Jon Favreau made a “live-action” Jungle Book movie without using one single live animal. Other directors, however, have been braver-slash-stupider, so let’s take a look.
Babe: a movie about a pig raised by sheep herding dogs involved a lot of animal wrangling by necessity. George Miller’s decade-long labour of love meant that 
56 animal trainers had to be on set to corral the 1000 animals it took to bring the production together. The talking pig herself was actually a series of 48 real Yorkshire piglets because the babies grows so fast, plus an animatronic double (all the pigs were female – pig penises are too noticeable). A makeup artist would add a toupee and eyelashes to each, and the snout would be digitally manipulated so it appeared to be talking. The film was such an ordeal that James Cromwell, a vegetarian at the time, decided to become a strict vegan afterwards. In fact, the movie made trouble for the whole pork industry.
Turner & Hooch: a buddy cop movie in which a detective must adopt the dog of a dead man to help him find the murderer. Hooch w
as played by Beasley, a Dogue de Bordeaux, one of the most ancient French breeds. He was so strong that during scenes where Tom Hanks walked him, he would often escape, besting Hanks who would drop the leash. Bad Hooch!
101 Dalmatians: a woman with fascinating hair kidnaps puppies to kill them for their fur, but various animals then gang up against her and get their 
revenge. Glenn Close starred in the live-action remake, and was so convincing in her wig and makeup that one of the pups, a little guy named Perdy, would always run away. There are 101 Dalmatians in the movie but it took 230 puppies and 20 adults to complete the filming, and an untold number of raw hot dogs to rub over Jeff Daniels’ face in order to induce puppy licking. The dogs were highly-trained actors, but when the handler yelled “Sit”, it was invariably Daniels who did the sitting.
The Bear: an adult grizzly adopts an orphaned cub and evade hunters together. Bart the Bear played the fully grown bear and had to be prepared to act alongside a cub since in the wild a male bear would normally eat him. Trainers gave Bart teddy bears to practice being gentle and when the real cub was finally introduced, all went well. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop made 5 
animatronic bears to use as stand-ins but when they were flown out to the Dolomites it was clear they just weren’t convincing enough and were hardly used. Bart was an Alaskan Kodiak bear, standing 9 and a half feet tall and weighing 1500lbs, although do remember that the camera always adds 10. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud called Bart “the John Wayne of bears.” His trainer insists that frequent collaborator Anthony Hopkins (he and Bart starred together in Legends of the Fall and The Edge) “respected him like a fellow actor” and indeed one movie critic credited Bart with “a milestone in ursine acting.” Bart made an appearance at the 70th Academy Awards in a tribute to animal actors, presenting an envelope to un unflappable Mike Myers.
Andre: a “true story” about a marine sea lion who befriends a little girl and her family. Embarrassingly, the real Andre was a harbour seal but the Hollywood 
Andre was played by a sea lion named Tory because seals are “notoriously hard to train” and “easily distracted.” Tory, like most sea lions, could not be house broken, making scenes shot indoors extra tricky. And little Tina Majorino’s tears were real in the final parting scene in part because Tory smelled so goddamned bad. But Tory went on to have a son named Andre who lives in Memphis Zoo where he pursues his dreams of being an artist – his paintings are available by auction.
War Horse: a young man goes off to war, following his beloved horse recently sold to the infantry. Real horses performed nearly all of the stunts in the movie – charging into battle, trudging canons up a hill – and trainer Bobby Lovgren had his work cut out for him. He trained 14 horses to do the work in
this film, choosing horses familiar with parades or rodeo work for their crowd exposure, and then worked on their not spooking around gunfire. The trainer’s own Andelusian, Finder’s Key (star of Seabiscuit), did a lot of the heavy lifting and even did horse “drag” for the birth scene, where he played the mother since using a foal’s real mother would be too distracting. Finder is also the horse who was trained to jump clear over a tank – a feat accomplished using many carrots for bribes, as you can imagine.
Free Willy: the movie’s about a depressed whale set free by a sympathetic little boy but sadly, the orca who played him, named Keiko, was himself held in 
captivity. The film’s popularity brought attention to his living conditions in a too-small tank with too-warm chlorinated water which made him sick. A custom tank was built for him in Oregon so he was flown from Mexico to his new home where he recovered enough to be moved to a sea pen in 1998. He was finally released from captivity in 2002 after 22 long years “behind bars” but he died just a year later at the age of 27 after the sudden onset of pneumonia.
