Working Hollywood: Lisa Brown keeps Secretariat — all of them — in line

Self-professed “ California cowgirl” Lisa Brown is hoping audiences won’t notice that multiple horses played the title role in Disney’s new fact-based drama “Secretariat.” As the horse continuity wrangler on the film, it was her task to disguise any physical differences among the six or seven animals — using a brush and a set of non-toxic, water-based paints — so that they would appear identical over the course of the movie, starring Diane Lane as owner-breeder Penny Chenery.

“In every wrangler’s bag, there’s the paint to color out a brand or a star, or add a sock,” she said. “My goal is to make sure that you absolutely cannot tell the horses are painted. It takes patience and a steady hand and, for me, I’m a perfectionist about color.”

She comes by her artistic eye naturally as the daughter of interior designer Howard Hirsch and art gallery owner Audrey Brown. Her father also instilled her love of horses.

“My dad would take me out to ride on the weekends,” said Brown, who grew up in Santa Monica and now resides in Montana. “I remember the way they smelled, and I thought, ‘Ach, this is the loveliest smell.’ And I felt so independent riding. It was just the most wonderful experience to be on top of a horse, alone, riding out into the horizon.”

She signed up for lessons, spent her summers at horse camp and worked at neighborhood stables and at Ponyland, a track offering rides for children where the Beverly Center now stands. “I worked to ride,” she said.

After working as an exercise rider at the tracks in Santa Anita and Pomona, she began training and riding polo ponies at Will Rogers State Historic Park in Pacific Palisades. She gave barn tours to inner-city children and worked as a horse trainer for actors including Michael Keaton and Jim Carrey.

Since then, she’s been responsible for wrangling and horse continuity on films including 2003’s “Seabiscuit,” 2005’s “Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story,” 2006’s “Flicka,” the upcoming Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 western “True Grit” and “Secretariat.”

“I think there were six or seven Secretariats, but I do not want the audience to know that there’s more than one horse,” she said. “That’s the whole gist of it. My definition of continuity is to match the horses so they all flow into one fantastic horse. And Secretariat, in my opinion, was one of the greatest horses of all time.”

Max power: “The horse that you see in the posters and all the close-ups is Longshot Max,” Brown said. “He is a chestnut horse, and I had to paint stockings on him, a star and a stripe. He did not have any of those. The head wrangler Rusty Hendrickson is the one who chooses where each horse goes, and the reason Longshot Max was chosen for the close-ups and for the handling by Diane Lane and everyone is because of his gentler disposition and being good with the camera.”

Speed racer: “We have a wonderful horse named Copper,” said Brown. “Copper Locks, I believe, is his registered name. He’s a quarter horse, and quarter horses are the fastest horses in a quarter of a mile, basically. So Rusty bought Copper specifically to play Secretariat and just blaze past the other horses. He was challenging for me to paint, because he has a big white blaze down his face. So we had to match his hair color to color it out so it’s just a thin white strip. It’s almost easier to add a thin white line than to take away all the white.”

The natural look: There was one horse that did make Brown’s job easy. “Every year, the Secretariat Foundation has a look-alike contest for Secretariat, and everybody paints their horses to look like Secretariat,” she said. “The winner in 2008, Trolley Boy, didn’t need paint. He was almost an exact match. He had the star, the blaze, the socks on the correct feet. We bought that horse, and he didn’t need any makeup. I mean, what a fluke! He was a really good horse for the scenes where you’ll see the horse’s feet running. Those were Trolley Boy’s unpainted.”

Not horsing around: “One of my things in life is I want to share horses with as many people as I can, because they’re fantastic, amazing animals,” said Brown. “They settled civilization, basically. People should revere horses. I also like for kids and inner-city kids to be around horses and realize — it’s a mantra for me — that whatever your passion is in life, you can make that your life’s work. I was a horse crazy kid, and I turned it into a career, and I feel truly blessed. So I try to share that with kids.”

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