The Red Bulletin April 2020

Trick riders
father died in 1984, at the age of 71,
Tad took note. “My kids were trained
completely differently,” he says, quietly.
BORN TO RIDE
Gattlin, a 21-year-old with a heartfelt
demeanour and a wide DiCaprio-esque
face, is the leader and spokesman for the
brothers. Three years younger is Callder,
a young man with an intense gaze and
a wry smile, who is currently rooming
with his older brother at Santa Monica
College, and who returned from a recent
rodeo-scouting expedition in Canada
with reports of Calgary’s hard-charging
cowgirl trick riders. Arrden, 16, who
sports a swooping wing of cinnamon hair,
became the first to break a bone (his
ankle) during a trick-riding run last year.
And blue-eyed Garrison – 11, with a spray
of freckles across his face – proved an
expert prankster in a series of Subaru ads.
Gattlin and Callder conduct a tour of
the Griffith menagerie. The ranch’s
The trick being performed here by Arrden is known,
for obvious reasons, as the back breaker
affectionate animal-naming convention
centres on pairs: Jesse and James, Clash
and Titan, Dallas and Cowboy, Bert and
Ernie, and the cows Ben and Jerry – they
treat their beasts with a tenderness more
akin to family than livestock.
For the brothers, trick riding runs
parallel with acting in film, TV and
adverts. Gattlin has made his mark in
major roles, from a kidnapped child in
Clint Eastwood’s 2008 film Changeling
to a 12-year-old demon in the TV series
Supernatural. Callder’s CV includes stunt
work for the show American Horror Story
and a role in the 2016 Western Boonville
Redemption, while Arrden has appeared
in the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. Most
recently, Garrison – together with Gattlin
– performed in Safety, a short film about
a school shooting. The siblings appear
unjaded by their exposure to star power,
even oblivious to the sketchier side of
Hollywood. This seems to have been part
of Tad’s second-act master plan once he
knew he’d offer his sons the chance to
take on the dangers of trick riding.
Tad’s ethical quandaries were not only
confined to putting his own boys at risk.
Alongside being a versatile stuntman –
from flipping a semi-truck for the Fast &
Furious franchise to being burned alive in
2001’s The Last Castle – he is a livestock
coordinator and stunt-horse trainer. Tad
knew he was joining an industry with a
chequered past regarding the treatment
of animals. Horror stories abound from
the old Western days, and as recently as
2012 the TV series Luck was cancelled
after three horses died during filming.
Keeping the impact of live action while
eliminating downside risk became Tad’s
crusade. “I’d been on many projects that
were a long way from well thought out,”
he says. “I was inspired to find a way that
was safer, quicker and more humane.”
For 2003’s Seabiscuit (2003), Tad
coordinated a sequence that illustrates
this challenge. A jockey, played by Tobey
Maguire, is seriously injured when thrown
from a panicked horse and dragged for
an excruciating distance with his foot
caught in the stirrup. Tad rehearsed with
a hundred slow drags before he felt the
horse was ready to perform at speed.
For the mounted chase in John Wick 3,
a 120m rubber runway was constructed
beneath an elevated subway track, and
the horse shod with rubber shoes. Tad’s
team drove the horse via lines from
above and in front, while a safety harness
created an invisible protective box in the
event of a stumble. Lately, he has been
testing a system designed to let a camera
operator shoot while on horseback. “I
can chase actors and horses down creeks
and up through trees where an ordinary
camera rig can’t follow.” Engineering
solutions like this are Tad’s answer to the
CGI takeover of physical action sequences
– a conviction born from a thousand live
shows where nothing can be faked.
Tad is pleased by his sons’ bridging
of old and modern. There’s pride when
he talks about the Wild West Express at
the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo five
years ago – 30 performances in 17 days.
“It’s the biggest, most prestigious show in
the world, and we’re only there because
of our name. The kids are feeling the
pressure of all that, and the fact they
could die. That show is the quintessence
of my life: anticipation, struggle, relief.
They’ve shared the experience of
learning how to do it; they know where
they came from.” And they survived it.
THE RED BULLETIN 47