All Roles Great and Small

The guest star on medical drama “City of Angels” is playing the part of Mike, a sweet-tempered 7-year-old who is rushed to the hospital with a fractured femur. Splayed out on a gurney with his leg wrapped in bloody gauze, he cringes in pain and moans with each labored breath. Then, with his eyes fixed soulfully in the distance, Mike arches his head forward and gives an attending nurse a long, wet lick.

The director calls cut, and it’s quitting time--not a bad day’s work for a scrubby-coated border terrier named Jasper. Soon he’s back in his trainer’s lap, the red food coloring and syrup wiped from his fur, the pained whining giving way to happy panting, all evidence of trauma left on this Sony sound stage in Culver City.

Which is exactly how Lara Deakin likes it. Standing in the shadows in a beige safari vest, Deakin is here to make sure that none of Jasper’s on-screen agony is the real thing. “I’m here as a quiet observer,” she says. “If they try something funny, I make my ugly face. That’s usually enough to stop whatever’s going wrong.”

On past assignments, she’s been dispatched to protect the welfare of cockroaches on the set of the Susan Sarandon movie “Anywhere but Here” (where she refilled a Raid can with Evian) and a swarm of 300,000 bees in the horror flick “Candyman 3.” “I felt like an absolute fool getting stung all week long,” she says.

Deakin works as an officer for the Film and TV Unit of the American Humane Assn., a nonprofit agency that acts as the official monitor of performing animals in more than 800 movie, TV and commercial productions a year. Now marking its 60th year, the association reviews all but a few major studio productions, and issues the now-obligatory and often spoofed seal of approval: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” (“Men in Black” ended with the tag: “No animals or aliens were harmed in the making of this film.”)

While dedicated to the protection of all creatures great and small, the association is often called upon to defend producers and trainers--especially when audiences are shocked by critters in apparent distress. In recent years, more and more movies have milked laughs out of the simulated bashing, thrashing or tossing of animals. Remember the drop-kicked terrier in “There’s Something About Mary”? There’s plenty more where that came from. In the upcoming “Me, Myself & Irene,” the character played by Jim Carrey gets into a violent tangle with a cow; meanwhile, Tom Green playfully tortures a mouse in the recently opened “Road Trip.”

In all these cases, American Humane Assn. investigators were on hand to ensure that the actual animals were unscathed. “We don’t tell filmmakers what they can and can’t make,” says Ginny Barrett, director of the unit’s western regional office.

“We don’t regulate content at all, but I can tell you I’m less concerned about something like ‘Me, Myself & Irene’ than something in which the violence is realistic,” Barrett adds. “What the Farrelly brothers do is so broad and silly, I don’t know how anyone could take it seriously.”

On most sets, the agency’s involvement is casual to the point of invisibility. “They’re totally innocuous,” says veteran unit production manager and producer Paul Deason (“Jurassic Park,” “Small Soldiers”). “Most of the time they take a look at what we’re doing, eat their lunch and go home.”

But the association can also be a major irritant on behalf of animals, scrutinizing sets for months at a time and, on rare occasions, halting production. Mostly, the American Humane Assn. asserts itself before production begins. In offices off the 405 Freeway in Sherman Oaks, a team of nine staffers answers a 24-hour anonymous hotline, tracks shooting schedules and pores over scripts for all productions involving animals--all animal action is categorized as mild, moderate and intense.

Mild and most moderate action is given clearance to go forward without further review--dozing lap dogs and grazing horses are usually left to their own devices--but for the trickier stuff, the association goes to great lengths to ensure that animals won’t be killed, injured, overworked or caused discomfort.

On the New Jersey set of “The Sopranos,” producers were asked to drain a swimming pool of chlorinated water for the sake of a flock of ducks. During production of “Batman Returns,” association reps mandated the installation of 400 air conditioners to keep a group of penguins properly chilled. And on the sets of several western movies and TV shows, inspectors have banned the branding of cattle and outfitted cowboy boots with spurs made of rubber.

“We don’t expect animal actors to be kept on silk pillows eating bonbons all day,” says Barrett. “We just don’t believe any animal should be harmed for the sake of a film production.”

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Horror stories involving animals are the stuff of Hollywood legend. In 1939, for example, a blindfolded horse was forced off a cliff during the making of “Jesse James.” Forty years later, the death of three horses on the set of “Heaven’s Gate” was blamed on tripwires and misfired explosives. The American Humane Assn. has cracked down on such abuses, instituting guidelines that cover everything from the proper transportation of livestock to the release of birds.

“Most animals in film and television are given tremendous treatment now, thanks mainly to the AHA,” says Gretchen Wyler, founder of the Ark Trust, an animal protection advocacy group.

But the association is not without its critics. Some producers and trainers say its guidelines amount to the institutional coddling of wildlife, while some animal rights activists accuse the agency of overlooking abuse for the sake of smooth relationships with studios.

“We get it from both sides,” Barrett says. “When the extremes are unhappy, I feel like we’re doing our job correctly.”

Most filmmakers grudgingly accept oversight, Barrett says, while many in Hollywood welcome the uniformed field reps as heroes. (Any production involving Richard and Lauren Shuler-Donner, Anthony Hopkins, Mel Gibson or John Travolta is said to be super animal-friendly.)

