In the 12th episode of The Horse Illustrated Episode of Horses in the Morning, sponsored by Straight Arrow Products, hosts Glenn the Geek and Holly Caccamise chat with Cailin Caldwell, equine content manager for the ASPCA’s Right Horse program and Mary Towslee, a TV and movie industry horse trainer.

Hosts: Holly Caccamise, Editor in Chief of Horse Illustrated & Young Rider and Glenn the Geek, host of Horses in the Morning.

Title Sponsor: Straight Arrow Family of Brands

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Cailin Caldwell, The ASPCA’s Right Horse Program

Cailin Caldwell is a lifelong equestrian who combines her passions for marketing and horses as the equine content manager at the ASPCA. Working specifically on the ASPCA’s Right Horse program, Cailin’s work is focused on educating and promoting adoption to the equine industry and horse loving public.

Cailin is a proud graduate of Colorado State University’s Equine Sciences program. She currently resides in Seattle with her horses and enjoys competing in the jumper ring.

Meet this week’s Right Horse Adoptable Horse of the Week, Class is Beautiful.

Website: MyRightHorse.org
Instagram: www.instagram.com/therighthorse
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheRightHorse

Mary Towslee, Hollywood Horse Trainer

Mary Towslee started her career as a gallop girl and assistant trainer at racetracks. While working in New Mexico, she happened upon TV horse training when a racehorse-based teen drama, Wildfire, needed well-trained horses to portray track life. After a brief break when the series concluded, Mary returned to the movie business.

Since then, she has trained horses for movies and television shows such as The Lone Ranger, The Magnificent Seven, Hostiles, News of the World, and 1883. She’s moved up the ranks to serving as “gangboss,” running the wrangler crew, giving riding lessons to actors, and handling horses on set.

Read more about Mary’s Hollywood adventures in this article from the April 2022 issue of Horse Illustrated.

Title Sponsor

We want to thank our Title Sponsor, the Straight Arrow Family of Brands, makers of Mane ‘n Tail, Cowboy Magic & Exhibitor’s, with over 100 years of grooming excellence. For more information about your favorite products, please visit www.straightarrowinc.com and find Straight Arrow Products at a tack shop near you!

The post Podcast Episode 12: Equine Adoption and Horses in Hollywood appeared first on Horse Illustrated Magazine.

Towslee’s horse-crazy life started with backyard horses in Washington state.

“We always had horses from the time I can remember,” she says. “I was riding from before I could walk.”

She competed in hunter/jumper events until her junior year in high school, then convinced a racehorse breeder that she knew how to break colts.

“I lied and said I’d done it before, and fumbled my way through it, breaking a set of colts for her,” Towslee recalls. “Her husband trained racehorses, and I ended up going to the racetrack after that and grooming horses. Later that year, I started galloping them.”

Big Screen Serendipity

She spent the next decade as a gallop girl and assistant trainer at racetracks around the country. While in New Mexico outriding and galloping horses on tracks, breaking horses, and running a training stable, Towslee stumbled upon stunt horse training. Or, rather, it stumbled into her.

“I got into it completely by accident,” she says. “A friend of ours had been working on a movie job, and they needed some horses that looked like racehorses but were broke. All of my outriding horses were old racehorses, so they could still gallop around, but you’d say whoa and they’d put on the brakes. They were perfect because it was a racehorse-based teen drama, Wildfire. I started wrangling and renting horses to them and doing stunts.”

Wildfire ended after four seasons, and Towslee moved on to managing a breeding farm. She turned down a couple of stunt horse trainer jobs because she felt obligated to the breeding farm owners.

Then The Lone Ranger (released in 2013, starring Johnny Depp) came calling.

“I thought if I didn’t make the jump in careers then, I probably never would,” she recalls. “So, I went ahead and took a leap. I [left] my job and my house at the same time. I bought a travel trailer and went to work on movies, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

The Highs and the Lows

As a stunt horse trainer on the set of The Lone Ranger, Towslee worked with Bobby Lovgren, one of the most well-known movie horse trainers.

“There was a lot of liberty trick horse work,” says Towslee. “The movie had some complex stunt sequences that had to be worked out, and the director wanted as little computer-generated stuff as possible. The Lone Ranger’s horse, Silver, had to be on rooftops and jump from building to building. Silver [also] had to be in a tree over the Colorado river, so they built us one. Bobby had trained the horse to stand on a rail, so it looked like he was standing on a branch. Silver had to jump up into a train car and run through it while the Lone Ranger was shooting, so they built us a train car that was big enough.

“It was a process keeping things safe,” she adds. “You have to be pretty creative to figure out how you are going to get what they want to see on camera.”

The cast, crew, and of course the stunt horse trainers travelled to spectacular filming spots, including Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley, and several locations in New Mexico.

But lest you think working as a movie stunt horse trainer is all teaching horses tricks in spectacular scenery, there are downsides to the work. Think white horses working in red sand.

