Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Twisting in Air: The Sensational Rise of a Hollywood Falling Horse (Bison Books, 2024) by Carol Bradley.
About the Book:
Twisting in Air chronicles the gritty and glittery era when an extraordinary group of horses made Western movies come alive and explores how one of them, Cocaine, overcame a debilitating injury to become the fastest falling horse of all. Falling horses came into being in the 1940s after movie studios agreed to abide by the Hollywood Production Code’s ban on cruelty to animals and stop using deadly trip wires, tilt chutes, and covered pits to topple unsuspecting horses. Filmmakers still wanted to depict horses falling in battle, however, so they went looking for a new wave of “acting” horses who could tumble to the ground on command.
From the Author:
Have you ever taken yourself on a penny walk? Where you set out in no particular direction, uncertain where you might wind up? The idea is to stroll to the end of a block, flip a coin, and let the results determine which direction to proceed. Heads might mean a turn to the right; tails, a turn to the left.
Working on what became Twisting in Air felt like a penny walk. I’d done a deep dive into the brutal treatment of horses in early movies: how second unit directors, the ones in charge of action scenes, would use trip wire, pit falls, and tilt chutes to make horses fall or slide off a cliff as though they’d been shot. But that material was awfully grim—too grim to appeal to any reader who didn’t have a lifelong membership to PETA.
To find a palatable path forward, I kept digging, combing for material that would offer readers a more hopeful story. Eventually I hit pay dirt in Cocaine, a thoroughbred mix leased by a stunt man named Chuck Roberson.
It was the early 1950s. Trip wires and the like had been banned, but Westerns were still enormously popular, and directors still wanted horses to tumble dramatically in the requisite shoot-‘em-ups. A small number of resourceful stuntmen met the challenge by teaching their horses to fall on cue. This was a wholly unnatural request. It took courage and no small degree of athleticism on the part of the horse, and many of them flat-out refused to tumble to the ground. When Cocaine easily learned to fall—and, moreover, seemed eager to perform for the camera—Roberson knew he’d found a gold mine.
Their story wasn’t all golden. Early in his career, “Coke” turned up gravely injured—not from falling—and Roberson did everything he could to bring him back to health. Cocaine rewarded him by becoming the fastest falling horse in Hollywood. Together, the two of them doubled for John Wayne and his horses for thirty years. Twisting may inhabit an arcane chapter in Hollywood history, but since its publication a year ago, I’ve heard from readers who are just as surprised and amazed by Cocaine’s story as I was. Winning a Will Rogers Medallion Award has been the cherry on top. It’s been a delightful ride and I’m grateful to Bison Books for enabling Coke’s story to be told.
Reviews:
“This is a book about Hollywood’s glory days and its stunt men, about the barbaric ways we used to treat movie animals, how that slowly improved, and how one amazing thoroughbred-quarter mix named Cocaine (think Seabiscuit) learned the hard way the art of fast falling. It’ll change how you watch animals who appear on the big screen.”—Larry Tye, New York Times best-selling author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
“Twisting in Air is an entertaining, informative, and historically relevant read.”—Marc Beaudin, Big Sky Journal
“From silent film horse actors such as Fritz to latter-day superstars like Cocaine, Twisting in Air celebrates the bravery and athleticism of equine entertainers. More importantly, it shows how the bond between horse and human can help both achieve great things.”—Cynthia Branigan, author of The Last Diving Horse in America
“Movie buffs with a deep interest in horses of the silver screen will find Twisting in Air fascinating and deeply moving.”—Chris Enss, Cowgirl Magazine
“Twisting in Air by Carol Bradley is a thoroughly researched look at the progress of health and safety at work in film production, during the twentieth century. I am sure we all regret it didn’t progress faster.”—Clare O’Beara, Fresh Fiction
“Charming as it is, Bradley’s book doesn’t shy away from the scandalous history of Hollywood’s mistreatment of animals.”—Diane Kiesel, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Twisting in Air chronicles the gritty and glittery era when an extraordinary group of horses made Western movies come alive.”—Montana Arts Council
“Carol Bradley has written a necessary book about the horses and the stuntmen that made possible the action exploits of the great Western stars, as well as the bonds of shared trust and devotion between rider and mount—and the cruelty imposed by Hollywood’s invariable need for expedience and speed.”—Scott Eyman, New York Times best-selling author of John Wayne: The Life and Legend
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