How Hollywood Influenced Del Mar Racetrack’s Showmanship
Joe Harper discusses how ties with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope shaped Del Mar Racetrack's atmosphere. It's about the show and entertainment at the end of the day.
Video Transcript
Joe, your, your Hollywood background, how much do you think- Mm-hmm that influenced you in running- That's right Del Mar, and how much that was important to put a show on with you there running Del Mar?
Yeah.
Well, I think it was.
You know, I grew up in the picture business.
My grandfather was Cecil B. DeMille.
The, the, he made the, the first movie in Hollywood and, and made 70-some movies.
The Ten Commandments was a big one.
And I, I got to be in The Greatest Show on Earth as a circus performer, and The Ten Commandments I played a Hebrew slave.
But I'll tell you, I saw a makeup, a, a photo of makeup of me, and I looked more like an Irish paper boy in a bad wig than- not a Hebrew slave, but I managed to pull it off.
But it was a lot of fun and, and you do learn a lot about, what to put on a screen and how it works.
I spent some years as a cinema photographer and, you see the world a little different when you look through a camera.
And I think that probably had, an impact on me to, to understand how you bring people to a theater and as well how, how you bring them to a racetrack.
You know what, too?
Yeah.
I mean, the track has been littered with Hollywood, too.
If I'm not mistaken- Mm-hmm I think you told me that Bing Crosby was the major factor at Del Mar when it was first, you know, opened, and he was a major, major player in this, and many of the Hollywood people were major players in it.
And that's kind of the background of what Del Mar is, too.
It's a show, and if you've never been there, like you said, you don't understand it until you've been there.
But it's always been about really theater and Hollywood.
Yeah, it has.
I, I Bob Hope was a friend of mine and, and I, I asked him one day, I said, "How did you end up with...?"
And he said, "Well, Bing Crosby," who was a, a singer and an actor, and so he wasn't beholding to the, any particular studio.
A lot, a lot of In those days, early days, you, you were a contract player.
Even if you were a star, you did everything the studio told you to do.
But Bing had a little more of, you know, sway and, and so he came down and went, when he Hope told me, he said, "When he t- tells you to come down to Del Mar for the day, you came down."
So that was Bing's marketing.
I mean, it was amazing.
You could come down here.
There was no TV in those days, no So if you wanted to see a, you know, a movie star, go to Del Mar, because they were all there.
He, Bing brought them all down, Bob Hope and, and all these other guys from the, you know, from the '30s and '40s.
So it worked.
What makes Del Mar special, in your opinion?
I mean, what, what makes the track, what makes the environment, what makes the setting so special for people to wanna come to?
Well, I think where we are, not just who we are.
You know, I mean, if I'm sitting here in my house looking at the Pacific Ocean, which is about, you know, 100 yards from the racetrack.
You know, it's a great place.
It's a resort city.
That's, that's really helpful.
And we've tried to market it, not just the racing, but where we are.
We've put on all kinds of special deals.
We've had concerts.
We have family fun days.
We, you know, go through the, we have Taste of Del Mar.
We do all that stuff that, that's, beyond just, looking at the pretty horses.
So I, and I think that, I've never left the fact that we're in the entertainment business.
We're, we're, we're, yeah, it's, we're entertaining with a racetrack, but we're in the entertainment business and we need to get the people out here that, not necessarily because they wanna see a horse, but because they wanna have fun and eat some good food.