“We had five white horses—I spent a lot of time washing [them],” Towslee laughs. “We were in Monument Valley in all that red sand, and there were windstorms. Our white horses turned pink, and when you’d wash them, they’d turn orange. And it was cold, so you couldn’t really give them good baths. It was just awful. I think they digitally fixed it; we couldn’t get them clean!

“We would be working all night and doing rain scenes, freezing our butts off,” she adds. “But you also get to do some really cool stuff as well and meet some really neat people.”

Horse wrangling work on A Million Ways to Die in the West and The Magnificent Seven, which included 140 cast horses, followed.

Stunt Horse Trainer Gangboss

Towslee’s first gig as wrangler gangboss came in the 2017 film, Hostiles. A gangboss runs the wrangler crew, trains the movie horses, gives the actors riding lessons, and handles the horses and actors on set.

“I would say the most important component to being a gangboss is communicating with the assistant director’s department, relaying that information to the wranglers, then getting them organized to achieve what the director wants to see,” says Towslee. “A lot of it is making sure everything’s safe for the horses around the cameras and making sure the actors are alright. Then we have other wranglers that are handling the background horses. Any time there’s a horse on set, we’re there.

“Quite often, we’re really close—if the camera sees half of the actor and half of the horse, we’re probably on our knees helping hold the horse still. It’s not always glamorous,” she adds with a laugh.

Towslee is one of just a handful of female stunt horse wrangler gangbosses in the industry.

“I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a disadvantage being female, but there is [also] no advantage to it,” Towslee says. “And it does have its challenges. I’ve been very lucky that my boss, Clay Lilley, has always had my back. Some of the cowboys have been in the business longer than me, although they have been very supportive of me. I very much respect their opinions.”

It’s easy to respect anyone who has the skills to work at this level—in other words, an accomplished horseman. Galloping scores of racehorses and breaking and training horses for decades goes a long way toward helping one speak horse.

“You do have to know horses: how they’re going to react to a situation and whether they’re going to be bothered by it, or whether you can use a situation to get the desired action,” explains Towslee. “You must know what drives a horse.

“Another thing is being a person that really pays attention to what’s going on around you all the time and can spot things that are going to cause a problem,” she continues. “Movie sets are incredibly busy, and there’s a lot of moving parts. We have actors on horses in very tight situations sometimes. You need to always have your head on a swivel.”

Favorite Co-Stars

If pressed, Towslee will name Sam Elliott as her favorite actor to work with.

“I worked briefly with him years ago, and now for the past five months on the series 1883 [a prequel to the hit show Yellowstone]. What a wonderful man. He possesses a certain humility and grace.”

But any conversation inevitably turns back to her horses.

“Pistol, a Quarter Horse, is fantastically talented as a movie horse,” she says of a horse she recently worked with while filming a series. “He’s like a Border Collie, he’s so darn smart.”

King, a Friesian cross, is another favorite who has been in half a dozen movies and doubled the main horse on News of the World.

Some of the horses know they’re performing.

“[Some can be] a bit of a ham,” says Towslee. “You have some stunt horses that you use for years and years. They’ve done umpteen Indian raids and bank and stagecoach robberies, and they just keep going. It never shakes them up. They’re in a whole league of their own.”

However, the work isn’t all fast-paced cowboy shootouts.

“Your background horses are basically walking from A to B all day long or standing tied to a hitching rail,” she explains. “A movie set has all these moving parts that are often very close to horses, so they have to be super tolerant of stuff.”

Temperament is the No. 1 trait Towslee and her boss look for in potential movie horses.
“Sometimes you’ll get a horse who you think is going to be perfect for the movies, and as soon as they set foot on a movie set, they’re like, ‘Nope! Can’t do it!’” she says.

“There’s a different energy to a movie set, with so many people and equipment and cameras. You try and introduce the horses to it slowly, but only your very best ones ever end up with actors [riding] them. They’re really special, the ones that make good cast horses.”

Variety is the Spice

No day as a Hollywood stunt horse trainer is the same.

“That’s probably one of the things I like most about it,” says Towslee. “I’m not good at things that are incredibly repetitive. Every day is different; it keeps your mind busy. I really enjoy that, plus the fact that I get to work with animals every day.

“The funny thing is, way back when, I always thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be cool to work with movie horses?’ And just out of the blue, I’m doing that.”

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An unusual photograph has become the inspiration for an Australian filmmaker’s next project. The photo, believed to have been taken in the 1980s, shows a gray horse, a dog, and a dolphin swimming side-by-side in the Port Adelaide River in Australia.

The exact origins of the photo aren’t known, but The Advertiser of Adelaide reports that the photographer who captured the trio on film was likely Martin Jacka, who worked for News Limited in the 1980s. The photograph ran in The Advertiser where filmmaker Craig Monahan first saw it.

Monahan has roots in Adelaide and told The Advertiser that he had been interested in doing a film centered around the dolphins of the Port River for years. The image of the three animals swimming together stayed in his mind.

