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 fter bulking up to
play the web-slinger in Spider-Man,
Tobey Maguire
lost 25 pounds to play a legendary half-blind boxer-turned-jockey named Red
Pollard in the much-anticipated horse-racing movie Seabiscuit.Now a distant memory of a sports legend, Seabiscuit was a horse that came out of nowhere in the depths of the Great Depression to become the richest horse of his time, and an inspiration to struggling people everywhere. A skinny, ill-tempered, misshapen nag, he lost his first 17 races and scores more before finally turning it around. He ended with nearly a half-million dollars in winnings and 13 records at eight different tracks. Even his training sessions were standing room only. The humans in his life were likewise affected, from the jockey, to a down-on-his-luck mustang-breaker named Tom Smith (Chris Cooper) to seemingly the biggest loser of all - a clueless money-man named Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) who got snookered into a buying a ridiculous-looking racehorse. "This is a true life fairy tale," says director Gary Ross (who directed Maguire earlier in Pleasantville). "Red Pollard was a second-tier jockey who had to box to eat. Charles Howard was a car dealer who knew nothing about horse racing. Tom Smith had never trained a winning racehorse and Seabiscuit |
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had lost 50 races. Together they turned Seabiscuit
into a champion and captured the heart of a weary nation." Ross, who adapted the script from Laura Hillenbrand's best-selling book Seabiscuit: An American Legend, saw Pollard's story as critical to the legend. "There was an incredible toughness and sensitivity to Red that few people could capture, and Tobey is uniquely capable of doing that," he said. It also helped that Maguire had some experience riding a horse, in Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil. Of course, horseracing is a much different bucket of oats. Maguire trained intensely on a jockey-training machine called an Equicizer (which resembles a barroom mechanical bull). Despite all the weight loss, he still reportedly ended up eight pounds over the weight limit for jockeys (a professional stunt rider was used for many of the race scenes), which is okay, since Seabiscuit had a few stunt doubles himself. Out of the 45 racehorses used throughout the production, eight played Seabiscuit. Each was chosen for qualities exhibited by the mercurial legend (who was said to have been so bad-tempered, he once grabbed a billygoat with his teeth and tossed it out of his stable). Four horses were used to portray Seabiscuit's longtime nemesis War Admiral. The movie has been termed the biggest news in the racing world since Seabiscuit himself. Seabiscuit's story was told once, in 1949 in The Story Of Seabiscuit starring Shirley Temple and Barry Fitzgerald. But where that movie used black and white newsreels as footage, the modern version used top trainers, jockeys and camera techniques, in location shoots with thousands of extras at top-tier racetracks, including Santa Anita in California and Saratoga in New York. 
"I think it's going to be fantastic," author Hillenbrand, who signed
on as a consultant for the movie, told the Sacramento Bee. "The
scenes I've seen so far are just exquisite. It will just be stunning."- Jim Slotek
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