By Stella Bednarz, Soap Opera Digest, 1990

It's a glorious day in Santa Barbara. Keen for intense competition, mogul C.C. Capwell leads his polo team - including daughter, Kelly - into battle. The competitors charge up and down the playing field. First, one side seems to have the advantage, but then momentum shifts to the other team. In the end, Team Capwell is victorious. Was the result ever in doubt ?

That's what viewers of Santa Barbara saw on their TV screens. What they didn't see was the intense effort needed to create the illusion of a spirited polo match. "Our executive producer, John Conboy, came up with the idea," explains producer Steve Kent. "Santa Barbara is a big polo town. They have fields there, and it's a glamorous, elegant sport, so we decided to do it." Decision made, the show needed a location able to accommodate the requirements of the soap as well as the polo players. Since a field trip to the actual town of Santa Barbara was deemed unacceptable, the show searched for a spot a little closer to home. "We researched what was available in Los Angeles, looked at a couple of polo fields, and then we found an estate in Malibu with a field where they actually play polo. We fell in love with it instantly; it was perfect," remarks Kent.

Next up, harnessing the necessary horsepower. Old hands when it comes to the equine world - think about how many times you've seen Cruz jump on a noble steed and gallop away - Santa Barbara consulted one of their experts, who provided a source who provided horses, riders to comprise the opposing polo team, and doubles for the Capwell team when the action became complicated. When the story was created, did the writers know in advance which characters know how to sit tall in the saddle ? "We said, "We want these people," and then we crossed our fingers," chuckles Kent. Fortunately, the actors involved - Carrington Garland (Kelly), Jed Allan (C.C.), Steve Bond (Mack), James Healy (Derek) and Louise Sorel (Augusta) knew how to ride.

A plus was that Bond was not only an accomplished horseman, but a polo enthusiast who even provided his own mount. "He was of invaluable assistance," notes Kent, who nevertheless didn't depend upon Bond for all of his information. For several weeks before the remote, Kent and director Rick Denowitz studied tapes in order to understand the finer points of the sport and see how a match unfolds.

When it was time to shoot the remote, eighty people headed for Malibu Canyon. "I know the exact number, because that's how many lunches we served," laughs Kent. "We had cameras, audio equipment, even a special truck called The Shot-maker. We mounted a camera on it and it went up twenty-five feet in the air in order to do tracking shots of ponies running toward the goal. We had one cameraman on the ground, and he had his camera pointing at the horses as they were charging. The horses were good. Of course, they don't do exactly what you tell them, but they came pretty close. They were handled by a real professional."

Shot two weeks before air, Kent terms the shoot "a big, in-town remote for us. We were there from sunup to sundown. It was one of the rare cold days in Los Angeles. It was thirty degrees that morning; it never did warm up. We were all freezing." In addition to fighting the elements, which also included the wind, Santa Barbara was fighting the light. They finished just before the sky turned pitch black. In fact, they had to light the last scene and tape it "night for day."

One major audio problem occurred. "There was a loose connection somewhere and an entire scene had no sound," confesses Kent. "It was the scene where Mack was asked to play and he's thrown a mallet. Afterward, we went to a looping stage so the actors could match what they'd said on location. But since they hadn't followed the script exactly, the actors had to reconstruct their words. It worked perfectly; you couldn't tell."

It took Santa Barbara two days to edit the footage, "sweeten" the scenes with background music, and add sound effects. How does Steve Kent rate the finished product ? He declares, "We slow-motioned some of it and the actors looked great. You could see that they were actually playing. I thought it looked great."