Dolphins inhabit the unique ecosystem of Adelaide’s Port River, which flows into the city from the St. Vincent Gulf. This is said to be the only location in the world where dolphins live wild within a city’s limits.

So what about the horse and dog? Monahan explains that racehorse trainers used to routinely use the beach as a conditioning grounds for their animals. There were stables nearby that trainers would use to house horses for a few days of exercise along the beach and in the water.

Although the dog’s identity is also unknown, it’s likely he belonged to a trainer or someone affiliated with one of the training operations and couldn’t resist a chance to go for a swim. Dolphins are famously curious and social creatures, and it appears this one just wanted to join in the group activity.

Monahan’s film, though inspired by the photograph and currently being produced with the working title “A Dog, a Dolphin, and a Horse,” won’t be about the animals specifically. The film is described as a coming of age story about an 11-year-old named Frankie who comes to Adelaide with her nomadic parents. Left to her own devices, she gets to know the people who make a living along the river and learns about the dolphins who reside there.

Fundraising for the film is currently taking place through the Australian Cultural Fund. Tap here to learn more.

Leslie Potter is a writer and photographer based in Lexington, Kentucky. www.lesliepotterphoto.com

The post A Dog, a Dolphin, and a Horse: A Captured Moment Inspires a Film appeared first on Horse Illustrated Magazine.

Our Instagram followers (@YoungRiderMagazine) asked some awesome questions and Greer Grammer, who plays Emma, reported back with her answers.

God_and_horses12: Did you learn to ride for the movie or did you already have experience?

GG: I had some experience, but I took lessons before filming and during filming to brush up on my riding.

Sylvie.xox: Did you ever have a bad experience on the set with the horses?

GG: The horses we worked with were all so great! There was one moment outside the practice ring at the arena on the competition day, which also happened to me my first day on this particular horse, and there was a bathroom behind us and the hand dryer kept going off and the horse kept getting spooked by it!

Cocohorse: Do you think you will keep riding now that filming is over?

GG: Yes! I mean, it’s a huge time commitment so it’s tough with acting but I definitely plan on riding whenever I can.

Ellie.dancer523: Who was your favorite horse to work with and why?

GG: I loved all the horses I got to work with but my favorite was Rubix! We called him the tank because he didn’t want to go anywhere. A lot of the horses wanted to run and go fast but for shooting purposes we couldn’t always do that, so Rubix and I got along really well because he listened and wanted to stand still a lot of the time.

That_Equestrian_Abby: What scenes were the most fun to film? The most challenging?

GG: The montage bits were really fun to film! And getting to prep the horses! I got to have a ton of fun with those and just kind of play around. The most challenging was probably the day where I first ride Chance for the first time, only because it was about 110 degrees outside and it was just so hot! Riding horses in the heat and sun is really tough!

Morgan_the_Equestrian: Were all of the horses well behaved during filming?

GG: Yes! They were all on their best behavior. Every now and then they would get tired after we had done a number of takes and they would start getting antsy but, I get the same way every now and then!

YR: Why will young riders love this movie?

GG: I think young riders will love this movie because it shows a girl who makes a difference through her riding. She’s able to help everyone: her family, the horse ranch, the rescue horses all through her love of riding that she finds. I also think young riders will get to see the horse rescue aspect of this movie and that’s something they may not be familiar with and they’ll be able to see how truly amazing rescue horses are.

I_love_Desi_arnaz: What is one thing you will always remember about working with horses?

GG: How beautiful they are and how much they listen and can feel you. And vice versa. I got to speak up for the horses when I knew they were getting scared or tired and I could feel when they didn’t want to do anymore. The relationships we built were really special and something I’ll always cherish. I’ll also always remember that as long as you have a treat in your hand you can get a horse to do anything!

Xoxobreyer: Did any of the horses have a unique ‘quirk’ or favorite treat?

GG: There was a donkey at the ranch who somehow always knew when people were taking pictures and he would come out and photo bomb them! Willow, the horse we used the most for Chance really loved the root beer barrels, which we were able to tie into the movie!

QueenAveMay: What did working with horses teach you about acting?

GG: It taught me a lot about being present and being ready for anything! Sometimes I would change my lines in reaction to what the horses were doing, I was able to come up with fun things to say and really play off of them.

YR: What is your advice for young riders who don’t feel like they will ever succeed in the show ring?

GG: My advice would be to keep going! Do what you love. Keep riding, keep practicing, you’ll get there. There are still times with acting where I get down on myself and it’s really hard but I keep going to classes, and making sure I’m the best I can be. It’s similar to competitive riding. You have to believe in yourself and have determination. With those two things you can do anything.

Emma’s Chance was released on DVD July 5, 2016 from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. The film also features names such as Missi Pyle, Joey Lawrence, Jennifer Taylor, and Lia Marie Johnson. Pick up this new horsey adventure for a family friendly movie night!

To learn more about Red Bucket Equine Reserve and their involvement in the film or to donate, visit redbucketrescue.org.

Find Emma’s Chance on Amazon.

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