009150 people and horses. What do we do now? Aggh! I think it was touch\u00a0<\/span>and go all the way through the movie whether we could pull the two halves of the story together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ballard grew up on Lake Tahoe\u2019s waterfront when the area was a wilderness. He originally intended to go into design, but an unplanned route to Hollywood started to take shape when he joined the Army and the sergeant in his unit had a film club. He faced immense logistical and creative problems in the making of The Black Stallion<\/i>, and he\u2019d never helmed a full-length feature film.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

After film school, he\u2019d made several documentaries for the U.S. Information Agency, Beyond This Winter\u2019s Wheat<\/i> and Harvest<\/i> (the latter was nominated for an Academy Award), directed a short called The Perils of Priscilla<\/i>, and made 1969\u2019s Rodeo<\/i>, which had Larry Mahan and Freckles Brown playing themselves in a look at the National Finals Rodeo back when it was in Oklahoma City. His first really big picture came in 1977, when he was the second unit director on Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Eleven-year-old Kelly Reno had no acting experience. But the pairing of him with a black Arabian stallion named Cass-Ol\u00e9 proved a winning combination. Raised on a 10,000-acre Colorado ranch, Reno knew how to ride already and reportedly took the role because he wanted to learn how to swim. That was fulfilled by stunt coordinator Glenn \u201cJ.R.\u201d Randall Jr., who booked Reno into a hotel with a pool near the Randall Ranch in Newhall, California, so he could teach him there. Reno spent half the day swimming and the rest of the day at the barn with horses. It wasn\u2019t just a young lead and a horse that Ballard had to contend with. Besides another black Arabian named Fae-Jur, equine doubles ranged from sorrel Hollywood trick horses to gray \u201cswimming horses\u201d from the Camargue in France, dyed black for the role.<\/p>\n

Though author Farley was a true horse lover, Ballard says they didn\u2019t necessarily\u00a0see eye to eye when it came to equine casting: \u201cFae-Jur was not his idea of what the Black Stallion should be. [The horse] was small and very feisty. I felt that was the magic horse. You could believe he was a spirit of some kind. Cass was a gorgeous horse\u2009\u2014\u2009and big. He was magisterial.\u201d Already a champion Arabian, Cass-Ol\u00e9 did the lion\u2019s share of The Black\u2019s performance on film and notched the starring horse credit.<\/p>\n

Featuring Mickey Rooney as ex-racehorse trainer Henry Dailey and Teri Garr as Alec\u2019s mother, the last half of the story was shot first. \u201cWe filmed [the second half of the story] in about three months in Canada. Then we went to Italy to do the front part of the film,\u201d Ballard says. The location in Italy was the island of Sardinia. \u201cIt was a very backward place at that time, and we were out in very isolated places,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cI told Francis we couldn\u2019t shoot this according to a regular movie schedule. He said, \u2018We\u2019ll just take as long as it takes.\u2019 We spent two months in some beautiful places with the horses. We did this and then we tried that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Horse trainer Corky Randall brought the talent and experience that allowed Ballard to capture some of the most challenging horse scenes ever filmed. The son of Glenn Randall Sr., who trained Roy Rogers\u2019 Trigger, Randall was an established Hollywood ramrod (boss wrangler), when brother Glenn Jr.\u2009\u2014\u2009the film\u2019s stunt coordinator\u2009\u2014\u2009convinced him to do the training. The Black Stallion<\/i> would establish Randall\u2019s legacy as a Hollywood horse trainer.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cCorky picked up that this wasn\u2019t going to be the kind of movie where the horse is going to walk in here and do this and that. He could improvise,\u201d says Ballard, crediting Randall for the signature beach scene where boy and horse become friends. \u201cWe were just shooting there on the beach and said, \u2018Maybe we [can] do something here with Kelly and a little piece of seaweed and a close-up. Maybe we can get him going back and forth. Corky picked up on it and said, \u2018OK, Carroll, where\u2019s the frame line?\u2019 Corky\u2019s right out of frame when the horse is backing up and rearing and coming forward. The whole thing was done in one<\/i> shot, and Corky did the whole thing. He just went in and did it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not much of the filming happened that easily, especially the portion in Sardinia. \u201cIt was a tough shoot, the kind of shoot that Carroll Ballard loves, out there in the elements with a much smaller crew\u2009\u2014\u2009everyone pitching in to carry gear\u2009\u2014\u2009here, there, and over rocks,\u201d says screenwriter Jeanne Rosenberg, who teamed with Melissa Mathison to create a whole new screenplay from scratch, sometimes literally writing scenes on the fly. \u201cI didn\u2019t go overseas, but Melissa was there. [Carroll] has an amazing eye and is quite a storyteller. … There are so many angles\u2009\u2014\u2009high angles and low angles and tracking shots\u2009\u2014\u2009so many things that are so much easier now. Just send the drone out or put the camera on the cable. [But back then] it was so hard, and they did it so well.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At a certain point, Ballard had to stop shooting in Sardinia and move the production to Cinecitt\u00e0 Studios in Rome to shoot the shipwreck sequence even though he still didn\u2019t have all the shots he wanted from Sardinia. \u201cThere\u2019s a tank\u2009\u2014\u2009it was the same pond they used for Cleopatra<\/i>,\u201d Ballard says. (Tidbit: An old growling toilet at the editing location was recorded to create the sinking-ship sounds in the film.) \u201cThat was a month of nights\u2009\u2014\u2009about five nights a week, every night all night. We finished the shooting in Rome, and I didn\u2019t know how we were going to pull it all together. There were really important scenes I wanted to do on the island that I hadn\u2019t gotten, things we couldn\u2019t finish in time.\u201d<\/p>\n

