Wearing my other hat as an entertainment industry blogger at my web sites HollywoodInHiDef.com and 3DHollywood.net,
by Scott Hettrick
I was pleasantly surprised this week while reviewing Disney’s terrific “Secretariat” (coming to Blu-ray Disc and DVD on Tuesday, Jan. 25), to see a couple familar faces from Santa Anita being interviewed in the bonus features.
Santa Anita’s Hall of Fame jockey Mike Smith who rode Zenyatta to immortaility, was certainly an understandable choice to corral for an interview in the section that offers different viewpoints on Secretariat, specifically relative to the historic 1973 Preakness race.
Hall of fame jockey Mike Smith
A less obvious choice but equally entertaining and informative is a companion segment featuring Dennis Mills, the vice chairman of MI Developments, which owns Santa Anita Park among many others, as a “historian.”
Mills, who is identified as CEO of MI Developments on the disc, a title that he resigned to his boss Frank Stronach last November, is mostly familiar to Arcadians as being one of the faces seen and a voice heard during Santa Anita’s bankruptcy and the loss of Oak Tree Racing last year amid myriad other challenges to the track and the industry in general.
MI Developments Vice Chairman Dennis Mills
“They contacted me and asked if I would be interested in saying something upbeat and positive about the historical significance of the Preakness,” Mills told ArcadiasBest.com today by phone. Mills describes his own memories of the Preakness track owned by MI, and notes that the archives at MI-owned Pimlico include an expense account for his day at the track filed by none other than George Washington. Mills said he flew out to meet the filmmakers in Burbank “and the next you thing you knew they were putting on make-up and putting me in front of the cameras.” He enjoyed the experience and said he did not know if his interview had made the cut until I contacted him today, so he was very pleased to hear that and is anxious to see how it came out. Smith’s brief interview is also entertaining, and he goes on to provide a running commentary during a digital recreation of the famous race.
— By Scott Hettrick