CREEPY CRAWLIES : When snakes, spiders or leeches are needed to grace the silver screen, animal trainer Jules Sylvester has just the creatures.

In most films, it’s the credits that crawl by. In any film Jules Sylvester works on, it’s his stars.

Sylvester’s Agoura-based company, Reptile Rentals, provides the film industry with “snakes, spiders and scorpions for every occasion.” This week he had the pleasure of seeing two of his talents on screen: His monitor lizard in “The Freshman,” which opened Friday, and a slew of tarantulas in “Arachnophobia,” which opened Wednesday.

His is the only show business animal agency that exclusively handles spiders and reptiles. “I deal with the kind of things nobody else wants to touch--slugs, leeches, snails, bugs, beetles, all the way up to lizards and snakes.”

Marlon Brando’s 7-foot, 6-inch, 85-pound co-star in “The Freshman” lumbers out of his cage, and Sylvester says, “This is the finest lizard I’ve ever met.” His dry, scaly body almost fills the narrow aisle in the trailer where Sylvester houses his “beasties and woolly buggers.” The reptile wrangler keeps a radio going in the trailer to “give the frogs something to talk about.” At the exact moment Brutus steps out of his cage lined with wood shavings, “Singin’ in the Rain” begins to play.

Brutus takes a slow, cautious step forward. He has the same body as your garden variety lizard--short legs holding up a plump body and a periscoping head that’s always in motion--it’s just 100 times bigger. It’s like Godzilla is taking a stroll while Gene Kelly sings “What a wo-o-o-n-n-n-derful fe-e-e-ling, I’m ha-a-a-ppy again.”

Brutus shoots his 12-inch-long, forked tongue in the direction of the radio. He does not look ha-a-a-ppy. He looks coolly indifferent. He stops to observe the scene. The other cages are closed, those with cobras and rattlesnakes are padlocked in accordance with state law.

In the 20-foot-long, air-conditioned trailer is a menagerie of non-mammals: 60 tarantulas, three frogs, one 16-foot-long Burmese python, 100 cockroaches, two iguanas, hundreds of spiders, dozens of snakes and God knows what else.

“You can’t train a lizard,” Sylvester says, as his star whips his four-foot-long tail back and forth. “There’s nothing there to train.” Brutus might be quite the physical specimen, but he’s not much of an intellectual.

“Jules has got just phenomenal patience working with this animal that has the intelligence of an amoeba,” says “Freshman” producer Mike Lobell. From the tone of Lobell’s voice, you can tell Brutus didn’t always hit his mark on the first take. Or the second. Or ninth.

“You can’t expect them to do what they don’t do naturally,” Sylvester says. “You know what they’d like to do--hide in a cool, dark place--then you give them a way to do it.”

For “The Freshman,” Sylvester set some camouflage netting on the other side of a scene, showed it to Brutus, let him know it was the kind of cool, dark lizard lounge he loves, then let him loose when Brando and the cameras were ready.

Sylvester reports that Brutus and his co-star got along famously. “He’s very well-mannered, very civil. He’s 100% professional,” Sylvester says, referring to Brando. “He’s not an excitable man. What impressed me the most was how polite he was.”

Sylvester returns Brutus to his cage by wrestling with him and shoving him through the door. It’s a strain for Sylvester to lift and move him. Once inside, Brutus burrows into the wood shavings, thinking either of Gene Kelly or the five pounds of chicken necks he’s fed a week.

“I just love that lizard,” Sylvester says as he smiles at the beast.

Sylvester began his love affair with things creepy and crawly while living in Kenya where his stepfather was an agriculture official with the British government. His first job was as a cage cleaner at the Nairobi Snake Park. He estimates he’s captured 8,000 poisonous snakes since without being bitten. “The rules are: Don’t grab them by the head--that’s the poisonous end,” he says. “And don’t macho out. Walk away from the really bad ones.”

After a short stint at school in Scotland--”a total waste of time”--he was back in Africa as a taxidermist in Rhodesia. One thing led to another and he met the veteran animal trainer Hubert Wells of Animal Actors of Hollywood, who was in Kenya providing lions for the “Born Free” TV series. “At that time, and even now, there were no professional animal trainers in Kenya,” Sylvester says. “There just aren’t that many movies being made there. A trainer would die of starvation.”

Following a stint as a snake wrangler on the “Born Free” series, Sylvester, then 25,

emigrated to the United States in 1977 “with $7.50 and a suitcase.” He joined the Thousand Oaks-based Big John Strong’s Circus as an animal handler, which led to work on the TV series “B.J. and the Bear.” Until two years ago, most of his jobs came from subletting his animals and experience to other companies, he says. Among the films he’s worked on as a free-lance snake wrangler during that period included “The Witches of Eastwick” and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

These days, Sylvester works almost entirely on his own. He says his company is established enough that most of his jobs come by word of mouth.

His company earns him an income “of a well-paid schoolteacher or a very poorly paid lawyer,” he says. Three years ago, he married former U.S. champion rhythmic gymnast Sue Soffe.

Their extended family is composed of the creatures living in the trailer, including the tarantulas he worked with in “Arachnophobia.”

When he opens the screen-covered Tupperware box in which one of the larger Tarantula resides, there’s suddenly a hissing sound, sort of like sizzling bacon. It’s the huge predatory arachnid saying hello.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” Sylvester asks. The tarantula is in an attack pose, on its rear six legs with its front two legs moving slowly like the arms of an orchestra conductor working through a Brahms melody. The six-inch creature is a mottled brown color with a 1/4-inch size blood-red mouth open to bite.

“They’re programmed to do three things,” says Sylvester. “To find food, to defend themselves and to mate.”

Since acting isn’t one of their basic instincts, Sylvester used some of the same tricks--like running for a cool, dark place--that work with Brutus. In addition, hot-air blowers were used to keep the creatures moving in one direction and vibrating wires that couldn’t be seen by the camera were used to corral the spiders in an area.

It was discovered that spiders hate walking on Lemon Pledge furniture wax because they can’t get a good grip on the surface. “It’s like a human avoiding walking on ice,” Sylvester says. So wax was sprayed to keep the spiders from going stage left when the scene called for a stage right exit.

As he locks the door to the trailer with a “Dangerous Reptiles: Trespassers Will Be Poisoned” sign, Sylvester has the look of a content man.

“This is all I ever wanted to do,” he says. “I spent most of my life in the bush and it’s all I know how to do. I really love my beasties.”

His next challenge is coming from a completely different species.

“My wife is having a baby,” he says. “I’ve never raised a human being. I’m scared to death.”