Our riding center used to loan horses to the movie producers.
We would deliver them, they had wranglers that took care of the horses and the people that were to ride them.
Some of their stories were scary, some hilarious.
A really nice horse would be for the better actors, many horses in westerns were the same one used for both, the indians and soldiers.
We can see that in the movies, the same horse keeps showing up in totally unrelated scenes.
Horses were taken care of well as far as feed and water and not coming back with problems from bad riding.
In contrast to the not so horribly hurt horse in the Horse Whisperer, the horse in War horse wrapped up in a huge ball of barb wire comes out with just some flesh wounds. I’ve seen a horse’s leg sawed in half by one strand of barb wire!
Nobody wants to watch a horse movie with me anymore. I wonder why?
I’ve been watching some old westerns since I’ve been laid up with a broken ankle. In one a mare was foaling and labor lasted at least 12 hours, maybe more. Both mare and foal were fine. In another a mare would not allow the foal to nurse. This went on for two or three days. Foal refused a bottle. They finally built a stanchion for the mare and the foal nursed and was perfectly healthy.
The thing that drove me to madness about The Horse Whisperer (the book) was when they took the horse to Cornell Vet and talked about being able to see “Lake Cayuga” from the vet school parking lot.
a) It’s Cayuga Lake and b) that is an impossible view from the parking lot. Get up into one of the buildings and sure, but not from ground level.
“…the horse in War horse wrapped up in a huge ball of barb wire comes out with just some flesh wounds.” Oh yeah! That got to me too. Also, that he just laid there and let them cut him out. Yes, there are horses that will do that, but they are the exception. Most horses would panic and get hurt even worse!
Caper that’s the one! But I can’t remember what it’s for…some kind of health thing? Because she’s supposed to be showing she’s feeling so good that she’s going to ride a horse?
You’re right, he really didn’t, to start with. Nicholas Sparks followed Buck Brannaman around for a while to gain some knowledge after he’d already decided to write the book. Sparks modeled the Tom Booker character after Buck, and when it came time to make the movie Buck was Redford’s stunt double.
Watched Sylvester with Melissa Gilbert and directed by Tim Hunter. Most frustrating scene is when she’s trying to get the horse over his dislike of water and involves a large circular water trough. Not the most realistic of movies but it is the least frustrating horse based movie that I have watched.
Any movie that involves jumping down onto the horse’s back from up high (ie, jumping off a cliff while being pursued by bad guys, and landing on your horse waiting patiently below).
Old Westerns - where the horses are all galloping along a zillion miles an hour and either get shot or whatever and they do flips before they go down. Why does that bother me? Because of how they made it happen - they used to tie wire to the horses’ legs and that was attached to a log or something rooted in the ground, they would make the horses run and when they hit the end of the wire - kerflip. Many horses died as a result of this. Did you also know that in the original Ben Hur over 150 horses died as a result of the stunts that were used? And there is an actual film from the 20s where they made the poor horse jump off a cliff and filmed him falling to his death. Awful…
What they used to trip horses was called a running W.
They would put a wire attached to a horse’s ankle and in the designated mark, generally a carefully prepared sand hole, the horse was supposed to fall when shot, the rider would pull the wire, which would pick that leg up and the horse tripped and fell.
Some such rigs were attached to both front legs and a ring in the middle of the cinch.
Most horses that fell when shot in movies were not tripped.
Those were well trained to fall on cue.
Training for that is so easy, any other was not really necessary.
You can tell a trained horse because the cue is to pull the horse’s head to the side and they then knee down on the opposite side.
The movies make it look wild, they edit out the slow parts.
All places to fall were staged and had to be right on that mark.
The cameras were very large and unhandy, not easy to move around.
That made hitting the mark where the camera could catch the action important.
What didn’t fit the story, showing the horse landing nicely, edited out so as to look wildly out of control.
The ground was prepared carefully, generally was a sand pile, so the horse and rider were not hurt.
The running W is what the bad, cheap movie trainers used because they didn’t have to pay for the more expensive well trained horses.
They were looked down by the good movie animal trainers for that.
Our riding center used to rent horses to the movie set.
We had rules of what they could do or not with the horses.
That they didn’t use running W was one and for what we know, the wranglers that cared for our horses never did.
You can use a running W properly, but the risk of injuring a horse if you don’t do it right or the horse is not properly prepared was not worth it.
None of the school horses we provided for the movies, that we rode over to the sets in the morning and then went back to pick up in the evening, was ever returned injured.
In the movie making we were part of, horses were not injured any more by participating in those than they would have been in any other horses get injured in.
Even feral horses get injured without ever seeing a human, horses are injury prone.
That was over half a century ago.
I don’t know what they do today in movie sets.
The very high stepping “Spanish” horses in Sergion Leone’s movies… I do not expect they had those deep in the middle of no where in the Wild West maybe somewhat likely when scene’s are in Mexico or there abouts but in other area’s highly unlikely .
Also that cute horse in The Game of Throne that shows up all over the land… I “call” him Joe and always tell my Beau: " hey Joe just flew across the land" Beau hated this inititialy but now gets into the game. He is a lovely horse and I can imagine that he makes a great ride. He is the one ridden by John Snow and a slew of other’s: the one with the roman nose… I want that horse for my Beau when he retires from the series.
Any horse you all find to be quite good actors ? I am thinking of one scene but it is vague where you really get the feel the horse knows he is acting and his effort is really good… I cannot remember the movie though.
All the cowboys that haven’t a clue how to mount - last two that I can remember mounting properly, Eastwood aside, were Clayton Moore and Richard Boone; the rest grabbed cantleboard and horn and hauled themselves up that way instead of left hand holding reins and a bit of mane and right hand on the horn. UGH!!!
Hate all the noises - been in barns full of race horses and rarely hear a sound except at feeding time.