Still, association involvement isn’t always a love fest; some producers are particularly rankled by safeguards of creatures such as ants, trout and lobsters. For example, inspectors monitor shows featuring lobsters to ensure that the “animal actors” aren’t served at wrap parties; they stand by with stopwatches when actors hold fish out of water (30 seconds max); they count bugs to make sure none are smushed in the line of duty.

Then there are horses and livestock, which are frequently handled by wranglers accustomed to rougher treatment than the association allows. “Horse and livestock trainers would just as soon we didn’t exist,” Barrett says. “A lot of them feel we’re trying to make pets out of these animals.”

But for every tough cowboy or reckless trainer who treats animals with unnecessary roughness, there’s a dozen kindhearted gaffers and grips who will blow the whistle when a dog’s water bowl is running low. “This is really a socially conscious industry,” Barrett says. “There might be an insensitive producer here and there, but they can’t get anything done without a crew or cast with someone who cares deeply about these animals.”

For some animal rights activists, however, the agency provides studios with the semblance of protection while ignoring real abuse. Pat Derby is a former exotic-animal trainer who worked on productions including “Gentle Ben,” “Flipper” and “Gunsmoke” before quitting the industry to start the Performing Animal Welfare Society. Derby says Hollywood trainers routinely motivate their animals with electric cattle prods, billy clubs and stun guns--but never when humane association field reps are nearby.

“I have personally seen somebody on a crew grab an AHA inspector to go get a cup of coffee while someone else went out and shot a really rough second-unit scene,” Derby says. “The AHA only comes to the set when it’s all fun and everything is perfect.”

Derby says there is no way for the association to properly monitor the handling of animals, and that until it can supervise all training and monitor animals around the clock, its seals of approval are misleading. “The AHA is nothing more than a public relations firm for using animals in entertainment,” she says. “They’re not stopping abuse. All they’re doing is putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.”

Barrett counters that the association doesn’t need 24-hour-a-day supervision to detect if an animal is being mistreated. “You can tell when an animal is stressed out or miserable,” she says. Besides, roughing up an animal off set for the sake of on-screen obedience just doesn’t work, she says. “You can’t train an animal using mean tactics at home and then change your commands once they arrive on set--it’s all about consistency.”

While the American Humane Assn. is first of all in the business of animal welfare, the agency finds itself often defending trainers and productions under fire from concerned animal lovers. So last year it was “absolutely inundated” with e-mails and phone calls after a dot-com TV spot pictured gerbils being hurled against a wall.

“Answering the gerbil calls became my life’s work, basically” says Karen Rosa, the association’s coordinator of communications. “I let everyone know who called that these were props. It was in very bad taste, but it wasn’t abuse.”

Still, the case of the flying gerbils demonstrates a tough issue for the agency: It monitors treatment of animals, not content. A prime example is the 1997 independent feature “Gummo,” which included scenes of young boys killing stray cats to sell to local restaurant suppliers. The creep fest ended with the familiar seal of approval.

“The producer came to us early and said this has some real dark cat content and I don’t want any controversy,” Barrett says. “We helped him out because we knew that film was going to be made whether we were involved or not.”

The reality is that a film like “Gummo,” which was overseen by inspectors every step of the way, is probably much more animal-friendly than the increasing number of overseas and nonunion productions mounted without oversight. Barrett says she received several calls alleging abuse of horses on the Mexican set of the 1999 feature “One Man’s Hero.” (The producers of the film, Silver Lion Films, were unavailable for comment.)

“We had no jurisdiction and couldn’t do anything about it,” she says. “With so many small independents and international co-productions, it’s getting harder and harder to protect performing animals.”

Of particular concern, Barrett says, is the spate of foreign-produced westerns in which horses are made to leap across gullies, charge across riverbeds and dive into the dirt. Even some big-budget studio films have been called into question for their use of horses. Barrett says the agency was not invited to the set of “The Mummy,” a Universal production shot in Morocco in which African horses were pictured tumbling to the sand.

While no inspectors were on the set, Barrett says the association reviewed the film and could not find evidence of abuse. “The Mummy” ended up receiving a “questionable” rating, meaning ‘the AHA wasn’t present on the set and no information was available on the film’s animal action.

Others who work with animals say that chimpanzees are particularly ill-suited to show business. Roger Fouts, director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communications Institute at Central Washington University, says his experience as an advisor for the 1987 Matthew Broderick film “Project X” convinced him that primates don’t belong in the movies.

“A chimp doesn’t work for M&Ms;,” he says. “The trainers have got to use other means to get them to perform. It can be a very abusive relationship.”

“Project X” remains a sore point for the AHA. Accused of overlooking abuse of chimpanzees on the set, the AHA and then-director Betty Denny Smith sued a grass-roots animal rights group for libel and slander. The two sides traded full-page attack ads in the Hollywood trades, and the lawsuit was settled out of court in 1989.

But Barrett maintains that the association’s inspectors have watched primates perform with no signs of mistreatment.

Barrett says the stars of the show were treated like superstars. “I can tell you, if I could provide the lifestyle of those chimps to every child in L.A. County, I’d die a happy woman.”