One involved the snake scene, where The Black stomps a cobra about to strike the boy. \u201cWe\u2019d made a deal with a movie snake guy. They promised the snakes had been defanged. They were real cobras. The day we were going to shoot, these two guys showed up in a little car and in the back seat they had two big baskets. They wanted to show me the snakes. I said OK, and out of this basket came this snake. It was the scariest thing you\u2019ve ever seen. I said, \u2018Gee, that\u2019s really scary. I\u2019m glad they\u2019re defanged.\u2019 The guy said, \u2018They\u2019re not defanged! We don\u2019t do it that way. The way we do it is this,\u2019 and he reached over [to] this little refrigerator. Inside was a hypodermic needle. He said, \u2018If the boy gets bitten by the cobra, we just inject him with this.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

Ballard details what followed as if it were yesterday. \u201cA couple hours later, two grips come walking down the beach carrying this gigantic pane of glass. It was out of a store window from somewhere, and they put the glass on the sand and strapped it up. The cobra is on one side of the glass and the boy is on the other, and these cobras were scary. We filmed some, but we weren\u2019t able to get enough angles on the snakes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Three months later, back in Sardinia, the weather had drastically changed. \u201cWe had two weeks to do pickups to fill in the holes. It\u2019s so cold, the snakes can hardly move. So, how are we going to shoot this scene?\u201d Ballard recounts the impromptu solution. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to warm<\/i> up the snakes. Let\u2019s dig a hole in the sand and put some heaters down there so they heat up the sand. We\u2019ll put boards on top and put sand on that. Meanwhile, the wind is blowing like crazy, the sheet of glass is moving around, and the sand keeps blowing against the glass and it\u2019s sticking!\u201d The exasperation he felt remains all these years later. \u201cWhat we were trying to do was get a shot of the snake being scary, and we had this huge contraption and all the heaters going and the snake trying to warm up\u2009\u2014\u2009this whole deal, trying to get one ridiculous shot of the snake.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

An entirely different scenario transpired at Cannon Beach, Oregon, late in the production. (Fortunately, Kelly Reno had not yet started growing facial hair or experienced a growth spurt.) \u201cWe just wanted a shot of Kelly riding Cass-Ol\u00e9 along\u00a0the beach. It was long after we did most of the filming. We were just doing pickup shots. I was really worried about the hardness of the sand. I was worried Kelly might fall.\u201d Ballard suddenly shifts into storyteller mode with a spot-on rendition of horse trainer Corky Randall\u2019s voice. \u201c\u2009\u2018Carroll, that little horse can\u2019t outrun a flea.\u2019 So we decided to do the run. We\u2019re shooting along, it was going great, and all of a sudden Cass took off down the beach and disappeared into the sand dunes. It was terrifying. All Kelly had was that little wire bridle. It ended up being the footage we used.\u201d<\/p>\n