As you can see, there are lots of deserving animals on set, and The PATSY awards were given out to just such outstanding animal actors ( Picture Animal Top Star of the Year); the very first was given to Francis the Talking Mule in 1951. Other recipients include Spike the dog for Old Yeller, Orangey the cat for
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Sophie the sea lion for Dr. Dolittle. Nowadays it’s all about the Pawscars, hosted by the American Humane Society, where Crystal the Capuchin monkey, aka “The Angelina Jolie of animal stars”, star of Night at the Museum and The Hangover: Part II, received the Lifetime Diva Achievement award recently. And this year the horses who trotted up the mountain in The Hateful Eight were awarded as well as Buttercup, the cat from the Hunger Games series.
Who is your favourite movie animal?
Reese’s Pieces were actually part of the plot. In the original script, it was M&Ms Elliott used to bribe E.T., but Mars wouldn’t allow their candy in the film if they couldn’t see the final script, so Reese’s Pieces stepped up and made history. Hershey didn’t pay a cent, but they did provide the movie with 1 million dollars worth of free tie-in advertising. Worth it? They saw a 65% increase in sales during the film’s run, so I’d say yes.
renowned for preferring a martini, to be caught drinking a beer. It’s a sad day when film makers are willing to forgo characterization, history, tradition, and story for the all-mighty dollar, but it’s not just one dollar, it is after all 45 million of them. How many cars can you smash up for 45 million? They destroyed about $34M worth in Spectre.
Cooper, which became the star of the movie. BMW provided 30 Minis to be used in the film and they saw a 22% rise in sales that year – not bad for a feature-length car commercial. I even rode an Italian Job roller coaster once where the cars were in fact little Minis. The movie made people reconsider the Mini Cooper – what was once thought to be a ‘girly’ car was no rebranded as sporty, speedy, and cool.
cancelling their Wayfarer line when it suddenly got a big bump thanks to Tom Cruise in Risky Business. He made the sunglasses cool again, and the brand attributes the sale of 360 000 pairs to the 
movie. So you can bet that 3 years later they were only too happy to enter into partnership with Top Gun, which this time high-lighted their Aviator line, which gave them a nice 40% increase.
it’s actually a plot point that the golfer becomes a spokesman for his favourite sandwich shop, Subway – he’s seen eating a sub while wearing a Subway t-shirt and SHOOTING AN ENTIRE SUBWAY COMMERCIAL. It’s unclear whether Subway paid a dime for this, but that movie was also responsible for increased ratings for The Price is Right, so anything is possible.
These two have so much hustle that there’s hardly a corner in all of dusty Los Angeles that they haven’t conquered, so when we called up Queen Bey herself to crown them with all the glory implicated in this event, she didn’t hesitate to say yes. To be fair, Rihanna and Katy Perry also accepted but those girls are so confused they couldn’t stop crowning themselves. So, Jay & Mark, in the name of Beyoncé, with the power invested by her entire Beyhive, I now pronounce you Most Industrious Assholes.
while Mark’s claim to fame was The League. Then they both appeared on the show they wrote and directed themselves, Togetherness. But that’s just what they do in their spare time. They’re also writing or producing or directing or micro-financing movies pretty much round the clock. Movies are either their passion, or their death wish.
workaholic, do what we love to do, and not die of a heart attack, destroy myself and my family, and keep my friends?’” – a commendable insight from Mark.
The Duplass brothers have been at heart of the Mumblecore movement for a long time. Mumblecore movies are a subgenre of indies that are known by their incredibly small budgets, their “natural” (read: amateur) acting, with an emphasis on dialogue over plot, lots of which may be improvised.
Beginners
company isn’t just about churning out Duplass stuff. They’re also bringing up lots of their friends along with them. They’ve got enough pull to make pretty much whatever they please, but they’re sticking close to their humble beginnings. The brothers are famous for bottom lines of less than a million dollars, and they always come in under budget. With their success and auteur status they’ve recently been asked to helm a real popcorn movie (shh – a superhero one!) and of course they turned it down, unwilling to make the kind of compromises
that would entail. “We’re not making that level of money [of directing a blockbuster franchise],” Jay says. “But we don’t need that level of money because we lived like starving artists for 15 frickin’ years. It’s like, we don’t need things. We just like to make things.”
Jay and Mark aren’t just running their own little empire, they’re changing the industry as a whole. “There’s no excuse not to make movies on the weekend with your friends” says Mark, and you know he really, truly means it.
