When Bug Content’s Michael Smith and Jeremy Grant signed on to be the Executive Producer and Director of the OLG’s horse racing documentary, Unfiltered, neither of them had any experience when it came to our industry. That didn’t stop them, however, from doing an incredible job on the hit five-part Crave TV series, while at the same time falling in love with the sport and many of its participants. TROT recently sat down with Michael and Jeremy and asked them to share their experience from behind the cameras. By Dan Fisher.
“I have been doing this for 20-plus years and I have never had a group or community open up their doors to us as we’ve experienced making this series. From the folks at OLG, Ontario Racing, Woodbine, and all the wonderful people that are involved with this sport, everyone has been amazing and have made this a dream job!” ~ Michael Smith of Bug Content… Executive Producer of Unfiltered
When the OLG and Ontario Racing decided to take racing into the mainstream this past year, it was welcome news to most everyone in the industry. In this day-and-age of video streaming almost anything to one’s phone, tablet or laptop, the Crave TV series, Unfiltered, sought to give our sport unprecedented exposure to millions who have yet to experience us. But who were the right people to tell our story? Enter the agency known as TAXI, and their hiring of Bug Content’s Michael Smith (Executive Producer) and Jeremy Grant (Director) - two men that not only did a wonderful job in doing just that, but who also became huge fans of our sport and its participants along the way.
TROT recently sat down with both Michael and Jeremy, and asked them to share their views and behind-the-scenes stories, from the recently wrapped-up five-part series that appears on Crave, and can also be viewed on the TSN website and YouTube.
Let’s start by telling us a bit about how you got involved with what you do for a living, and if you had any past experiences with horse racing before you started work on this series.
JEREMY: My story is that I grew up in a small town in British Columbia riding mountain bikes, and all my friends got really good really quick. We used to film each other, and they all started doing these death-defying stunts - I decided I’d be safer behind the camera (laughing). Since then, about 20 years now, I’ve traveled the world making exciting sports look fast… a lot of skiing, mountain biking, motocross. Anything fast and high-stakes, I’ve done. I said, before starting this series, that I had only been to Toronto once, but I’ve been to the Gobi Desert three times, and the North Pole twice. Most of my trips are in the middle of nowhere, but when OLG, TAXI and Michael reached out to me, I immediately saw the through-line of the heart in this sport. I also saw the risk-and-reward, and how familiar it was to so many of the other sports I’ve done... I also saw, a bit, that it was a complicated sport, and how it would be a challenge to bring people in and get to know all the layers. My lack of, I’d never worked in horse racing before, but I had worked a ton in really intense sports… I realized that was not a hindrance but a superpower, to come in with a fresh perspective. I knew as much as a fresh audience would know, and I knew I could bring them along for that ride. What really pulled me in though… you don’t make films on sport this long without being addicted to something, and for me it’s that passion. Immediately I picked up on that in horse racing.
MICHAEL: From the beginning I kind of fell ass-backwards into this field. I was supposed to be a fire-fighter but before I went to fire college I realized that I had an irrational fear of ladders, so it probably wasn’t going to work out (laughing). I was fine with fire but not with ladders. I was an actor for a hot-second and that’s when I realized that I just loved the business. Someone told me to go into commercials first because when you’re a production assistant in films you can’t do anything else… you can’t help the grips or anything like that. There’s a natural pace when you’re doing commercials, you have 2-3 hours of down time, twice a day, when you can start hanging out with the camera guys or whoever else… you can start to learn the whole gamut of how things work. So I eventually ticked my way up, started producing, and opened up my own company [Bug Content] a few years ago. I represent a stable of directors… The client [OLG] would work with the agency - TAXI - and they’d send out the script to all of the executive producers they know and trust. Then I put forward a director [Jeremy] that I want for the project. They [TAXI] pick three, and then we go into a bidding war. That’s when Jeremy puts out the treatment on how he’s going to approach the job, and then we work together, with the agency, on a projected budget. I had zero background in horse racing but I’ve always loved listening to the call [of the race]. I often watch the Kentucky Derby just for that… that ‘Rich Strike call’ [2022 Kentucky Derby] still gets me (laughing). I did have an affinity for the sport because I love horses. I absolutely love horses. They’ve been very stand-offish with me my whole life, and towards the end of the shoot there’s been a nice little icing on the cake in that I’ve learned how to be around them a little bit more.
Tell us a bit about the individuals in racing that you worked with the most closely on the Standardbred side. Maybe something that happened behind-the scenes, or just something that pops into your mind when you hear their name.
