One contender for autumn box-office honors might break away from the field. With "Secretariat" (opening nationwide in October), director Randall Wallace has crafted a stirring, fact-inspired fable about the 1973 Triple Crown winner who was the greatest champ in horse-racing history.
But Baltimore racing fans swept up in Secretariat's come-from-behind victory at the Kentucky Derby will get a surprise as Wallace guides the story into the Preakness.
The director makes his most daring and unexpected move when the action shifts to Northwest Baltimore's Pimlico Race Course. Rather than lavish the same attention on re-creating Old Hilltop that he did on Churchill Downs, he shows the middle jewel of the Triple Crown entirely on television, as Secretariat owner Penny Chenery Tweedy's husband and four children follow the broadcast in their family room in Denver.
Wallace says he wants to make sure Baltimore readers would know that "in the movie they're seeing the footage of the real Secretariat winning the Preakness. That's the only time in the film where Secretariat plays himself."
And he proceeded to explain why doing the Preakness that way actually brought it closer to the core of the movie.
Wallace set himself three challenges on "Secretariat":
"I wanted the audience to enter the races as participants, not as spectators; I wanted viewers to feel they were inside the races, as if they were the jockeys and the horses, feeling the dirt in your face, the speed under your feet, the horse's heart pounding like your heart. A visceral, primary experience."
"Secretariat" wraps its popular poetry around the story of Penny Tweedy ( Diane Lane), a Denver housewife turned racehorse owner who stakes her identity and character on Secretariat's prowess. Wallace does a terrific job of getting audiences to feel as if they're taking a leap of faith along with Tweedy, even though many know how the story ends up.
"I wanted you to experience not just the statistics of Secretariat but the emotional experience of who Secretariat was, and the qualities of courage, hope and faith that were part of him and the people around him, particularly Penny," Wallace says.
"And finally, I wanted it to be a movie that affirmed those values. This movie says that if you're courageous and follow your heart, you don't always end up slaughtered. Those qualities do prevail. You might have noticed that I wrote the song at the end of the movie. It encapsulates the qualities I wanted in the whole film. It's not about how fast or how far: It's about who you are. It's not about who is less and who is more. You run because you want to see how far and fast you can go, and you only know that if you go out and try to win."
So how does this relate to the way he showed the running of the Preakness?
Wallace thinks it does in every way.
The film sharply depicts how Penny Tweedy's quest to revive her late father's Virginia horse farm strained her bonds with her brother, Hollis Chenery (a brilliant Harvard economics professor, played by Dylan Baker), and her husband, John Tweedy (a Columbia-trained lawyer, played by Dylan Walsh), and stole her focus from her four growing children. Pennyf, a smart, tenacious woman, was a Smith graduate who met Tweedy when she was studying at Columbia Business School.
Wallace says, "When I was working on the script, I kept asking whether we would understand the internal emotional qualities of Penny. … What does it matter if she wins or loses? What is at stake?"
Penny adored her father, Chris ( Scott Glenn), and inherited his love for horses. But that wasn't enough to instantly enroll her in the exclusive men's club of thoroughbred owners and breeders. Wallace says that while she proved herself as a sportswoman, she found that "doing the best she could, and pursuing what she felt was her true identity, separated her from her children in distance and emotion." She literally bet the farm on Secretariat — and tested her faith in herself.
"Playing out Preakness as a televised event let me show the impact on her family," Wallace says. "To me, it's one of the most moving parts of the film: The family participates at a distance."
Pimlico marks the beginning of a rise in the action that's just as important to Wallace as the conquest of the Triple Crown. Penny realizes that because she made honest choices, straight from the heart, she and her kids will be all right. (In real life, she and her husband ultimately were divorced.)
"And it makes a broader point, too," Wallace says. "Tens of thousands of people may go to Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont, but millions more watch these races at home. This is my more personalized way of saying that."
William Nack, who wrote the movie's source book, "Secretariat: the Making of a Champion" (aka "Big Red of Meadow Stable"), couldn't be more pleased with the picture. He was an eyewitness to this saga as a turf reporter for Newsday. He has never lost his devotion to the horse that helped him find his literary calling.
Last month, over the phone from his home in Chevy Chase, he said that "the arc of the movie is accurate. Penny took over the horse farm when her father was dying, and left her family and went East to run the career of this racehorse. It made her and her husband estranged; she had a very difficult time. But she managed to start another life. She ended up blending in well with the Establishment, and she was much admired. That is the guts of the movie — and it's all true."
Beyond that, Nack said, Wallace got the pastoral and the prickly textures right. Secretariat and his closest rival, Sham — and their jockeys — face off like George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. Sham's blustery trainer, Frank "Pancho" Martin ( Nestor Serrano), tries to unhinge the naturally elegant, sneakily humorous Penny. Even the press comes in for scrutiny, notably a fervid reporter named, yes, Bill Nack ( Kevin Connolly). Penny swats him away like a fly but says he writes "like a poet."
Nack respected Wallace's director's intuition. He said he thinks he knows the real reason why Wallace chose the Preakness as the race we watch with Penny's family, at their home. "It's one race you could really see on television," he said. "All of a sudden, people were gasping. It was as if a thrill went throught everyone watching it. 'Here comes Secretariat' — all of a sudden he was there, passing all these other horses."
Nack said that "for sheer drama, nothing outranks his race at Pimlico. Sham should have had the advantage at the Preakness, because he was more of a front-runner and more likely to control the pace at a 'speed track.' " (Speed tracks like Pimlico boast tight turns and fast surfaces.) Legendary Maryland handicapper Clem Florio told Nack that if you take the tight first turn of the track too fast, "You end up at a laundry on Belvedere Avenue."
Nack, watching from the second-story jockey's porch, saw jockey Ron Turcotte barely touch the reins at the first turn — and set off "the single greatest scene in Preakness history." Let Nack the prose-poet take over: "A set of motions interlocked as one, a kind of chain reaction started by the hands: the flicking of the wrists, the grabbing of the bit, the pulling on the right line, the swinging outside, and then the first thrust forward, with dancer's grace, when Secratariat raised his forelegs in a single stride that lifted him and swept him across the hindlegs of Our Native and set him down sprinting three horses wide on Pimlico's tight first turn, like a hoop around a barrel, and through all this Turcotte sat still, having moved only his hands, and that's all he did."
Nack felt touched with glory watching Secretariat outstrip his competition at Pimlico, moving in and out of light and shade as the sun dipped behind the grandstand and cast shadows on the track. Afterward, Florio told Nack, "Horses don't do this at Pimlico and get away with it." But Secretariat did. He does it again, in "Secretariat."
michael.sragow@baltsun.com