Like any work of fiction, Nope took more than a few liberties with the story of The Horse in Motion.
For starters, the first assembly of pictures to recreate movement did not feature a Black jockey on a horse, according to four researchers and photography experts who spoke to The Daily Beast.
In 1872, Leland Stanford, the former governor of California and a horse aficionado, hired British-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photograph galloping horses at his property in Sacramento. The point was to prove that all four of a horse’s hooves are off the ground at one point. Legend has it that Stanford commissioned the experiment to settle a bet.
“Muybridge seems to have proved this to Stanford’s satisfaction, but the pictures were too fuzzy and imperfect to publish,” said photo historian and Muybridge expert Phillip Prodger in an email to The Daily Beast. “They exist now only in the form of drawn and corrected copies.”
This first set of photos did not feature Black jockeys. Muybridge and Stanford’s collaboration was suddenly interrupted in 1874, when the former traveled to the city of Calistoga to kill his wife’s lover, Major Harry Larkyns.
“After having discovered the affair, the photographer sought out his rival at the Yellow Jacket quicksilver mine where Larkyns worked as a surveyor; he greeted him with the words: ‘Here’s the reply to the letter you sent my wife’ and then shot him through the heart with his Smith & Wesson No. 2 revolver,” according to a 2014 article by film and media professor Ulrich Meurer in the journal Kinetophone.
In court, Muybridge pleaded insanity. He blamed the killing on an 1860 accident in which he hit his head against a boulder after he was thrown off a stagecoach, according to a 2002 article by psychology professor Arthur P. Shimamura in the journal History of Photography.
Though he admitted the murder was intentional, he was acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide in a dramatic verdict.
“At the sound of the last momentous words a convulsive gasp escaped the prisoner’s lips, and he sank forward from his chair. The mental and nervous tension that had sustained him for days of uncertain fate was removed in an instant; and he became as helpless as a new-born babe. Mr. Pendegast [his lawyer] caught him in his arms and thus prevented his falling to the floor, but his body was limp as a wet cloth,” according to a San Francisco Chronicle article from 1875.
Muybridge’s ex-wife Flora, who had divorced him, died five months after the trial. Their son was sent to an orphanage. The photographer spent time in what Prodger calls “self-imposed exile” in Central America before returning to the U.S.