TYLER JONES, ‘The Rookie’…
JEREMY: Tyler was actually just texting me last night about how much he loved the series. He’s just such a great human being on top of being a great horseman. My favourite thing about him was just the trust he gave us from the very beginning… letting us in. Normally, with being in front of the camera people need time to warm up, but immediately he just kind of gave in and showed us his whole self, and then let us pick what to highlight and what not to. He’s just such a genuine guy. Even in his previous work, I want to say with kids… he’s just got such a massive heart. For him to know he’s ‘The Rookie’... he knew the role he’d been cast in, and was self aware enough… he has a lot of confidence but is just there to learn still, and I was so impressed by that in him.
MICHAEL: He was amazing. It was also nice to meet Dustin… it was one of the reasons that we chose Tyler, to show that father/son story, with his father having been a very successful horseman. I will say that from a production standpoint, that when his owner of No Control decided to pull the horse from racing in the North America Cup [eliminations] that obviously created a massive wrinkle for us in story. We were like, ‘Holy shit, how are we going to keep Tyler in this?’ So that was a huge thing and a learning curve in how unpredictable this sport can be, because we’re used to having everything locked in a week or two weeks ahead of time. I’d been working with Jeremy for about a year-and-a-half at that point and didn’t know he even had this in him, but it impressed the hell out of me how he was just able to pivot and find the story. ‘This didn’t happen so now we’re going to carve this story out.’ As an executive producer it was pretty awesome to see Jeremy do that.
JEREMY: We’d been talking about this for months, with it all leading to the North America Cup… we’re betting on particular drivers to do this or that. What a great story if the rookie comes all the way through and wins the North America Cup. It’s a longshot, we knew, but that’s a story we were kind of dreaming of in our heads. In the weeks leading up, now you hear his horse is doing well… and then, as it’s so classic in horse racing, boom, the horse isn’t even in the eliminations and Tyler only has one drive on the big night. Then we thought we had Doug and James, the two leading guys - they’re my safety blanket - and Doug doesn’t get a drive in the final and James has a longshot with a bad post position. Now we’ve built an entire season around that… It’s just like a film-making contest. You’ve got to pivot and find a new way, a new story to chase. For me, in that final episode, what I loved so much, is that after James was last in the North America Cup, he then showed that resilience to come back and win the very next race anyway. To me that would be like losing game seven of the Stanley Cup finals and having to come back and play again 10 minutes later.
JAMES MacDONALD, ‘King James’...
JEREMY: James gave a line that ‘If you do really, really well in this sport you still lose 80% of the time’. Michael and I use that line all of the time now, in life, and not just horse racing (laughing). But my favourite James and Doug story that isn’t in the show - most of them are in the show - was in casting. To tell too many stories is to tell no stories at all - we’ll lose the audience. We just wanted to tell three or four main stories. We had a list of about 10 drivers that had been recommended to us as potential good stories. We do phone calls to see who has a good personality to be on camera and see if they’re interested in being in this. First I talked to James a bunch and he was great… then I did a call with another driver and then I called Doug. I was about to give Doug my spiel of what it was all about and he goes, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I was already talking to James’ (laughing). So they’re one and two in the sport - top competitors - and they’re calling each other that quickly about a documentary. I found that very interesting. And they both said it when asked, if there was one main guy they liked beating most, it was each other. I then thought that was very interesting too. There’s such a friendship there… they’re tight enough friends that they’re calling each other about this documentary, but they want to beat each other so badly.
MICHAEL: Like Jeremy said, the relationship between James and Dougie is very unique, but aside from that, when I think about James I think about his dad, Fred, and him not making it into the final cut, unfortunately. When we did that whole road trip aspect to the Camluck [Classic] James’ dad drove up with him. We had a whole bunch of stuff that…I don’t know if you know James’ dad (laughing) but unfortunately it wasn’t ‘PG’ enough to make the cut, but he was quite a trip too. Then we lost him at the actual event as well, so we couldn’t tie him into the story at all, which was too bad. He showed up in the winner’s circle when James won the one big race [The Forest City Pace] but other than that we lost him (laughing). From what we know of the family, we thought we could probably do an entire documentary on them. In fact, when we approached this, one of our ideas was to look for someone, like Tyler, who had lineage in the sport, but we soon realized it was the same story everywhere, like everybody in the family is involved. It’s a very interesting aspect of the sport.
DOUG McNAIR, ‘The Prodigy’...
JEREMY: With both Doug and James, they were so welcoming from the start. It wasn’t guarded at all. They both said things like ‘You’ve got to come out golfing with us; we should all go to a hockey game’. I swear they would have moved us in to live on their couches if we wanted that kind of access. You really need candor in a series like this though. A lot of people will change who they really are in front of the camera, but Dougie wasn’t like that. He was the same person before we pushed the red button and after - which is so important. At the beginning of the series I really thought we had our confident veteran in him… what started to happen, because of his honesty and candor, you really start to fall in love with him. By coincidence though, even though he’s having a good year, he kept having this second-itis when we were with him. So we really started playing it up. By the final episode we really needed him to get a big win. Then, obviously, he had two big wins [in the Armbro Flight and Roses Are Red], including that incredible comeback [after the accident in the Mohawk Gold Cup], and really showed myself and the audience just what he’s capable of, and why he is, beyond the personality and everything, one of the top drivers out there.
