Bug Wrangler Is King of Hollywood Jungle

With the lightest of light touches, entomologist Steve Kutcher picks up a newly hatched monarch butterfly by its wings and sets it on his kitchen table to feed on the sugary juice of a watermelon.

It’s a typical morning for a guy who walks past his neighbors’ prize rose beds to look at the spiders or checks his house’s electric meter to see if a live chrysalis is still hanging there.

With the same precision and care he takes with the butterfly, Kutcher has wrangled more formidable creatures for a list of film and television hits that would be the envy of any Hollywood actor.

He’s sent thousands of carpenter ants scurrying across actress Sigourney Weaver in bed in “Copycat” and looked after 3,000 African locusts for “Exorcist II: The Heretic.”

He’s even taken a bath in wriggling mealworms on “The Late Show With David Letterman”--an experience he called pleasant.

For “Jurassic Park,” he rustled up his biggest mosquito specimens for the film’s explanation of prehistoric amber bug traps. He dressed up a dwarf tarantula in a costume for “James and the Giant Peach.”

He says it all began with a childhood spent collecting fireflies in the Catskills, in New York state.

“As soon as I could learn what an entomologist was, I decided it sounded like a good job,” Kutcher said.

“People pay me to play with bugs. I don’t mind getting paid to play.”

After finishing his entomology and biology university studies, a professor recommended him for a job on the 1977 “Exorcist” sequel. Kutcher wrangled those demon-possessed locusts so well that word of his talent spread.

“Around that time, I realized that one of every three movies had an insect in it,” he said. “And I thought, that’s a lot of work.”

Even so, Kutcher couldn’t make a living at it until he landed a job on the 1990 movie “Arachnophobia.” He said most of the shots used live spiders that he prompted to stampede on cue, and even to act.

“I figured out how to make a spider crawl into a slipper from four feet away on one try,” he said.

How?

“Hire me and I’ll tell you.”

“Arachnophobia” director Frank Marshall said he knew Kutcher was his man when he walked on the set with his trademark red baseball cap bearing the statement, “Bugs Are My Business.”

“He’s incredibly dedicated to his craft,” Marshall said. “I always thought it was interesting for someone to love bugs like he does. Here’s a man who, when he sees a spider web in his bedroom, he loves it and he respects it and he studies it.”

Marshall said Kutcher’s crowning achievement in the movie was having hundreds of spiders emerge from a sink drain on cue.

His trick, Kutcher says, is knowing insect behavior so well that he can adapt it to the action the director wants. For example, he coached a cockroach in “Race the Sun,” shot in Australia.

“I made the cockroach walk onto the bag of Cheetos and walk onto the Cheetos and walk onto a surfing magazine and stop,” Kutcher said. “That got me a trip to Australia. I broke that behavior up into little behaviors.”

The running list he keeps of his film and TV jobs is approaching 200, including many commercials.

“I’m one of the few people who can make a living by going into the wild. I can go out to a railroad or easement and collect bugs. I can collect cockroaches behind a restaurant and make a living in Hollywood,” said Kutcher, 52, who lives near the border of the Angeles National Forest, 16 miles northeast of Downtown.

One of the rooms in his sunny Arcadia house is filled from floor to ceiling with specimens of insects in glass and wood boxes. In his home office, he keeps his desk, computer, chair, bowl of giant mealworms and plastic boxes of live spiders in repose, among other tools of his trade.

Kutcher’s refrigerator houses dozens of living insects, packed away in ventilated plastic tubes sealed inside wet Ziploc bags. Old plastic cookie containers become refrigerated ant farms. The fridge mimics nighttime conditions in nature: dark, cold and moist.

On the set, Kutcher uses a variety of tweezers and probes kept in an old metal pencil box and a plastic case full of waxes, glues and fishing line, among other curiosities.

“I have a collection of rubber bugs as stand-ins. When they’re lining up their shots, I don’t want to put a live bug out there.”

Kutcher also employs devices that emit hot air or carbon dioxide to influence insect actions. Humane Society rules prohibit any living thing--including lice and maggots--from being harmed or killed during filming.

When he’s not on the set, Kutcher volunteers for several conservationist groups, teaches biology at a local college and makes presentations at grade schools. He helped start an annual insect fair in Los Angeles County, where thousands can learn about, rather than be repulsed by, his creepy-crawlies.

“Movies are not scientific documentaries. Insects are portrayed for their entertainment value,” he said. “I make most of my money in Hollywood, but I’m also an educator.”