Animal Rights Group Keeps an Eagle Eye on Hollywood

American filmmakers don’t parachute live elephants out of airplanes nowadays. Nor do they jump horses off 70-foot cliffs.

Once upon a time they did those things with animals, and worse, for the sake of entertainment. No longer. Should they try such stunts now, or even suggest them, someone like Nan Stuart would lower the boom.

Besides, Hollywood nowadays has the technology, something called animal-tronics, to fake with remarkable realism any scenes that would be cruel to animals--or even risky.

Nan Stuart is a field representative of the American Humane Assn., one of 14 soldiers in a fight that began 55 years ago. The fight is still going on--of necessity, she believes, although filmmakers seem to finally have gotten the message.

In fact, Stuart said, “I have never been on a set where the animal was in jeopardy in any way, shape or form” in her 15 years as an association rep.

Which is heartening when you consider how the group became necessary in the first place. It began in 1939 during the filming of “Jesse James.” A stunt man rode a horse off a 70-foot cliff into white water. The stunt man survived. The horse did not.

The public outcry was such that the group established an office in Hollywood the following year and worked out an agreement with the Motion Picture Assn. of America. It required that the humane association be consulted on all filmmaking involving animals and that one of its representatives supervise all animal shots.

That worked for more than a quarter of a century until, in 1966, the agreement was dissolved. After that, the association often was barred, sometimes at gunpoint, from sets involving animals.

Then, in 1979, in the making of “Heaven’s Gate,” a horse was blown up.

The association organized a national boycott of the film, and public outrage led to the reinstatement of the association’s authority in the 1980 actors-producers collective bargaining agreement. That agreement continues today.

“We were on 411 sets last year, and at 102 sets last month alone,” said Jim Moore of the association’s Los Angeles office.

With animal-tronic technology, Moore said, “you have electronic animals that look and move exactly like real animals and digitally produced animal effects.” They are a major advance in safety for animal actors.

“That really makes our job easier. You don’t have the elephant thrown out of the plane” as in the bad old days, he said, but you can still have an elephant-parachute scene. Anyone who saw “Operation Dumbo Drop” saw an animal-tronic elephant float through the sky.

The association’s mission is that no creature should be harmed for entertainment’s sake. Its reps take seriously the words “no creature”--lions and tigers, bugs and bears, dogs and horses, big elephants and little cockroaches. No exceptions.

Stuart’s beat is the Rocky Mountain region where photogenic creatures abound. Her office is in Denver. She is a short, stocky blond woman who has been passionate about animal welfare all her life. She loves dogs and has two golden retrievers.

Out in filmdom’s trenches, when the trenches are in the Rocky Mountain area, Stuart is there.

“A lot of times the directors want the animal to do something it can’t possibly do--like having a bear topple over backward,” she said. “A bear doesn’t fall backward.” If a director should direct someone to make a bear fall backward. . . . Cut! No backward-falling bears.

No tripping of horses, either. Horses falling in Western movie action scenes are no longer allowed.

If you look closely at horses that fall in the movies today, Stuart said, you will see the same six or eight horses in most of the movies. It’s a stunt and safe. Those horses are specially trained.

Some of the human stars who Stuart has worked with include Mel Gibson, Meryl Streep, Kevin Bacon, Tommy Lee Jones and Bill Murray. She gives them excellent grades for working with animals.

“The animal usually gets the scene right the first or second time,” she said. “The human actor usually takes longer. Then the animal becomes bored or tired.” (The exotics, as she calls them, such as jungle cats and bears, have even shorter attention spans.) That is when Stuart keeps an even closer watch for stress in the animal.

“You watch their eyes, ears, their whole body language. Elephants will sway back and forth when they’re bored. The big cats become irritable,” she said.

Too many repeats of a scene and a horse, for example, will begin anticipating. If a horse is supposed to run to a fence and then turn or stop, she said, “he will begin anticipating and start turning too soon or stopping too soon. The horse thinks, ‘Why should I exert all that energy running clear over there when all I have to do is stop or turn?’ ”

How far will an association representative go to protect all creatures great and small?

Jim Moore of Los Angeles recalls a recent filming in which 50 trout were used for one scene and were on the set three to four days.

“The rep was making sure the water was changed and kept at the proper temperature,” he said. “When the shooting was finished, the producer rolls in his barbecue pits for a fish fry. We didn’t allow that.”

The same goes for cockroaches.

“You walk onto the set with 10,000 cockroaches, you walk out with 10,000 cockroaches,” Moore said.

The association’s role in filmmaking begins with the scripts. Months before any shooting begins, the association coordinates with producers on how to achieve the animal effect they seek without harming the animals.

American filmmaking has become pretty humane, according to the group. The same, however, can’t be said for some films shot on foreign locations.

According to the association, a water buffalo was hacked to pieces in the filming of “Apocalypse Now” in the Philippines. In the movie “Patton,” filmed in Italy, two donkeys were shot to death on the set.

While Stuart has not run into that sort of barbarity, she has had some unsettling moments.

“On a set here in Denver, I was working with Bill Murray and an elephant. The elephant was just an arm’s length away. I was taking notes and when I looked up, the elephant was gone. They move silently.

“ ‘My goodness, I’ve lost an elephant,’ I said. I felt kind of stupid.”

If being temporarily misplaced is an elephant’s worst misfortune on a Rocky Mountain movie set, it would seem that Stuart is doing her job.