Secretariat finally crosses the finish line

How in the world could it have been 37 years since Secretariat won the triple crown of horse racing, yet we are only just now getting a major motion picture about him?

I'm sure if I delved into it, I'd find a history of some legal wrangling over the rights to the story of probably the most famous racehorse of all time. But it's still very strange to me that it's taken so long, and that we've seen so many other horse stories come to the big screen in the meantime, many of whom were horses we'd never heard of until a movie was made about them. Seabiscuit seems like the most prominent example of this. I don't know about you, but I had no idea who or what Seabiscuit was until the movie came along.

Thirty-seven years seems like a particularly long time when you consider that the most talked-about "period piece" of the fall is The Social Network, which deals with events that occurred entirely since Seabiscuit hit theaters in 2003. Presidents don't even leave office before films are made about them (Oliver Stone's W in 2008). You can no longer afford to let the "appropriate amount of time" pass before delving into a historical event cinematically. If you do, someone else will get there first. Even the highly sensitive events of 9/11, which were once thought to be utter cinematic taboo, only took five years to reach theaters (United 93 and World Trade Center in 2006).

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the most famous version of anything rarely gets an interesting cinematic treatment. In the first month of my blog's existence, I wondered why there had not been a definitive biopic about Martin Luther King Jr. And I concluded, among other things, that there was more mileage in the story of a civil rights figure we did not know quite as much about, namely, Malcolm X, who came viscerally to life in one of Spike Lee's best films.

Similarly, I expect Secretariat not to get the same kudos that Seabiscuit got. Seabiscuit was roundly praised and eventually earned Oscar nominations for its screenplay, sound, art direction, cinematography, costume design and editing, as well as a nomination for best picture. Even with twice the best picture nominees this year, Secretariat doesn't seem like it will figure into that discussion, going just on my impressions of it and some early reviews.

Of course, this argument is pretty specious, because prestigious subject matter does not always get matched up with prestigious filmmaking talent. Secretariat director Randall Wallace, for example, has only two major directing gigs to his credit, the forgettable duo of The Man in the Iron Mask (1998) and We Were Soldiers (2002). Why hand the reins, as it were, of this film to a man who hasn't directed a film in eight years? Only Disney knows that.

Then again, Seabiscuit director Gary Ross had only directed Pleasantville, five years earlier, and doesn't have his next feature coming out until next year -- which will be a similar eight-year gap, but a slightly more surprising one, given that his last film earned seven Oscar nominations. (Though, we should note, none for directing.)

Hollywood can be a mysterious place. I won't even give you the list of terrible directors who have directed a half-dozen films since Ross directed Seabiscuit.

Even if I didn't have a baby at home severely limiting the number of films I can see in the theater, I don't think I'd make Secretariat a priority. Perhaps it's because it seems to have a "been there, done that" quality to it -- which, granted, is a strange thing to say about the biopic of a horse that had been places and done things most horses never had. Perhaps it's because I don't really like sports movies, especially ones where I already know what happens. Perhaps it's because Disney's live action movies are often lacking in nuance or edge, and this figures to be no different.

Too bad, because Secretariat was an exceptional athlete, and really deserves a good film to be made about him. ESPN ranked him 35th on a list of the 100 best athletes of the 20th century.

Then again, have you seen a good movie about the #1 or #2 athletes on that list, Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth? There has been no Jordan movie, and Ruth has appeared as a character in a number of not-very-good movies, most notably Arthur Hiller's The Babe (1992). Muhammad Ali, the #3 on the list, was featured in a well-made biopic that is still not very memorable: Michael Mann's Ali (2001).

In fact, going down that list, the next athlete on the list who's even the subject of a prominent film is Ty Cobb at #20. I found Ron Shelton's Cobb (1994) to be a dynamite sports biopic, one of my favorite of all time. But Cobb is only the sixth highest ranked baseball player on the list, lending more credence to the idea that the best of anything rarely makes the most interesting film. Perhaps that's why there are not prominent films about Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Jackie Robinson or Ted Williams, the other four between him and Ruth on the list.

When you consider that the youngest on that list, Hank Aaron, retired in 1976, only three years after Secretariat won his triple crown, maybe 37 years isn't such a long time to wait after all.

Endangered species

When Rob Reiner directed Stand By Me in 1986, it seemed poised to be as surefire a hit as there was that year. The fact that it was based on a short story by popular horror novelist Stephen King was tangential to its prospects -- in fact, you could argue that most people didn't even know that, since the movie itself is not a horror. What drew audiences -- both young and old -- was the promise of nostalgia for 1959, with a soundtrack full of popular period hits, and the type of relatable coming of age story with just enough genuine danger to seem edgy.

For children of the 1980s, it was no surprise that our parents were interested -- my dad was 20 in 1959, my mom 16. But I don't think we even needed that connection to be interested ourselves, just as we didn't need that connection to be fans of A Christmas Story, set about 15 years earlier. We just wanted to see a good story told well, regardless of who was starring in it, and when it was set. (I'll try to ignore the fact that River Phoenix was probably considered a heartthrob then the way Robert Pattinson is considered a heartthrob today, and be content granting my generation a certain purity in its interest in Stand By Me.)