But for Ballard, that wasn\u2019t the toughest scene to get right. \u201cTo me, the hardest, most crucial scene in the whole movie was the scene with his mom, where the boy tells her about the shipwreck,\u201d Ballard recalls. \u201cKelly understood that was an important scene, and he had to express all the things to Teri [Garr]. He pulled it off. He made it believable.\u201d This single scene linked the two parts of the film. \u201cIt pulled the whole thing together,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cIt\u2019s where the boy tells his mother about wanting to be in the match race with The Black. Of course she didn\u2019t know he was secretly training for that and is furious and afraid. Then he pulls out the little Bucephalus horse figurine his father gave him on the ship before the wreck and tells his mother the story his father told him about Alexander the Great and his horse. By the end of the scene and what he shares, the mother agrees.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it was all put together, they had shot an eight-hour movie. \u201cThat\u2019s why it took us a year-and-a-half to edit,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cThere was so much, and we tried to somehow make sense of it. There is some beautiful footage, a lot of funny quirky scenes, but I [didn\u2019t think there was] a way to string them all together. I think we extracted the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Once completed, The Black Stallion<\/i> got shelved by United Artists. \u201cI thought the film was an utter failure,\u201d Ballard confides. \u201cThe studio guys that came to see it thought it was unreleasable. They said, \u2018What is this? Some kind of art movie for kids!\u2019\u2009\u201d Thanks to Coppola\u2019s clout, The Black Stallion<\/i> finally debuted at the New York Film Festival in October 1979 and quickly became a box office hit. Named the best film of the year by Roger Ebert, it earned two Oscar nominations, including one for Mickey Rooney. At the 1980 Academy Awards, The Black Stallion<\/i> won the Special Achievement Award. At the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, the film won Best Cinematography for\u00a0<\/span>Caleb Deschanel, Best Music for Carmine Coppola (Frances Ford Coppola\u2019s father), and the New Generation Award for Ballard. The timeless tribute to the horse-human bond was added to the National Film Registry in 2002.<\/span><\/p>\n

Produced for under $4 million, The Black Stallion<\/i> has grossed roughly $38 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, it was always kind of a mystery how the film became successful,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cWhen I was making it, I felt it was completely out of control and I wasn\u2019t going to be able to fix it. But there was enough continuum that kept everything in balance.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the sunroom grows chilly and Ballard prepares to head back to the main house, he shares a parting anecdote\u2009\u2014\u2009and it\u2019s a great one that reaches back to the days when he was making 1969\u2019s Rodeo<\/i>. \u201cWhile we were filming, I heard this story about this bull called Tornado that nobody could ride,\u201d he recalls. \u201cIt had been years, many rodeos, and nobody could ride Tornado. He was the most fearsome monster. At the [1967] National Finals Rodeo, Freckles Brown … draws Tornado the bull and he rides him, and that night he could have become the governor of Oklahoma.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ballard later asked the Rodeo Hall of Fame cowboy what it took to ride a bull. \u201cFreckles said, \u2018Well, you\u2019ve just got to feel it. You\u2019ve got to feel where the center of gravity is and where it\u2019s going next. And you get your head right there because that\u2019s how you stay in balance on top of that uncontrollable movement that\u2019s going on underneath you. You\u2019ve just got to hear where it\u2019s going and get your head right there.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For the director, it\u2019s an apt analogy\u2009\u2014\u2009for Rodeo<\/i>, for The Black Stallion<\/i>, for making movies in general: \u201cTo me it was always an interesting parallel,\u201d Ballard says. \u201cMaking movies is sort of the same process. It\u2019s kind of uncontrollable. It\u2019s going all over the place. Every day it\u2019s a whole other bunch of unpredictable events and you\u2019ve got to get your head there to stay in balance.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

More about The Black Stallion<\/h3>\n

The Black Stallion\u2019s Accidental Screenwriter<\/a><\/p>\n

The Black Stallion at 40 With Stunt Coordinator Glenn Randall<\/a><\/p>\n

The Black Stallion\u2019s Secret Weapon<\/a><\/p>\n

The Black Stallion at 40 With\u00a0Production Assistant Tim Farley<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Photography: <\/span>(all images) Courtesy Tim Farley<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

From the November\/December 2019 issue.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cowboys and Indians magazine did a nice series of articles for the 40th anniversary of “The Black Stallion” (1979) Don’t forget to stop by the shop for a little luck!   The Black Stallion: A Heartwarming Epic For The Ages BY Elizabeth Kaye McCall November 25, 2019 Still fantastic at 40, one of the best-loved …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1351,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,637],"tags":[281,540,278,67,463,71,543,621,531,469,89,462,461,470,50],"class_list":["post-3882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","category-movie","tag-bucephalus","tag-caleb-deschanel","tag-carroll-ballard","tag-cass-ole","tag-clarence-muse","tag-corky-randall","tag-doug-claybourne","tag-equestrian","tag-francis-ford-coppola","tag-fred-roos","tag-kelly-reno","tag-mickey-rooney","tag-terri-garr","tag-tom-sternberg","tag-walter-farley"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3882"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3885,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3882\/revisions\/3885"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblackstallion.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}