A Swarovski crystal-studded bathtub for your dog: $39 000
3 x-rays of Marilyn Monroe’s chest: $45 000
braved a crowded rush-hour subway to get back down to Tribeca and run right past the Ghostbusters building to arrive breathless at the Borough of Manhattan Community College only to be redirected to another entrance that meant dragging my swollen, sprained ankle several more blocks with the remnants of my back surgery burst open and freely bleeding just so that we could stand in line for 40 minutes and then be denied a seat. Denied a seat? But we had tickets in hand – tickets we’d paid for three weeks prior! But us, and the two people in front of us, and the hundred or hundreds behind us (hard to tell) were denied entrance because they’d way, way, way oversold the event and we were shit out of luck. We were also really, really pissed.
toward the guy with the clipboard. He unclipped the rope and I was being ushered alone up a sad, empty red carpet, the very one we’d just watched John Oliver and Tom Hanks ascend, me still lumping my sore and swollen ankle along. I wasn’t happy to be going in alone and it was only the element of surprise that made me do it. I felt awful that Sean would sit outside with his $50 ticket to nothing, after having driven all the way from another bloody country, while I would be tickled fairly pink. Maybe even almost red. But the guy with the clipboard was so impressed with Sean’s self-sacrifice he basically invented another seat for him and got him in, even though he had to stand. I felt a little guilty because the couple in front of us rightly deserved those seats but hadn’t thought to split up (and actually, we’d already seen a few other singles be plucked from the line behind us) and a little guilty about the dozens and dozens behind us who hadn’t gotten in either, and super mad at the fuckfaces at Tribeca who oversold the event and didn’t tell anyone. But mostly I just felt elation the minute those two men took the stage, and fuck everyone else.
vitality in their neighbourhood of lower Manhattan (Tribeca stands for the Triangle Below Canal St).
up to these events, and lots are eager to lend a hand. Martin Scorsese has curated a Best of New York series in the past, and this year Whoopi Goldberg is helming the animation lineup.
Whitaker, Laurence Fishburne, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and Anna Paquin are all pushing the History miniseries Roots, and TNT is launching a new drama based off the movie Animal Kingdom, starring Ellen Barkin. Tribeca will also be screening the finale of the show Six Feet Under, with Alan Ball there to provide commentary (this is THE MOST GUTTING television I’ve ever seen) and Julianna Margulies will be toasting The Good Wife’s finale. When the television’s that good, you know the movies are going to be incredible. And we’ll get to those.
storytellers series is. First night: Patti Smith being interviewed by Ethan Hawke. Next: JJ Abrams interviewed by Chris Rock. There are talks with Idina Menzel, Catherine Hardwicke, Tina Fey, Samantha Bee, Francis Ford Coppola, Jodie Foster & Julie Taymor, Alfonso Cuaron, Bahz Luhrmann, and more. It drives me crazy how good these are.
wazoo, but also some throwbacks worth seeing again and again (this year they’re recognizing the 40th (!) anniversary of Taxi Driver, and Scorsese, De Niro, and Foster will all be in attendance). Tribeca Film Festival runs April 14-24th, and Sean and I will only be there for the second half of it, which means we’re seeing only a tiny sliver of all the goodness available. I’m a sad panda about missing Abrams & Rock, but we arrive in time to see John Oliver take on Tom Hanks, and I think I can live with that!
model?” Charlize said in the May issue of British GQ, whining that “when meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
Devil’s Advocate because director Taylor Hackford thought she was too good looking to play such a gritty role. “Devil’s Advocate was probably the hardest — they put me through the wringer,” Charlize told the publication recently, “Taylor just wasn’t convinced. He was like, ‘If you were his wife, why would he cheat on you?’ So there. She’s also too pretty to be cheated on. And definitely too pretty to realize how stupid she sounds. I mean, if you’re going to show up to accept Spike TV’s “Decade of Hotness” award, you just have to be prepared to accept all the terrible fallout that comes along with it.
Nicole Kidman – this ugmo got the lead role in Moulin Rouge instead of Charlize, who can’t sing, incidentally, but the main reason was of course, her distracting beauty, which is why they replaced her with Kidman, who after all, only models for Chanel, Jimmy Choo, and Omega, though that’s not an exhaustive list.
beautiful, so she has to be replaced by someone far plainer – Gwyneth Paltrow (who admittedly models for Hugo Boss and Estee Lauder), who actually was still too damned beautiful, so they got rid of her and went with the plainest woman they could think of, Marion 
Cotillard (yes, she technically models for the same brand as Charlize – Dior – but it’s in the uglier handbag section, so it barely counts), and then they thought, jeez, I don’t know, maybe even crummy old Marion is still just a little too pretty for this, so let’s call up that frumpy dancer, Alicia Vikander (who barely manages a Louis Vuitto
n campaign)
Theron was in consideration for the role of Helen Gandy in J. Edgar, but the director realized, no, this woman is just too beautiful, and so he hired the repulsive Naomi Watts instead, once voted #2 in the French edition of FHM magazine’s “100 Sexiest Women in the World 2006”, presumably right behind Miss Theron, and a model for Pantene and Ann Taylor.
