06/04/04

LC040604

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

A Southern California landmark played a big role in the movie
"Seabiscuit", but does the film have strong enough legs to help
revive Santa Anita?

Chris McCarron>> "Seabiscuit" the movie is going to be a great
shot in the arm for racing and it will bring people to the
facility, but once we get them here, we have to figure out how
to make them happy while they're here and make it a very
interesting day for them so they'll want to return.

Val>> And then, it's Los Angeles's latest experiment in
theater, a high-tech multimedia sensory experience, and it's
part of Disney Hall. We'll show you the Redcat Theatre.

It's all next on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Today we bring you the story of a Southern California
landmark that was hot when your grandparents were young. We're
talking about the Santa Anita Racetrack and it's been getting a
lot of attention because of the hit movie about the legendary
race horse. The film and the horse have the same name:
"Seabiscuit" and, as Philip Bruce tells us, Seabiscuit blazed a
trail into American history books at the Santa Anita Racetrack.

Philip Bruce>> It took no great Hollywood magic to turn the old
racetrack into a field of dreams. Santa Anita already had the
beautiful scenery and the art deco architecture. All the
director had to do was yell action. Of course, there was a
little more to it than that. The cast and crew of "Seabiscuit"
spent nearly two months at Santa Anita recreating one of the
greatest stories in horseracing.

Stuart Zanville>> Well, they brought four hundred people to
Santa Anita. They took over the whole racetrack and they pretty
much created a movie studio for seven weeks. They had wardrobe,
they had makeup, they had the normal things you do for a movie,
but they also built sets and they probably shot in more than
fifty locations on track.

Gary Ross>> It's rough, it's violent, it's exciting, it's
dangerous and how do you really convey all that nuance? Well,
you have to put people inside the horse race. There's no other
way to do it and you can't shoot it the way it's always been
shot before outside the race. So that was the first challenge.
How do I get the nuance, the interaction, between the two
jockeys, the interaction between the horses, the subtlety of how
the race has evolved? How do I tell that story?

Philip Bruce>> The movie people left behind a few souvenirs
like this sign. They changed it to look more like the original
from sixty years ago and it was so appropriate that the track
decided to keep it. But the real challenge was duplicating the
historic moments, especially the famous race from 1940 when
Seabiscuit and Santa Anita became forever joined.

Chris McCarron>> Oh, I get goose bumps when I see the film.
It's a marvelous production. I had the pleasure of working on
it and my sole responsibility was to make sure that the racing
scenes looked realistic and authentic. It was a challenge, but
I believe we got it done. I'm real proud of the end result.

Philip Bruce>> Chris McCarron is a Hall of Fame jockey with
more than seven thousand wins to his credit, nearly a third of
them here at Santa Anita. A few months ago, he retired from
riding, but not from racing. McCarron is now the General
Manager at Santa Anita and an expert on what's riding on this
new film.

Chris McCarron>> Well, "Seabiscuit" certainly will be a shot in
the arm for racing and Santa Anita in particular because he was
a legend around here from 1936 to 1940.

[Film Clip]>> "The eyes of the turf world are on Santa Anita
and the comeback of the great Seabiscuit. Twice he's lost the
$100,000 Handicap by a nose. Now if those valuable pens can
stand the gaff today, he'll try again."

Philip Bruce>> America was still in the grips of the Depression
and war was just on the horizon, but for a few brief moments,
the world seemed to stop as everybody's favorite underdog ran
the race of the century, the Santa Anita Handicap.

[Film Clip]>> "At the touch of the whip, Seabiscuit broke
through and exploded into the lead. He and Pollard scorched
down the stretch and under the wire all alone. Seabiscuit had
clocked the fastest mile and a quarter in Santa Anita's history,
the second fastest ever run on an American track and has
surpassed the world money-winning record by more than $60,000.
Some called it the greatest comeback in the history of American
sports."

Philip Bruce>> It took a former jockey like Chris McCarron to
recapture the drama of Seabiscuit's legendary run on the very
same track.

Chris McCarron>> Every horseracing movie you've ever seen, most
of the jockeys that are involved in the race are holding their
horses and looking back and wondering when the hero horse is
going to come by and win. In this particular movie, we had to
make sure that Seabiscuit was winning legitimately, that
everybody else in the race was trying hard to win, and that
Seabiscuit won because he was the best horse. That was a
challenge because all of the horses that we used in the movie
wanted to win themselves.

