The Circuit

by Stuart Levine
With horse racing all the buzz for the last few weeks, director John Corey's "Lost in the Fog" seems like a perfect fit for CineVegas, especially considering you could bet the ponies only a few yards away at the Palms sportsbook.

On the surface, the doc is about a blue-collar equine who went on to win a bunch of races with a fair amount of talent and a bunch of heart. But in reality, Corey's film is more about Fog's cantankerous owner, Harry Aleo, who never met a journalist he liked.

Aleo, a bastion of conservatism -- including a Ronald Reagan poster hanging on his wall -- in the middle of liberal San Francisco, took a liking to Corey because the two were practically neighbors.

"We hit it off right away," said Corey, who left a job at CBS to take on the project.

Like most good horse tales, there are lots of ups and downs for Fog, who took on the big boys of racing at storied tracks such as Churchill Downs and Belmont Park.

Corey would love to see "Fog" find a national audience and, in a perfect world, would see the film feed off the recent Big Brown news cycle.

"We'd like to put it on 3,500 screens next week," he joked at the post-screening and Q and A.

Alas, "Fog" won't reach "Indiana Jones"-type distribution, but positive word of mouth in the racing community should get this winner home to the finish line.