While Kim Walnes was disappointed to be left at home as the non-traveling alternate for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles with The Gray Goose, she suddenly found herself with a job nearly as exciting that summer—a starring role in the movie Sylvester.

When a location team for the movie put a call out for a big, gray advanced level horse that could tackle the Rolex Kentucky jumps as a stand-in for the main character at the Kentucky Horse Park where they would be filming, Walnes and “Gray” were a natural choice.

“If you’re going to film a gray horse going over those Rolex fences, at that time, there were only two of us that had gray horses—me and Gray and Karen Stives with Ben Arthur,” said Walnes.

Because Stives and Ben Arthur were headed to the Olympics, Walnes stepped in to help film cross-country and show jumping scenes for the character Charlie, played by actress Melissa Gilbert of Little House On The Prairie fame.

The movie follows the rise of Charlie, a young woman who comes across Sylvester, a wild horse no one thought would ever be rideable. With the help of her trainer, the gruff Foster, played by Richard Farnsworth, Charlie turns Sylvester into a champion eventer and goes to the (fictional!) National Olympic Trials.

The film uses several scenes shot at the 1984 edition of Rolex, as well as Walnes on Gray and two other lower level eventers. Walnes’ daughter Andy, who was 12 at the time, was an extra, and the local Pony Club also helped out.

“I was excited,” said Walnes. “I thought it sounded like such a fun thing to do. I put a lot of structure in place. I said I wouldn’t jump Gray every day. If I felt he was tired, we had to stop. The director said to me, ‘Can’t you make this look harder?’ And I said, ‘My horse is known for making it look easy! No, I’m sorry I cannot.’ ”

Walnes and Gray had to jump over a cameraman on several occasions, but the gelding had no problem. “Once he laid in the ditch of a coffin and the other he was in the middle of an oxer show jump, which was really dangerous! Every time I showed Gray, ‘OK, there’s a human here,’ he was like, ‘OK, got this.’ He’d jump extra high over it.”

Walnes remembered that it was tough to get in a rhythm when jumping over a single huge fence several times, and she had to find other objects to jump so Gray would get his blood up before they started filming.

“He had such a memory that if we had to turn a different direction from the way [the course] normally ran, he’d be like, ‘No, we have to go this way! You’ve got it wrong,’ ” she said with a laugh.

The film’s director, Tim Hunter, brought in longtime Rolex announcer Nigel Casserly for some scenes and Walnes found that Gray recognized his iconic voice.

“Gray knew Nigel’s voice and knew that whenever Nigel was there, it was a big deal. He always knew Rolex and some of the other big events we went to [where he was announcing] were a big deal,” she said.

In one scene, Walnes had to pretend to fall off at the water jump, a type of fence that the fictional Sylvester had an aversion to.

“There wasn’t a lot to warm up with,” she said. “We shot the water scene on the last day of shooting. I think we set up a show jump [to warm up over]. I said, ‘I can give you a duck, but that’s all I can do to pretend to fall off.’ I practiced in midair ducking off to the right side. He adjusted to it and balanced for it. We had to do a lot of weird things!”

Walnes spoke with Gilbert a few times, who said she hadn’t actually done as much riding as it might have seemed on Little House On The Prairie. One day while shooting a dressage scene, Gilbert’s mount, also named Sylvester, bolted and scared her, so Walnes offered a suggestion to Hunter.

“According to union rules, I couldn’t say a word to her about riding,” she said. “They had hired an instructor and only that instructor could teach her riding. I couldn’t give her any tips or cues.

“I went to the director and told him I had a bit that looked just like the bit she was using on the outside but isn’t that same on the inside,” she continued. “I thought she could hold him with that mouthpiece. We tried it and she could hold him.”

Walnes also recalled that while she and her daughter were put up in a nice hotel and fed well for two weeks, she wasn’t allowed to visit Gray late at night. “I could not drive my vehicle to the grounds of the Kentucky Horse Park,” she said. “They said if I was on a movie payroll, you must be driven. Union rules.”

As a horseperson, Walnes admitted she couldn’t stop herself from offering suggestions in certain scenes she thought could be depicted better. She laughed as she described a day when she was chosen as the representative to speak with second unit director Mickey Moore, who was having a bad day and yelled at her, “Why don’t you direct then?” as he threw his hat on the ground. She proceeded to pick it up, put it on and tell the Pony Clubbers and extras where to go.

“It was fascinating to watch how movies are made,” she said. “[Moore] did all the second unit work on Indiana Jones. He came up with a lot of innovative stuff on that, so it was an honor to work with him. He was not a horse person, so the Pony Club folks and I would get frustrated from time to time because the way they would be depicting things would just be wrong. We would quietly go up and suggest different ways to do things, which he sometimes listened to and sometimes didn’t.”

When asked how she enjoyed the final product, Walnes was hesitant and said she often has to warn parents before they let their children watch it.

“Honestly, the language was just awful!” she said. “It’s like the director couldn’t make up his mind what kind of movie he wanted to make. It should have been a family film, but the character Charlie uses a lot of bad language and there is one attempted rape scene. That was kind of disappointing.”

Even so, the summer of 1984 was one she’ll never forget.

“It was a little bit of a parallel of my own story,” she said. “Gray was definitely a diamond in the rough. He was rogue-y like Sylvester was. I had not had any lessons hardly to speak of at all before I made it to my first competition on those grounds in 1979. We came in second. The storyline I thought was great. It’s just too bad he couldn’t make up his mind which way he wanted to go, so there was a little bit of everything.”