It’s 7:45 in the morning and the Millarville Racetrack just south of Calgary is already a flurry of activity.
“Today we’re putting together a horse race for an episode of Heartland,” says John Scott, longtime ATB customer and wrangler co-ordinator for the hit CBC television series.
Scott has worked in the motion picture industry dating back to 1969. He started out making $25 a day as a riding extra.
“I had rodeo’d quite a bit and some of the guys I’d rodeo’d with in the States came up here to do a picture called Little Big Man and they got a hold of me to put some horses and riders together for that,” recalled Scott, leaning against his white pickup truck. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”
Soon after, Scott headed to Hollywood to get a crash course on co-ordinating stunts for movies. “I cleaned the manure out of their trucks and brushed their horses for nothing for three or four months just to get on the sets of things like Gunsmoke, Alias Smith and Jones, Big Valley, just to learn the business.”
He is also a stuntman himself and has doubled for actors like Gene Hackman, Burt Lancaster and Paul Newman. Now in his mid-60s, Scott still performs many of his own stunts. “Quite a bit, yeah. I don’t fall off of ‘em as much as I used to but I still do quite a bit of stunt work as far as riding goes and setting things up.”
He’s worked on several Academy Award-winning movies like Days of Heaven, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and Unforgiven. The film that he’s most proud of is Legends of the Fall. “I spent four years trying to get it to Alberta and then when it came and it did very well it was a successful feeling.”
While it’s true Scott has hobnobbed with Hollywood’s elite, his job is hard work and he takes it very seriously. “A stunt co-ordinator is the safety valve on the picture,” Scott pointed out. “He organizes all of the action sequences and puts them forth in a safe manner. There’s always a safe way to do things but (bad) things can happen, especially when you’re working with animals.”
From his Longview ranch, Scott also runs one of the film industry’s largest stock-contractor operations. “I’m a 3rd-generation rancher on the same ranch that my grandfather homesteaded in 1904,” Scott said of the land he’s owned since 1976. “It’s a working cow ranch. We also run buffalo. And it’s home for 150 head of horses that work in the motion picture business.”
He has also built three movie sets on his land, which have been used as locations for several feature films, television series and commercials. “I have one set that’s a complete western town,” Scott pointed out. “It was built for a (made-for-TV) movie called Monte Walsh with Tom Selleck. Since then Little House on the Prairie has used it and The Virginian and a German television series.”
Scott’s ranch-based business has been a huge success but it might not have been possible if not for ATB Financial, which financed its expansion in the mid-1980s.
“I had a chance to buy a ranch west of me which I thought would never come for sale but it did, and it had quite a bit of lease land on it,” Scott said. “Of course, ATB being a crown corporation would finance lease land. They’re about the only ones that would. We’ve been with ATB ever since and it’s been a wonderful relationship.”
Even though he has been in the business for 40 years, Scott is showing no signs of slowing down. “It gets to be a passion working with the horses,” he said. “I think (professional chuckwagon driver) Troy Dorchester said it best. He says ‘We’re here because we love the horses, we don’t have to be here.’”
