Hunter Is Hoping We Bite

Steve Irwin is, if possible, even more excited than usual. Far from his home in Queensland’s Australia Zoo, the Crocodile Hunter is on a crusade to capture a new audience.

It’s the last Friday afternoon in June, the ninth day of a four-week international tour to promote his first feature film, “The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course,” and Irwin, his sidekick wife, Terri, and his partner and director, John Stainton, peer out at Hollywood from the windows of a sleek limo as it carries them to their destination, “The Tonight Show.”

“There I am!” he says, spying one of the billboards advertising the movie, which opens Friday. Although he’s been awake since 4:30 a.m. and is suffering from jet lag-induced insomnia, you’d never know it. He looks remarkably like his mass-produced image: in khakis and boots, eyes wide, blond bangs flying as he hangs on to a runaway open-jawed crocodile.

A boyish 40, Irwin also sounds just like his breathless persona on Animal Planet’s “The Crocodile Hunter,” making full use of his easily and oft-satirized phrases, “Aw, Crikey!” and “Isn’t she gor-geous?”

He addresses everyone from strangers to studio officials to his wife as “mate.” He bursts with schoolteacher-esque overstatement as he zips from story to story--the gangrene he contracted in the wilds of Namibia, the moment he figured out how to trap a crocodile, the tears he shed filming a new series on Australian heroes of World War II and his devotion to wildlife conservation and the journey of life.

“In this journey, your eyes, your ears, nostrils, every single part of you, your hair, is feeling something,” he says with an almost alarming intensity. Stainton’s journey is with cameras, he says. His is with wildlife. With their TV documentaries, which bring them $16.5 million a year, and now with this movie, he says, “We’re going forward, further and beyond. There’s no parameters for us. Conservation is what makes us tick. We’re wildlife warriors through and through. We will die defending wildlife. Every cent we earn goes back into conservation.”

Before it was picked up by MGM, “Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course” was a series of documentary clips shot on 35-millimeter film, at their own expense, he says. Since the movie cost a relatively cheap $13 million, he stands to make a reasonable profit through a “back-end deal” still being negotiated, he says.

“We believe in this movie,” he says, then adds in a conspiratorial stage whisper, “Let’s put pressure by your print on the MGM back-end deal.”

Not only is he willing to help MGM promote the movie--which he hasn’t yet seen--he’s also vowed to do more interviews than anyone ever has to promote a film. “If Tom Cruise has done 60 interviews in a day,” he says, “I’ll do 80.” But here’s the problem. Most people, especially fellow entertainers willing to interview him on their shows, are more interested in his animal antics than in his message.

As happens every time he appears on “The Tonight Show,” Irwin says, the producers this time around want him to do animal acts. “It’s wearing a bit thin. What I want to do is talk about what I’m doing. I really like Jay Leno because he’s a top bloke, but I’ve got more than animal antics to give to the world. I’ve got a big heart. I’m the ultimate softie. I’m really passionate about what I do, and I never get the opportunity to tell people about it,” he says.

As the limo pulls into the lot, Terri Irwin, his co-crusader and behind-the-scenes marketing expert, says, “It’s frustrating when you’ve got six minutes and have things to convey and you bring the animal out, and you talk about the animal and you’re done.”

Nevertheless, after some negotiation with the show’s producers, he’s agreed to wrestle an alligator on the show one more time. Inside the studio, Bubba the alligator waits quietly in a denim bag.

Flown in from Chicago, where he is known as one of the mellowest alligators in the U.S., he has given rides to children at hospitals and birthday parties and has appeared at wedding receptions, confirmations and block parties. Not to mention on “Oprah.”

Whatever happens on the show tonight, Irwin will not be in danger, said Bubba’s owner, Jim Nesci, founder of the Cold Blooded Creatures educational organization.

In rehearsal, a segment producer stands in for Leno and kisses the alligator on the nose. In a private conference, Leno and Irwin agree that on the show, they will hoist Bubba onto Leno’s desk so he can kiss the alligator in profile for the camera.

With Steve and Terri Irwin resting in a private room, Stainton talks about his hopes for the movie in a hallway backstage. Because the cable series attracts viewers across the generations, he thinks “Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course” might spawn regular summer sequels, like the Elvis or Gidget movies of the 1950s.

Stainton knew it would be a challenge to motivate “Crocodile Hunter” fans to pay for wildlife adventure scenes they can find at home on cable. His answer was to cut a narrative story, with professional actors, into their regular documentary scenes.

“I couldn’t have Steve playing a role,” he says. Irwin ad-libbed his part, as he does in the documentaries. In the movie, Irwin plays himself, a wildlife crusader rescuing rogue crocodiles and small kangaroos, who is unaware the croc he’s chasing has swallowed a fallen spy satellite. A pair of goofy CIA operatives and a feisty rancher widow provide antics aimed to appeal to 8-year-olds.

“It’s not the sort of movie that will get critical acclaim from the academy,” Stainton says.

When it’s time for his segment, Irwin bounds onstage. As he starts to talk about conservation, he is interrupted by Bubba, so relaxed he has to be carried in by his owners. As Leno and Irwin attempt to lift the alligator, it knocks Leno to the ground and swipes Irwin’s cheek with its tail.

“Ah, claret!” Irwin says casually of the bloody scratch. He motions for a close-up of his face. Almost lost in the excitement is a brief exchange where Leno asks him, “Now, all this money is going to help animals?” Irwin replies: “Every cent.”

After the show, the entourage exits through the basement to avoid, their security guard says, a crush of fans. As the limo winds back through Hollywood toward their hotel, Terri Irwin says she was worried that Irwin’s now swelling scrape might ruin his appearance for the movie premiere the next night. She quickly realized however, it could serve as an ice breaker. “I’m terrified about meeting all these Hollywood people. So, it’s like a bad thing? No way. This is the best thing that could have happened.”

He’s more philosophical about “The Tonight Show.”

“As usual, I didn’t get to where I wanted to be, but it doesn’t matter. Come the end of the day, Bubba looked really good. When he walked like a dinosaur, it was fantastic, wasn’t it?”

They pass another billboard, a mammoth ad above Hollywood and Highland. “Crikey,” Terri Irwin says. Says Irwin, “It’s a beauty.”