Last month Santa Anita Park enjoyed a national showcase on ESPN2 for the annual Sunshine Millions race. Last Sunday the track served as the prominent backdrop to Shaquille O’Neal’s Vitamin Water commercial during the middle of the most-watched Super Bowl ever.
These high-profile appearances are only the latest in nearly three-quarters of a century of appearing in front of the camera.
Within five years of the first races at the track on Christmas Day in 1934, Hollywood stars and filmmakers were flocking to the Arcadia venue to film no less than a dozen feature films, including a Charlie Chan episode, At the Race Track, starring Warner Oland in one of his 16 movies in the enormously popular and long-running series. In 1937 alone, the track served as the primary location for one of The Marx Bros. most hilarious comedies, A Day at the Races, filled with several classic scenes of race-jargon banter between Groucho and Chico, and for a pivotal scene in the original Janet Gaynor version of A Star is Born featuring Fredric March and the 1954 remake with Judy Garland and James Mason, both in the track’s elegant Chandelier Room and preceded by shots of the track itself and the grandstands.
In that same year a 17-minute Vitaphone short family drama feature called A Day at Santa Anita (in an early version of Technicolor), starring young actress Sybil Jason in a Shirley Temple-like performance (included as a bonus feature on Warner Home Video’s October 2007 special three-disc special edition of the 1937 Al Jolson version of The Jazz Singer) shows a great deal of Santa Anita and the surroundings. It also includes a sampling of the many Hollywood stars that frequented the track, including Jolson himself, Olivia de Havilland (two years before she starred in Gone with the Wind), Edward G. Robinson, and Bette Davis, among others.
Although countless movies, TV shows, and commercials use the expansive Santa Anita Park grounds and parking lot to film scenes that may have nothing to do with horse racing, including a major scene from a recent season of Grey’s Anatomy, and the new Pushing Daisies TV series, the facility is still also used in many movies and TV programs as a horse race track setting, from prominent films such as the critical and box-office hit Seabiscuit to last year’s Hallmark Channel TV movie patterned after the long-running Diagnosis Murder series, Murder 101: If Wishes Were Horses, starring Dick Van Dyke.
Here is a list of some other productions filmed at Santa Anita Park that featured the track (taken from Internet Movie Database – imdb.com). Look them over and offer comments below if you’ve seen any of them and can remember what scenes from the programs feature the track. And please submit others you may remember.
Angel (1937) Charlie Chan at the Race Track (1936) Day at the Races, A (1937) Debtors, The (1999) Ex-Mrs. Bradford, The (1936) Fighting Thoroughbreds (1939) Hollywood Handicap (1938) In Old Kentucky (1935) Murder 101: If Wishes Were Horses (2007) (TV) National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) Nixon (1995) Notorious (1946) Out to Sea (1997) Quincy M.E.: When Luck Ran Out (1976) (TV Episode) Return of October, The (1948) Scream Play (2004) TV Series Seabiscuit (2003) Sergeant Murphy (1938) Stablemates (1938) Star Is Born, A (1937) Star Is Born, A (1954) Straight Place and Show (1938) Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937)