MICHAEL: We all still laugh, because in episode one he’s going home and he tells James he wants him to win; then later in the series he admits that he was actually just kidding, but on N.A. Cup night he actually, finally, meant it (laughing). He really didn’t censor us in any capacity… if he wasn’t having a good night or something, he let all of that stuff stay in. When they give us all of that freedom it makes our life a lot easier. It’s not that they actually have access to see footage in advance or anything, but in this case they had been (laughing)… There is a cut that goes out to places like the Woodbine people, and there was a leak somewhere (laughing). One of them would comment on a part [in an upcoming episode] and I’d say ‘How do you know, it’s not even out yet?’
CHRIS MATTHEWS, ‘The Assistant Trainer’...
JEREMY: In those casting calls I spoke about earlier, Chris told me the story he told in episode one about having asthma, and I was like, ‘There it is’. It’s easy to play up the rivalries and the classic sports stuff, but what makes horse racing special is the horses. So, without being able to really follow a horse for the series - because there were too many variables with them - that love for horses poured out of Chris more than anything. I knew it was important to show that… there’s a certain show-don’t-tell style to filmmaking though - you don’t want to just say it. But you could see it in his every action, his love of the animals. The hours he wakes up in the morning… and it is… you feel the unsung heroes of the sport. James, Doug and Tyler are incredible, and they even take second tier to the horses, but behind them is these incredible people who wake up early… like, when we were filming with Chris and Doug at the farm, we’re there with Chris at five in the morning. The lightning is going, he’s helping pull production vehicles out that we got stuck (laughing), and doing interviews and everything, and Doug slept in until like 11 o’clock that morning (laughing). It’s so important to see all that. Chris is like a metaphor for the entire team that goes behind all that - the grooms… there’s even so much more to it behind the trainers and assistant trainers. The biggest challenge is that there’s so many people to highlight. Chris was perfect to use, to show the emotion of the love of the horses above all else, and we knew that was essential to the series… and then also someone to combat Doug and bring him back down to Earth (laughing).
MICHAEL: You just can’t help but root for that guy. He’s so wonderful. My dad, who’s not a horse guy, said the same thing you did, how the part in episode one with Chris [where he describes his asthma and how he just decided to work with the horses anyway] was just so emotional and how it really got him. I also think about how when the crash happened [on N.A. Cup night] and how Doug was down and how Chris was obviously very concerned… he just ran down the stretch, and almost put himself in the hospital because of his asthma (laughing). It’s a special bond that those two guys have, I think, and it was awesome to be with them and be around them. I mean, we were worried too. We knew that Doug went down. That was our friend out there on the track. Now that it’s over we really miss these guys. You have these amazing people in your lives, and there’s a purpose for it, and now the purpose is gone, and they’re gone… it’s kind of unfortunate, and to be honest it’s tough to deal with sometimes. I can go into a bit of a funk after one of these things.
KELLY SPENCER…
JEREMY: The term is ‘It’s hard to see the forest for the trees’, so to ask any of these drivers or trainers ‘What happened that race?’ or ‘What was the significance of that?’... The entire job of the driver is only to look at winning, so they don’t have an objective point of view (laughing). So we knew we needed someone to educate the audience, pull them through it, give them the significance and set things up quickly… Kelly was that. She’s so intelligent, such a great story teller. The interviews, I would start with her interview and we would craft the story together, and then build it up with their interviews. It was great to lean on her knowledge of the sport. Again, I’m not super-versed in the sport so I could ask the ‘dumb questions’ that the audience would be asking, because it is so easy to get lost quickly in this sport, and it was so important to make sure that anyone who came in knew… the stakes and the simplest of rules. The whole idea with the series is to bring people in. Our whole job, and Kelly helped us a ton with this, was just opening the door, just get people to glance, fall in love with the characters, and then they can lead it from there.
MICHAEL: She was critical in terms of the story itself, what you see on camera, and she was critical in helping Jeremy and I navigate through it - especially in the early days when we knew nothing. She’s a total pro and… is very articulate. She gave us the greatest sound bites like ‘Professional athletes driving professional athletes’. Come on! We could have asked 50 questions and not gotten anything like that (laughing). She had tons of things like that. She was awesome, and so was Jeff [Bratt] too.
