An ode to longshots

by Trey Nosrac

An alert reader of this publication suggested a correction to the Breaking Stride column of June 2. The column under discussion contains a list of harness racing movies released to the public. The reader asked, “Hey Trey, What about Johnny Longshot, the Emilio Estevez harness racing movie? I saw a few minutes of it.”

The reader saw a few minutes of something, but not a movie. Most likely, the reference was to a pre-production trailer for a proposed film or a promotional interview from about 10 years ago. Johnny Longshot was a movie that reached the pre-production stage of development, but the film was not completed or released. This failure for a movie to launch is not unusual, and most of the time, the reason is funding, or we should say, lack of funding.

Buying a yearling and winning a big race with your horse is extraordinarily difficult and expensive. The journey from a script to the screen or video is equally challenging. I have dabbled in the arenas of yearling harness horses and Hollywood. On the longshot scale, they are about a dead heat.

Want some data? In the glory days before COVID-19, in 2019, more than 67,000 screenplays were registered with the Writers Guild, but only 777 movies made it to the viewing public. The odds are over 90 scripts for each produced film, and just creating a film is no guarantee that the backers will make money.

Participants in harness horse racing whine that getting a champion trotter or pacer is complex and expensive, and the odds against purchasing and raising a Hambletonian winner are long shots. That is correct. We are trying to do something challenging. We may suffer from selective amnesia, the inability to do risk/reward probabilities, and delude ourselves into having a secret sauce. In filmmaking and yearling racehorse purchasing, we are much like the hapless Lloyd (Jim Carey) seeking romance with a pretty girl in a scene from Dumb and Dumber.

Lloyd: “What are my chances?”

Mary: “Not good.”

Lloyd: “You mean “not good” like… one out of a hundred?”

Mary: “I’d say more like one out of a million.”

Lloyd: (slowly reacts) “So you’re telling me there’s a chance? (joyfully) Yeah!!”

Making movies, raising horses, running marathons, becoming a movie star; why do people even try endeavors where success is such a longshot? Why do we dare to do difficult things? When presented with empirical statistics about your chance of owning a Hambletonian champion, why do you buy a yearling at the next sale?

Who knows?

Here are a few guesses from a fool.

When you attempt something unbelievably challenging, your peers do not expect you to be successful. They think you are bonkers. For me, this takes the pressure off. It’s house money. Failure to hit a home run stings, but it is not embarrassing. At least you were at the plate swinging. This philosophy is much like my wagering on horses. I always play ridiculous long shots on the toteboard. I’m never disappointed, and should I ever win a race, it will be a real hoot.

When you try something outside your comfort zone, you learn new stuff. For example, when arranging a camera shot with a greenscreen background, you must use a blue screen in filming shrubbery, or it will disappear. I just learned that last week. Learning is cool. Striving for complex, challenging goals like a completed movie or a champion racehorse takes you to places you do not usually travel.

The fun is in the trying, in putting yourself out there. Maybe you wanted to try amateur harness horse driving but could never pull the trigger and make the call. When you do, if you do, you get an endorphin rush; one step feeds the next, and you wonder why you waited so long. Easy things are boring. Watching and wagering on races from your computer is okay, but climbing into a jog cart is better. We all think we are superheroes in the winner’s circle. Mentally, we are all staring in our movie, why not make it real?

You want to have fun. Find several million dollars of disposable income and contact Emilio. He probably still has options for the Johnny Longshot script (tons of scripts bounce around Hollywood for decades). If Emilio doesn’t work out, find someone else to make the movie or look for another harness horse racing cinematic property to spin into movie gold. Heck, call me. I know a guy with a half-dozen excellent sports-related movie scripts in development waiting for a player with funding.

Shoot for the stars. If you fall, you land on a cloud.