old school have you ever heard of
 

martin ritt........

"the late Martin Ritt, who directed Hud, Sounder and a fistful of other fine movies. Perhaps this was because he came into the game the hard way, as a horseplayer during the nineteen-fifties, when he found himself the victim of the notorius Hollywood black list. "I was living in New York then. This was in the McCarthy era, and I couldn't work. I'd been accused of being a Communist, so nobody would hire me," he told me. "So I began going to the track. It didn't take me long to figure out that most of the people out there didn't know much." Ritt learned fast. He supported himself at the track for years as a bettor until he could get back to work as a director. When he became an owner, he approached it with the same tough-minded unsentimentality with which he plucked winners out of the Racing Form in order to pay the rent. He had what he called an iron ass and could sit in his box all day without making a single bet, if he had to, a discipline that kept him from squandering millions on expensively bred bums. He claimed and bought and bred horses at all levels, but got rid of the ones who didn't produce and had no more feelings for the animals themselves than a trader in commodities. When I asked him why he never went to the backside to see his horses, he answered, "Why should I? They don't know me?" From the book "The Wrong Horse and Oddyssey Through the American Racing Scene" by William Murray.

Hud is a great movie with Paul Newman (Hombre is pretty good, too). He also directed Casey's Shadow, a racing Quarter Horse movie based on the early career of Randy Romero.

its a very entertaining book thanks to infield - line who turned me on to it......

you would be suprised how many books are out there that arent all how toos...