Tara McClellan McAndrew Correspondent
Dr. Karl Luthin is a large animal vet in central Illinois … part of the time. At other times, he’s in the movie business. Hollywood called after he was invited to join the 7th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry re-enactors, which formed in 1974 to appear in parades celebrating America’s Bicentennial. The unit was asked to appear in a documentary, which led to a movie. Today, Luthin’s company, KEL Equine Productions, provides films or special events with “immediate background mounted personnel working in conjunction with wranglers (animal handlers),” according to the company’s website.
It can supply props (such as wagons, saddles, and fake bodies to appear as dead soldiers) and “mounted military units” that portray a wide range of time periods and countries, including the Mexican War of 1846 and German Cavalry from World War I, among others. KEL has worked on movies including: “Lincoln” (with Daniel Day-Lewis), “Secondhand Lions,” “The Last Samurai,” “Glory,” and many more, according to the website.
What was the first production you worked on? “In 1978 we did a little project called ‘The Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas.’ There had been a battle there in ’62 or ’63. The park wanted a little movie to play at the visitors center and we went down with a dozen guys and along with infantry, artillery, and more cavalry units we filmed it. The next year they were filming (the movie) ‘North and South’ with Stacy Keach and Warren Oates in the same park. The park manager flipped on the little, 30-minute documentary we had done the year before. (The movie’s director) said, ‘Where did you find these extras?’ and the park manager said, ‘These aren’t extras, these are re-enactors. They come with all their stuff, all their guns, all their uniforms.’ (The director said) ‘Hire them.’ And it mushroomed from there.”
How many movies and TV shows has your company worked on? “Personally I’ve probably been on 60 or 70 projects. With renting stuff to the movies, we’re somewhere up between 135 and 140 movies in the last 40 years.”
Is the movie business starting to become busier than the vet business? “We have people that work for us, and I pretty much am the gopher. We have a big carriage shop which is heated and they do the work on the vehicles in there and I walk in and we make decisions on what has to be done, and then I get to go to Menards or Lowes or Big R and pick up whatever we need.”
What was your most recent project? “Last Tuesday we were in Nauvoo to do a full-length feature film. I think the name of the project is ‘Emma and Anna.’ The Mormon church is producing it. Emma Smith was Joseph Smith’s wife (Smith was the founder of the Mormon religion) and Anna is a little … girl who was her friend who was a free black. And after Joseph Smith is killed at the Carthage jail, she and Emma become even closer friends. This is the story of their relationship.
“We just finished a sequence on “The Son,” which is an AMC project with Pierce Brosnan in the lead. In September of last year we did a Netflix (series) for the Coen brothers called “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” We’re (in) episode No. 5 and we’re in the Oregon trail sequence.”
You provide horses and wranglers to productions. What is a wrangler? “A wrangler is a person who is in charge of handling livestock. In our case we are horse wranglers. You can be a cattle wrangler, a spider wrangler, or a gorilla wrangler. You know the mouse in “The Green Mile”? There were probably 20 mice trained to do all the things you saw that one little mouse do. They were mouse wranglers.”
What’s been the most surprising thing you’ve learned? Maybe you had a preconception about the movie business before you started working in it and you learned it wasn’t true: “I learned that everybody is mesmerized by the actors, but it takes 250 or 300 of us behind the camera to make them look good. They need all of us to win the Oscar.”
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