Luck: HBO series: David Milch, Dustin Hoffman, Michael Mann

Right, but those shoots were presumably a lot shorter, and not subject to as grueling a schedule (TV shoots tend to be a lot more hectic than film).

yeah definitely ... 2 hour movie with some racing vs basically a 9 hour movie with a ton of racing

but still, 1 death in 2000 productions vs. 3 deaths in this one production. it looks bad.

the guidelines for how much you can race the horses in a day remains the same, movies or tv

How many of the 2000 productions actually featured horseracing, though? Surely those would be much riskier than films that happen to feature one chase sequence on horseback, or even just horses hanging out or whatever.

And also, not just the equivalent of a 9-10 hour movie, but one of those every year. If anything think it may have been naive of HBO to not expect horse fatalities.

i saw this real sports segment a few years back about how there was a horseracing scandal in the 70s, where there was an epidemic of leg breaks due to painkiller usage and horses being run when they shouldnt, and how some people still think thats going on but everyone in horseracing is real cagey about it and the accusations only come from people who arent active in the sport anymore

i dont know anything about racing but i always think about that when i hear about breaks and horses dying

what was the plot point that came up in that teary nick nolte monologue about the leg breaks? that was an insurance scam or something, right?

thats a reference to the alydar/calumet farm scandal iirc?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alydar

ah, thanks Hungry4Ass-- that was linked upthread i guess

another question i keep meaning to ask-- why do all the Foray Stables guys live in a motel? I thought they were only going to hide out there for a day after winning big in ep1?

Clearly these horses should be angling for better union representation.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2012/03/luck-angry-david-milch-brought-baseball-bat-to-edit-bay.html

"He said to John [Ortiz], who plays the other trainer on the show, ‘I’m going to go down to the editing room and I’m going to kill Michael Mann.’"

And also, not just the equivalent of a 9-10 hour movie, but one of those every year. If anything think it may have been naive of HBO to not expect horse fatalities.

― Simon H., Thursday, March 15, 2012 7:10 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nay, to embrace them!

wait why is it so horrible when a horse dies bc it was raced for a tv show but it's fine for them to die for sport

obv peta and them are against horse racing but there's this subtext that horses dying for "art" (w/e) is going too far, and i don't really see why the institution of horseracing itself isn't really questioned. too many jobs at stake? or does peta just go after whatever the media will latch onto?

it often is questioned! there's great anxiety inside the horseracing world about how everyone else, esp animal rights activists, will respond to horse breakdowns

david milch is so fucking self-important

peta just goes after whatever the media will latch onto.

self-important in the best way possible imo xpost

i think milch is just a swinging dick and so is mann, tensions are always high when a production is lagging behind

david milch is so fucking self-important

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:27 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so true I've always thought he was a bit of a pompous medium talent

smh @ Deadwood being considered the product of a "medium talent"

it's just interesting to me that three horses die and an extremely high-profile HBO show is canceled for it while it happens all the time in real life without consequence

Because HBO shows are way more in the public eye than horse races prob

Because I thought this show could have been really amazing given the time to stretch out, I agree with you. But if horses had died during the making of 2 Broke Girls, it would have been knives out from me.

Still, Real Housewives drove a dude to suicide and its still on the air.

Ya but not THREE

is he really pompous or is that just a reaction to the mythmaking around the milchian 'genius', which he has no control of? i think he has some blowhard tendencies but isn't particularly self-important beyond holding the belief that his should be the primary creative voice on his projects - a trait he shares with any decent director

hes not a medium talent but i do think his vision would benefit from being molded or directed a bit so that he doesn't disappear up his own ass too much - which is why Luck was so promising on paper (ive only seen the first four eps)

I think his larger desires about what he wants to express can overshadow things (John from Cincinnati, for instance) but he's got a great handle on storytelling, episode structure, and character arcs.

I don't think he cares about seeming pompous though. Anyone who brings along the Kierkegaard to a seminar he's giving for a media class isn't concerned seeming pretentious. More power to him, I say.

yeah milch talent > milch pompousness

yeah i think he's talented (although i thought that every other deadwood episode was a complete mess) but he is indisputably self-important

Dude wants to live up to Robert Penn Warren's ambritions.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/.a/6a00d8341c630a53ef0168e8cda3e1970c-pi

Needs cartoon bat.

http://www.good.is/post/if-we-don-t-kill-horses-for-tv-why-kill-them-for-gambling/

We Eat Horses, Don't We?

As always, I highly recommend folks dig up that New Yorker profile of Milch. He's likely a bona fide genius (even if I think his output outside of Deadwood has been erratic). Mann's a genius, too, but he arrived at it through sheer hard work, which perhaps explains why he's been so much more successful. He's less beholden to a muse and more able to simply buckle down and do what needs to be done.

Link?

http://deadspin.com/5893747/since-december-16-horses-have-died-at-aqueduct-racetrack

lets get real here folks, this show was canceled because no ones watching it

I thought that at first but not so sure. There's fewer people watching Enlightened and it's still on. Treme is in its third season and was drawing about the same numbers as Luck from what I've heard.

I mean I guess it was a combo of bad PR + expensive to produce + ratings not that great. But I don't really think HBO was just looking for an out here.

Even if not that many people watched it was still a "prestige show" and Dustin Hoffman's first ever TV gig

Enlightened probably doesn't cost 1/20th of what Luck does.

Mann's a genius, too, but he arrived at it through sheer hard work, which perhaps explains why he's been so much more successful.

He's also terrifying, and a careerist of the first magnitude. His legend - like, say, Lynch's - eclipses his outputs.

and kills 1/20th of the horses

I think laura dern is going to slit a horse's throat in the season opener

mann is a genius fuiud

no one suggested he wasnt?

yah remy did

if im parsing his pretend hollywood insider schtick correctly

Mann's a genius, too

oh rlly

Ali, The Insider, Collateral... jeezus, up there w/ the best of Renoir

shhh go watch e.t.

Heat was at least like a nutty 3-hour condensation of these endless HBO shows you guys love

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