Philip Bruce>> A few creative camera shots and a little
cheating, like giving some of the horses a head start, provided
McCarron the result he wanted and he says all the hard work only
made him appreciate the real Seabiscuit even more.

Chris McCarron>> Well, the horses that we used for Seabiscuit's
role, we actually had six racing Seabiscuits. I'll tell you
what, they could do a tag team match and they could start at
various points around the racetrack and they still wouldn't beat
the real Seabiscuit because he was awesome and these horses that
we used in the film were not extremely talented.

Philip Bruce>> Santa Anita's legendary history is a great
story, but today this track and many others like it face
challenges that you won't find in the movies. They are, above
all, places to watch a race and place a bet. The trouble is,
lots of people are doing both these days without ever getting
near the track. The Sport of Kings doesn't draw nearly the
crowds it once did and very often that means Santa Anita is an
unappreciated gem.

Legends and reputation aside, it's a Southern California
landmark everybody knows about, but which only a handful bother
to visit. Can "Seabiscuit" the movie rekindle the public's
interest the way Seabiscuit the horse once did? Stuart
Zanville, the man in charge of marketing this great old track,
says the early signs are encouraging.

Stuart Zanville>> It's difficult to say. I know one thing that
we have created awareness of Santa Anita and our sport to a
level that has not been the case for many, many years.

Philip Bruce>> But everyone here knows it will take more than
the reflected glory from a movie to help Santa Anita compete.
After all, there have been lots of films using this track as a
backdrop dating back to the Marx Brothers in "A Day at the
Races" in 1937.

[Film Clip]

Philip Bruce>> Now it falls to a real jockey to help Santa
Anita blaze a new trail for the twenty-first century.

Chris McCarron>> "Seabiscuit" the movie is going to be a great
shot in the arm for racing and it will bring people to the
facility, but once we get them here, we have to figure out how
to make them happy while they're here and make it a very
interesting day for them so they'll want to return.

Philip Bruce>> And McCarron hopes to accomplish that by doing
more than just trading on Santa Anita's past glory. He says
there are all kinds of ways to turn the track into an
entertainment destination that offers families more than a day
at the races.

Chris McCarron>> We're working on plans of creating some extra
entertainment here. We're thinking about the possibilities of
building a concert area so that we could have music during the
races and even on weekends. So we'd just like to be able to
utilize this beautiful grand facility in a much better way than
we've ever used it before.

Philip Bruce>> Ironically, so much still rides on the back of a
great horse that ran at Santa Anita into the history of America,
a horse that once seemed to embody the hopes of a troubled
nation.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Perhaps nothing can recapture the drama of Seabiscuit's
famous run at Santa Anita, but people at the track tell us
they've definitely been rediscovered by a whole new audience
since the movie came out.

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Val>> We bring you now the poignant and emotional story of a
search, a daughter's search for a father she never knew. Tracy
Droz Tragos was only three months old when her father died in an
ambush in Vietnam. At age thirty-two, Tracy began to look for
her father. The search began on the Web and ended as an
independent documentary called "Be Good, Smile Pretty". We met
Tracy at a coffee shop in Westwood to find out how this powerful
film changed her life.

Tracy Droz Dragos>> I always had a photograph on my dresser of
my father in his dress uniform and I knew the statistics from
his obituary. I did have a relationship with his family in his
home town of Rich Hill, Missouri, so I would visit them. They
had more pictures than I had at home of him, but there wasn't a
lot of talking about my father and I didn't want to bring him up
because I didn't want to cause my family more pain than they'd
already been through.

On March 16, 2001, I took a break from this script that I was
writing and I just started randomly entering family members'
names into a search engine. It was a Friday night, I was bored
and I really had no intention of finding anything other than,
you know, I was just fooling around. I took my name and my
mother's name and my husband's name and I took my father's name.
I didn't even enter Donald Glenn Droz, his full name. I just
entered Don Droz and up came an account of how he was killed in
Vietnam.

This was information no one in my family had ever known before
written by a man who was on his boat and had witnessed him die.
I didn't even know if my mother knew the details that it
contained, so I kind of sat on it for two days and then, in
retrospect, it was pretty cowardly. I didn't know how to tell
her. I didn't know how to ask her, so I just e-mailed it to her
and said I don't know if you're up for this, but here's this
article that I found. She called me within like an hour of
getting it and was in tears and it all kind of spiraled from
there.