Something makes me doubt that today's young viewers have that same pioneering spirit.

Nearly 25 years later, Reiner is directing another film that will earn obvious comparisons to Stand By Me, even though the subject matter seems to dwell in the considerably lighter territory of first crushes (whereas Stand By Me dealt with poking corpses, dodging trains and evading bullies with switchblades). Flipped, which opens today, is set in 1962, a mere three years after Stand By Me. But the passage of a quarter century makes it feel like it took place 100 years before that, practically speaking.

Simply put, Flipped feels like a total anomaly. It's been so long since a coming of age story set 50 years ago has received such a wide release and been so heavily marketed, that my wife and I were left scratching our heads when we saw the trailer. Before we figured out why we were flabbergasted, we were reaching for the right description of the trailer we saw -- what was wrong with it that flummoxed us so much.

Well, there was nothing wrong with it. Flipped looks like it might be cute, even good, though Reiner hasn't been the same director in the past decade as he was previously. (It's no coincidence that the poster says "From the director of Stand By Me and When Harry Met Sally" -- two movies that came out in the 1980s.)

What was wrong with it was this: It seemed like a relic from another era. Something subtle has changed in our collective viewing habits, such that this kind of movie has almost disappeared from the landscape.

Yep, the 20th century period piece is officially an endangered species.

Period pieces from other centuries are endangered to an extent, too. But you're always going to find people interested in costume dramas, if only for their high production values and classical subject matter. Conversely, the interest in movies with '57 Chevys and doo-wop singers seems destined to dwindle and dwindle until there's nothing left. In fact, I think we may have already reached that point. The weekend box office for Flipped will render some kind of judgment on that.

Flipped is not the first movie that has created this kind of reaction in me. I remember thinking the same thing when I saw the trailers for My One and Only, last year's Renee Zellwegger vehicle that's set in 1953. I remember thinking, "Who wants to watch that kind of movie in this day and age?" Sure enough, few people did -- despite the presence of Zellwegger, the film couldn't scare up $2.5 million at the domestic box office. Other years have likely featured other anomalies like My One and Only, but the fact is, I don't remember them off the top of my head -- which speaks to the very point I'm making.

At least with that film, however, the studio viewed it as a marginal commodity to begin with, not sinking very much into advertising. (That film was also released in August, which may be deemed a suitable month to gamble on this kind of movie.) Flipped is different in that it has been backed by a genuine awareness campaign. The trailer played before the popular summer movies directed at young people (I believe we saw it before Toy Story 3), and there are hundreds of billboards up around Los Angeles. Warner Brothers is throwing all its weight behind this movie, and we're about to find out whether it was a smart move.

So why can't today's kids take an interest in Flipped? Maybe all they need is one good, memorable movie of 1950s-early 1960s nostalgia, and it will kick off a wave of others, just as any other thematic trend comes out of nowhere and takes hold. But I kind of doubt that. Maybe I'm just turning into a curmudgeon (at the ripe old age of 36), but I think it's hard to grow up in an era when you're so surrounded by high-tech gadgets, and have the same kind of appreciation for low-tech stories. And it's not like this generation is the first to lose some of its focus. Where we were watching Stand By Me in 1986, the generation before us would have been losing themselves in a book rather than a movie. Bloggers blogging in 1986 would have called our generation lazy for needing to have visual stimuli do the work of creating characters and settings for us, rather than leaving that up to our imaginations, as would be the case if we were reading.

It's only logical that people want to see movies that have at least a tangential overlap with their experiences. That's why I expect another film that opens today, Middle Men, to do significantly better than Flipped. Middle Men, about the advent of internet porn, is set in the 1990s, a time that's recent enough for today's viewers to remember, but old enough that it's starting to seem like a distinctly different era. The early years of the internet seem like a terrific period subject to get today's viewers, since many of them have witnessed the massive transformation of the medium in their own lives. That increasingly less familiar sound of an old dial-up modem will still resonate with viewers for a few more years, enough to make them laugh and nod their heads in recognition. Period pieces will never go away entirely -- it really just depends what period is most relevant to the viewers.

And to end on a slightly more positive note, I think it may actually be the 1950s and early 1960s themselves that are at a peculiar disadvantage in this discussion. Let's face it, this was a relatively boring decade plus in the United States. The Eisenhower administration was a remarkably stable time, a Korean War here and there notwithstanding. Music was light and fluffy, people seemed innocent. Movies set just ten years earlier will probably continue to resonate with people long after the 1950s have become a permanently square topic for mainstream films. In the 1940s, you had World War II, and the post-Depression hardscrabble existence being experienced by most Americans.

Maybe the problem with movies set in the 1950s and early 1960s is the absence of conflict. Because after all, isn't that one of the basic cornerstones of narrative filmmaking -- conflict? The more epic the better? This era was bookended by periods of heavy conflict -- World War II on one side, Vietnam on the other. What came in the middle was just pompadour haircuts and waitresses on rollerskates.

So if I'm saying the Twilight generation doesn't want to watch something because it's too frivolous, well, I guess that's about the best compliment I can give them. And if true, it's quite the paradox indeed.