Is there anything else that you’d like to add, that you think our readers may find interesting about what it was like to shoot this series for you, compared to other work you’ve done perhaps?
JEREMY: There’s so many great sports documentaries out there now on platforms like Netflix, so people kind of get it. People understood what we were trying to do and were like, ‘I love what Full Swing has done for golf, we want that for our sport’. But what those series’ have is that they shoot an entire season, they edit an entire winter, and it comes out the next year… Whereas we did this live, in that we’d shoot, and inside of a month that episode would come out. We wouldn’t know how it would end… It’s not cheating [the other way], it’s good story-telling, but when you know how it ends, all paths lead to that ending. We had no idea how this was going to end, just like anyone watching a race. So from a story-telling perspective you’re trying to cover it broadly enough, but you still need the audience to invest. Just like in horse racing though, sometimes the person you bet on, or follow all season, does not win the big race. I find as a story-teller though, that’s way more interesting than the guarantee of knowing how it’s going to end. It’s so true to horse racing, because there’s just so many variables, and that’s what makes it so exciting. It’s much more of a challenge though, to the traditional ones that shoot for a season and then edit for eight months, crafting the stories that they like. That was a big challenge.
MICHAEL:At the end of the day here our job was to bring people to the track, and from what we’re hearing, we don’t know for sure, but we’re hearing that the metrics are up, there’s more people coming to the track, the betting is up, The King’s Plate sold out for the first time in years… so hopefully it’s doing its job.JEREMY: I think it’s important to mention, that similar to horse racing, it should be said that on the production side of this it was like an army, a huge team, like a family, that worked together on this project. I think why the series is so strong is because there was such a balance of people from OLG, and Ontario Racing… and people from TAXI and Bug [Content]... Just like a two minute race is a culmination of a lifetime, this series is similar from a production standpoint.
Any final thoughts gentlemen?
JEREMY: There’s so much more to tell… this sport is so rich with story. I’ve done doc series’ on other sports and it’s like, ‘Alright we’ve told the story, we’re done’ but this is… I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface. I’m leaving some of these races… we finished the Standardbreds and went back to the Thoroughbreds, and then I’d learn some tidbit and and realize there’s like a whole other aspect of this that could be told here.
MICHAEL: The client [OLG] were just so great in just trusting us and letting us go with it. We generally have a set-up where the client and the agency are there, and the typical work flow is that we do a shot and we check with them: ‘Are you good with this? Yes? No?’ If it’s yes, we move on; if it’s no, then we have to do another variation. Then came the first shoot, with Tyler in the barn, and I couldn’t get them a feed after that because of the nature of the whole thing [horses don’t do a second shoot] so they just had to trust us… that’s unheard of in this business. Unheard of… We don’t know if there’s any talk of a second season. I’m sure OLG and TAXI will have to look at the metrics and see what this did, if it’s worth trying to do again, and how much more can we push the needle forward. I know that they’re happy, so hopefully, we’re hoping. I know that we would love to do it again but we just don’t know at this point.
JEREMY: From our standpoint, it was such a treat. I’ve said it earlier, but we’ve just scratched the surface here. There’s so many more stories and it’s such a wonderful community, so wherever it ends up landing, personally, I’d love to do it again. The sport in general, I just felt like family right away. I’ve worked in a lot of sports and some you really have to fight your way in. They’re too cool, too elite; you’re only allowed x-amount of time with them. But here, the whole community just welcomed us in… and taught us a ton. The Standardbred side was really blue collar and they really welcomed us in. Both sides [Standardbred and Thoroughbred] were incredible to work with though.
MICHAEL: One of the things that really stuck with me, I can’t remember who exactly said it, was that horses can get on streaks just like any other professional athlete. They know when they’re winning and they know when they’re losing, and they can get into a funk and get into a slump just like any other athlete. I thought that was really interesting to learn. I mean, they’re animals! I thought that was really incredible… The day we spent at the horse reclamation farm was just a beautiful, wonderful day… I think people need to be aware of that, I think that’s a blindspot… I think we need more places like that. That’s a really important part that people need to be aware of.
JEREMY: I’m a really big fan of human stories, so sitting back and watching something [a sporting event] on TV, I don’t do a ton of. I love to… like, my favourite part of this - I mean the racing part is incredible - but my favourite part is getting to sit down with like, Doug [McNair], and talk to him for two hours… get to know about it that way. The human stories are so rich. I knew what most people knew about racing, but to learn about how much goes into it. Much more than any sport I’ve ever covered… like, seven days a week, up at four in the morning… I kept waiting for an ‘Ok, we’re done, let’s go out for a beer, we’re a wrap’, but it literally never wraps. Everyday they’re right back in.
This feature originally appeared in the October issue of TROT Magazine. Subscribe to TROT today by clicking the banner below.