I went up to visit my mother and she was talking about my father
in a way that she had never talked about him. There were
stories that I'd never heard before and then we took this trunk
out of the garage and there was all this stuff in it that I'd
never known existed before. There was Super 8 footage of my
father holding me on R&R in Hawaii. I heard his voice for the
first time in these reel-to-reel audio tapes. My mother had
recorded a phone conversation.

>> "When are you going to come back?"

>> "I can't hear you."

>> "I said, when are you going to come back?"

>> "When am I going to come back? To the United States? I
don't know. About a year probably."

There was just all this stuff and I was overwhelmed with this
feeling like, you know, something's going to get lost. All
these stories are coming out and I'm in such a state, my mother
is in such a state, you know, it's going to get lost. So I
picked up a camera and started capturing these stories.

Mother>> "As I look at some of the -- in reading some of the
letters this morning, it's like it takes me back to a happy time
and then when I have to close them up and sit down and realize
that, you know, that it's gone."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> I didn't want it to end there. You know, I
sort of felt like there was so much out there that I'd never
known, you know, that I'd never known about before that I wanted
to know everything. It's like I'd finally gotten a taste of it
(laughter), so I went to his family in Missouri and I met the
men that served with him that rescued his body and the man that
wrote the article.

In June of 2001, I went to the Wall for Father's Day and that
was, for me, when I really felt like maybe I should do this for
more than just me and my immediate family and maybe three other
people because, for the first time in my life, I met other
children who were now adults like me who'd lost a father. But
they talked about, you know, the exact same things that I had
felt and experienced. And if everybody else was kind of like
me, feeling like they were alone, I thought I should share this
story.

I mean, there was just a tremendous amount of stuff out there.
It was very strange to realize that it had been out there all
this time. I had wanted to know all this stuff, but I had just
never kind of put the pieces together and really, for me, that
was what it was about. You know, putting these pieces together,
going to his hometown, going to the places -- you know, kind of
walking in his footsteps as much as I could.

One of the other discoveries for me was that, you know, it
wasn't just my mother who hadn't grieved. It was also a lot of
these veterans. A lot of my father's friends had never talked
about their experience.

>> "It wasn't until I sat on the edge of my bed and read a
little Stars and Stripes item about the ambush in which Don was
killed and then subsequently discovered that, well, my best
friends had gotten killed while I was sitting on my ass in a
hospital and I've lived with that all these years."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> And I think in order for me to get to where
I needed to go, in order to learn about my father, I had to sit
through those tears. I had to say it's okay to cry, but I'm
still going to continue to ask. It was important for me to do
that, even though as an audience, I think it's sometimes kind of
hard to see that. I felt a responsibility to share that because
that was the truth.

Tracy Droz Tragos>> "Have you felt very, very alone in all of
this?"

Mother>> "I am alone."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> "What about me?"

Mother>> "What do you mean, what about you?"

Tracy Droz Tragos>> "I mean, don't you know we have each other?
No?"

Mother>> "The grief that I feel is different from the grief
that you feel and the grief that you feel is different from the
grief that I feel. What you grieve for is partly that he died,
but more so that you didn't have his memory in your life."

Tracy Droz Tragos>> And for the first time, you know, I have a
sense that my father was kind of like Bill Zaladonis said in my
film, that he was kind of a smart ass and he had a good sense of
humor and that, you know, he was constantly telling jokes. You
know, these are things that I can now -- sounds strange, but
when presented with the challenges that life will present you,
you know, I can even now have that sort of pretend dialogue in
my head. You know, what would my father tell me now? Well,
he'd probably tell me to lighten up or, you know, don't take it
so seriously, have a little fun. You know, I get to have that
dialogue in my head and I get to maybe be more like I would be
if he had come home and been my father.

Val>> A few months after the film was finished, Tracy, her
husband and her mother went to Vietnam to visit the place where
her father had been killed. If you'd like to read the diary of
that trip, you can do so on their website.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us
by mail at this address:

Life and Times
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Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or
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Val>> If the Disney Concert Hall is Los Angeles's living room,
think of the Redcat Theatre as the basement where that artsy
teenager of yours explores his creativity. Redcat stands for
Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theatre and it's a place where
high-tech theatre meets imagination. Call it a big black box,
an experimental multimedia high-tech black box, a cube on the
cutting edge. Whatever you call it, it's like nothing else in
Southern California or beyond.

Mark Murphy>> I don't know of any other place in the United
States that rivals the unique qualities that we have here at
Redcat. It's a unique gift to the contemporary culture.

Val>> The Redcat Theatre sits just below Disney Concert Hall on
the corner of Second and Hope, but it's nothing like its more
mature classical parent upstairs.

Mark Murphy>> Frank Gehry has been quoted as saying that Disney
Hall is the new living room for Los Angeles, and I think of
ourselves as the basement laboratory, you might say.

Val>> Mark Murphy is Redcat's Executive Director.

Mark Murphy>> Having that juxtaposition both in the same
building is exciting to me.

Val>> So what will you actually experience if you step into
this theatrical laboratory? Well, I went to a rehearsal of the
Japanese ensemble, "Dumb Type", and my first sensation was
blackness, complete, almost tangible blackness, but it didn't
last long.

[Film Clip]

Val>> "Dumb Type" is from Japan and they are, to understate it,
unconventional.

[Film Clip]

Val>> The performance is called "Memorandum". They describe it
as "an impossible investigation into the unstable
neurophilosophical events of memory itself." I just called it
pretty amazing.

[Film Clip]

Val>> The name "Dumb Type" connotes several things. First,
they don't use words. The director, Shiro Takatani, is from
Kyoto.

Shiro Takatani (interpreted)>> Dumb Type believes that they
don't have the ability to perform like normal theatre performers
to use their voice and their face as an acting ability and they
are trying to create a message using lighting and sound and
other techniques besides just voice.

Val>> They do use writing. That's right, just writing and more
writing which was, after a while, strangely mesmerizing.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Of course, dumb also means stupid or idiotic which they
say, and I'm quoting again, "is a cynical antithesis to the more
refined and established world of high art." Translation?
They're rebels.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Dumb could also simply be the way you feel when you tell
a friend that you saw a bear onstage vacuuming up hundreds of
little pieces of paper.

[Film Clip]

Val>> But there is one thing that makes perfect sense. The
Redcat Theatre is the ideal space for adventurous performers.

Mark Murphy>> Well, we don't get information the same way as
when some of the classic plays were written a hundred or five
hundred years ago. We receive information through media bites
and information through rapid flying images.

Val>> At times, the performance reminds you of images from a
dream. They're actually produced by computer manipulation of
video and human interaction. The Redcat Theatre has state-of-
the-art equipment, top of the line 35mm projectors, three
hundred seats that can be arranged traditionally or in the round
and a mission that reflects its operator, Cal Arts.

Mike Murphy>> It's my hope that the technological capabilities,
that the unique setting, that the mission devoted to
experimentation in the arts, as well as the exposure to some
artists who are leading the way in that sort of experimentation
through our visiting artist program, will together inspire
people to work here with the understanding that it's a safe
zone, it's a safe haven, for experimentation.

Val>> "Dumb Type" started as a group of frustrated college
students, frustrated at having to stay within the strict bounds
of their fields such as architecture, painting or music. They
were inspired by emerging multimedia and conceptual artists.
Redcat's mission is to blur the boundaries between artistic
discipline.

Shiro Takatani>> I jealous about Los Angeles people have this
kind of theatre because, in Kyoto, it is very difficult to find
this kind of, how can I say, of course, we have theatre, but
it's not for the experimental.

[Film Clip]

Val>> Redcat will also give Cal Arts students a chance to
perform closer to Los Angeles's hip downtown culture.

Mark Murphy>> And it's exciting for Cal Arts which is located
in Valencia, thirty-five miles to the north, to have an
opportunity to share with a larger audience in Los Angeles some
of the remarkable visiting artists who have always been guest
teachers and guest lecturers at Cal Arts, but not able to
actually present their work in Los Angeles.

Val>> So is Los Angeles ready for the creative collision of
stage, screen, music, video, acting, dance and who knows what
else? Mark Murphy thinks so.

Mark Murphy>> I think some people may leave Redcat thinking
that they loved what they just saw and some may leave thinking
that they really hated it or that it wasn't successful. But I
hope that no one leaves thinking with a shrug, well, that was
just fine, because that's not what we're here for. We're here
to challenge perceptions and to try new things.

[Film Clip]

Val>> The Redcat Theatre is throwing its opening celebration
this weekend. It goes for twenty-four hours, so you can show up
at midnight or two o'clock and there will be plenty going on.
And on Sunday, there are loads of free family activities.
That's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and
Times, thanks for watching.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of
the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality
of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of
medicine, health, science and education.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times, a battle of survival is
taking place off Southern California's shore and at stake is the
future of a tiny animal that's become an unfortunate part of
nature's food chain.

>> Right now, Golden Eagles is our worry, but there are other
things that could happen out there as well, so that's why it
will require constant vigilance on our part.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.