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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
According to the American Humane guidelines, no animal actor should have to work like a dog. For instance, if an ape is on set for more than three consecutive days the production must provide a play area or a private park where the ape can exercise and relax. When a bear is working on a film, anything that produces smells that might bother the bear--cheap perfume, strong liquor, jelly doughnuts--must be removed from the location. Only cats that like dogs should be cast in cat-and-dog movies. No individual fish can do more than three takes in a day. Also, under no circumstances can a nonhuman cast member be squished. This rule applies to all nonhuman things, including cockroaches. Karen Rosa, the director of American Humane's Film and Television Unit, was discussing this particular guideline one day last summer. "If you show up on set with twenty-five thousand cockroaches, you better leave with twenty-five thousand cockroaches," she said. I wondered if she extended the same welcome to cockroaches at home. "A cockroach in my kitchen is one thing," Rosa said. "A cockroach in a movie is an actor. Like any other actor, it deserves to go home at the end of the day."
The Film and Television Unit headquarters are in Sherman Oaks, about twenty minutes from Hollywood, in a squat concrete building shaded by a highway overpass and a stand of gnarled banyan trees. The place is as homely as an orthodontist's office, although it is decorated with movie posters and a nice photograph of Francis the Mule. A wirehaired, baby-faced mutt named Lulu has the run of the office, and staff members wander in and out between visits to soundstages and locations. There are thirty full-time and part-time field representatives of the Film and Television Unit, which is the official monitor of animals in all Screen Actors Guild productions. Keeping an eye on animal actors is a mighty undertaking. In the past twelve months, more than fourteen hundred sag scripts included some kind of animal action, ranging from ants in a television picnic scene to movies featuring hundreds of horses. During the week I spent with Film and Television Unit staff, there were tigers doing insert shots for "The Last Samurai"; owls, cats, rats, and dogs working on "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban"; a miniature horse doing a guest appearanceon "That '70s Show"; full-sized horses at work in "Around the World in 80 Days," "On the One," and "Deadwood"; a frog shooting scenes for "Cinderella"; some deer working on "Thumbsucker"; cats and dogs rehearsing for the sequel to "The Truth About Cats and Dogs"; and spiders auditioning for "Constantine." The Film and Television Unit keeps track of all of these. Even fake animals and dead animals are the unit's responsibility. If animals used in a movie are frozen or stuffed or shown as a food product--say, a haunch of beef--the unit requires proof that they showed up on set that way.
Most of the people who work for the Film and Television Unit are former veterinary technicians or zookeepers or horse trainers; many are graduates of the Moorpark College Exotic Animal Training and Management Program, in Moorpark, California, which bills itself as "America's Teaching Zoo." Even though the Film and Television reps spend their days reading scripts and visiting locations, they think of themselves as being in the animal business rather than in the movie business, much the way that barbers in the Navy probably think of...
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