And then there was the time Charlize auditioned for the role of Rose in Titanic. James Cameron must have also been ultimately discouraged by her exquisiteness, poked around for someone a little less stunning and thankfully landed upon the face of Lancome herself, Kate Winslet. Gross.
definitively a few rungs lower, a solid 6 on a good hair day, she was able to land the role of a video game character, who are known for their realistic-looking women.
Just when you thought the title of this movie was as pretentious as it could get, Zack Snyder delivers a pre-movie PSA on spoilers. I was offended. What else is the internet for aside from spoilers and porn? And since Snyder and crew spoiled some key parts about this movie in the title (namely the Batman VERSUS Superman part) and trailers (revealing the big bad guy), it was doubly ridiculous to waste time on a PSA that I could have spent watching a post-credits scene (SPOILER ALERT: THERE ISN’T ONE).
At least we don’t rehash Superman’s origin (thank Krypton). But (SPOILER ALERT) we don’t get any hint of Lex Luthor’s origin or his motivations, other than (SPOILER ALERT) he’s evil and crazy and rich and smart and an orphan. It’s the same way with Wonder Woman – the no-origin part, not the evil crazy rich smart orphan part (as far as I know). That left me to guess as to why Lex hated everyone to the point he was willing to cause the destruction of Metropolis and Gotham (which, SPOILER ALERT, are right next to each other in a very lazy move by the writers), and why a literal greek goddess (I’m assuming) is conveniently hanging out in these twin cities waiting for an opportunity to (SPOILER ALERT) don her 
So if nothing else, Batman v. Superman accomplishes its objective. It made me want to see the 
agle from your spouse and your dogs, and even a faux-fur throw to keep you cozy on the couch. You don’t even have to wear pants!* (presumably – no guarantee)
they’re “committed to the sanctity of the in-theatre experience” which sounds a little creepy seeing how we’re talking about a dark room with sticky floors and seating that I’m afraid might have lice. “We don’t understand why the industry would want to provide audiences an incentive to skip the best form to experience the art that we work so hard to create.”
the rise in quality of home theatres, your sacred blue people will view just as well at home, and more comfortably. I’m sure Van Gogh isn’t thrilled that his most famous paintings are reproduced on coffee mugs, but do you hear him complaining? No. Because not everyone can afford a trip to New York City to the Museum of Modern Art, where The Starry Night is currently displayed (price of admission: $25). So now the masses can enjoy works of Van Gogh just about everywhere – on shower curtains, on umbrellas, on postcards, and Google. If Van Gogh can be a big boy about it, James Cameron, so can you.
cinema is a group of strangers sharing stories and it belongs in a theater. Once filmmakers and theater owners open the door to this idea, there is no going back. The movie going experience is something to fight for! Watching a movie by yourself & watching a movie in a theater are two very different experiences. Film is meant to bring people together.”
where the audience spontaneously burst into applause at the end because we were so moved. But I’ve been to too many movies where I’m disturbed by someone’s candy wrappers, hacking coughs, crying kids, deep abiding need to state obvious, observable facts, and an increasing inability to sit for 90 minutes without checking their goddamned phones. Is that part of your “art”, M. Night?
Screening Room because it doesn’t “cannibalize” theatres – “Screening Room is very carefully designed to capture an audience that does not currently go to the cinema.” And that’s a pretty big audience. Because movie watchers aren’t just people who prefer theatres or not, they’re also made up of people who don’t have a choice. I missed a bunch of movies when I had back surgery and was attached to too many machines to travel. I still miss them intermittently (and always have, and always will) when my back is acting up and I don’t want to risk those shitty chairs. Parents with young kids who can’t get a babysitter will rejoice. Canadians who get snowed in or iced out will benefit. And people who are immobile, and families that deal with all kinds of physical and mental health problems who just aren’t able to tolerate a public theatre. Shouldn’t they have a venue for great “art” too?
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES