PETA’s Jackass battle might be the end of Hollywood’s animal debate

One wisenheimer has often compared Johnny Knoxville and silent-era stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton. There is a commonality in reality and a difference in pain. Whereas Keaton put himself under the falling façade of a house, only to come out unscathed thanks to a well-placed window, Jackass frontman Johnny Knoxville would prefer himself crushed — as long as he can get back up and endanger himself again. Still, it’s part of a continuum.

In the franchise’s 20-plus years, however, one complaint against Jackass’ brand of yes-this-is-real stunt comedy lingers, and it’s cropping up again in anticipation of Jackass Forever, the group’s fourth feature film. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) doesn’t care if Knoxville wants to try and light Steve-O’s flatulence on fire underwater, but the animal rights organization won’t sit quietly when the fraternity of pranksters wrangles a rampaging bull for its particular brand of showmanship. PETA’s January statement was the following (which PETA representative for Jackass ForeverParamount Pictures did not comment on this story.

Johnny Knoxville may choose to stop performing dangerous stunts. But the bulls and bears that are tortured for films like “The Last of Us” can’t. Jackass ForeverThese are the true victims, who live their whole lives under the constant threat of being harassed and sometimes deprived and harmed by Hollywood trainers. Paramount Pictures should know that animal exploitation doesn’t belong on a 2022 movie screen, and PETA is calling on moviegoers to stay away from this sordid sideshow.

The weekend of the film’s release, PETA went one further, calling for an investigation into criminal charges on the basis that the production may have broken [California] animal protection laws. “PETA is reminding city and county prosecutors that no one is above the law,” said PETA senior vice president Lisa Lange said in an additional statement, “and that while the rest of the world wants to save bees and recognizes animals as sentient individuals, these Jackasses exploit and abuse them for fun.”

The Jackass Forever debacle, in an unlikely way, feels like the end of an era — one when animals could even casually share the screen with human cohabitants. It is now that the art of making movies and TV may have reached a critical point. The computer-generated images of reality are being used by visual effects artists to create realistic scenes. Fake animals — for now, exotic ones like tigers and monkeys, but soon, plain old dogs and cats — are becoming so indistinguishable from real ones on screen that producers may soon weigh the cost of hiring on-set handlers, leaving the next Trigger, Beethoven, or Clyde the Orangutan on the unemployment line. Having spoken with experts, the industry’s pivot to CG animals seems like less of an “if” than a “when.” It’s what many want, while sitting in contrast to many an auteur’s push for “practical” effects.

Artists have been interested in the animal kingdom since prehistoric Lascaux caves. 9 out of 10 historians believe that the original motion picture was made in 1939. Horse in Motion (Or Sallie Gardner on a Gallop) from 1878, a series of images from multiple cameras that British inventor Eadweard Muybridge lined up in his “zoöpraxiscope” in order to depict a thoroughbred’s gait. Unfortunately, this relationship was soon fraught with danger for filmmakers and the great beasts. Edison film crew members went to New York in 1903 to capture the grisly murder of Topsy. Topsy had been attacked by a drunken man and burned his trunk using a cigar. The resultant 74-second film. An Elephant is ElectrocutedIt is clear that early 20th-century people could have had other hobbies. The only good thing about this book is the fact that it inspired many other authors. Bob’s Burgers musical.)

The Wild West was early moviemaking, with little concern for animals’ welfare. Legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt’s “Running W,” used in the 1939 movie StagecoachThe sonic boom was brutal and delivered great results, but at an enormous cost.

“They would drill holes in the front horseshoes and run a wire up to the reins,” stunt coordinator Steve Dent explained to The Telegraph in 2016, speaking about the Running W’s use in 1959’s Ben-Hur. “Then when the horse’s front feet were up mid-gallop the rider would pull and the horse’s feet would stay up. Or they’d gallop horses into pits that were about eight feet deep.” In 1940, the Darryl F. Zanuck-produced film Jesse JamesA horse was made to jump off a 70-foot high cliff. The horse was later shot for his efforts.

The Jesse James incident led to the group known as American Humane (different from the Humane Society) to create its first Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media, and the establishment of the famous “No Animals Were Harmed” stamp of approval. By 1980, an American Humane signoff on any animal appearance — from aardvark to zebra, from gorilla to ant — was codified in a Producer-Screen Actors Guild agreement.

We now reach today. This is something that Industrial Light and Magic’s senior publicist was eager to ensure I understood. Interview with Den of Geek Y. The Last Man showrunner Eliza Clark said that when it came time for American Humane to give its seal of approval, the organization said, “Well, we can sign off on the horse, and we can sign off on the dog. But we weren’t there when you shot with the monkey.”

Members of the group weren’t there because there was no monkey.

Images: Industrial Light & Magic

A pilot that has yet to be aired Y. The Last Man, shot in 2019, actually used a real capuchin monkey for the part of Ampersand, sidekick to the show’s apocalypse-surviving protagonist. The series needed to be retooled and reshoot. It was then decided that a CG actor would play the role of Ampersand. Clark explained to Polygon that this allowed actors not to have their teeth exposed, something which was a problem with capuchin monkeys. And Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox, and the FX brand, also necessitated the change. Seven years earlier, Disney had established a “no primates in entertainment” edict.

Bruno Baron and Mike Beaulieu (VFX supervisor and animator at Industrial Light and Magic) were responsible for bringing Ampersand alive. Beaulieu explains, via Zoom, that realism in CG animals has been harder than it was with human-based digital characters, which can include motion capture. It was not possible to put a gorilla into a golf-ball outfit.

“You have to rely on animators to understand the movement and anatomy,” Beaulieu says. Now the studio’s artists — who, in the VFX supervisor’s words, are getting better and better with every project — have learned to give photo-real VFX technology more of a soul. To achieve true realism, you must resist the urge to allow things to run smoothly. If you picture an actual monkey jumping around a room, it’s not going to be precise. “If it’s too calculated, your mind will tell you that what you are seeing isn’t real,” says Beaulieu. And asking artists to think outside the box and experiment with more advanced systems offers “a little more freedom to explore and get things out of a performance that you may not get without 37 takes.”

Shooting take-after-take with your fingers crossed is a reminder of what may be the peak in absurd, nearly fake-sounding animal training to make a feature movie. Tim Burton insisted that forty feral squirrels were trained to break open nuts (and other stunts) just prior to the advent of our current, CG Sickle Moment. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It took 10 months to complete and resulted in this crazy behind-the-scenes video. (You can watch ol’ Tim with his manicured mad scientist coif mumble about his “poor squirrel people go[ing] kind of squirrelly” while the trainers fry their brains trying to make his request a reality.) Baron, a French-speaking actor, reminisces about this filmmaking legend and says that his job it to aid the director get what they want. If Burton were making Chocolate FactoryBaron encourages digitalization today. “How many takes for those squirrels?” he says. “You shoot half a day to try and get that one joke?”

Both monkeys and squirrels that eat nuts are rare animals. And surely any beast a film’s script requires to “speak” might be better served by CG. It would be easy to understand why the high-scoring Air Bud pooch could have been made from pixels if they return. What about regular pets in the home? But what about horse, the star of Hollywood Westerns? It was not the motherboard that won the West. We’re talking about an entire industry employing experts in the orbit of film and television production; trained specialists that can still get a funny-looking schnauzer to the set for a perfect reaction shot with just a phone call. At what point does the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule come into play? Why would a producer hire CG artists to do something as basic as this?

Lauren Thomasson is PETA’s associate director for animals in television and film. She has the answer. PETA does not represent American Humane. It does not offer approval of productions (which most gladly accept), but it lacks the same connection to Hollywood guilds. Like its recent message to Jackass Paramount says that PETA is more assertive and ready to make a fuss. If you look at it that way: American Humane would be Charles Xavier and PETA Magneto.

Thomasson was aware of the importance that a capuchin monkey played in the tale Y. The Last ManThe show was followed from its inception. (Via Zoom, she says that the early pilot’s monkey was “supposedly the one used in Friends,” in case you were curious.) This was a red flag that the organization condemned because, Thomasson says, “we know that all animals, but specifically, wild animals and primates, suffer behind the scenes at training compounds from the way they live, the way they’re trained, and the deprivation that they experience.”

PETA recently used their megaphone to criticize Kate McKinnon and Queen Latifah’s projects that featured tigers. The argument in favor of computer-generated imagery is that since people have less direct familiarity with exotic animals, Thomasson says, audiences are very likely to buy CG versions — as seen in movies like The Jungle Book And Jungle Cruise. (The ILM team supports this psychological effect. PETA’s ultimate goal, Thomasson confirms, is the cessation of all animal use in film: dogs, cats, birds, you name it. “We’re not there yet, but We see it coming. It’s going to happen,” she bluntly states.

Part of this stems from PETA’s overall philosophical ethos — a “who are we, man, to be bossing animals around?” sentiment — but also from a belief that there’s really no such thing as a safe set for animals.

Thomasson says that American Humane, despite its famous phrase at the end of most movies, “offers us no assurances.” She points to an exposé in The Hollywood Reporter This 2013 report detailed the many mistakes made at the organisation. (The “no animals were harmed” stamp is, to her, still “meaningless.”)

More importantly, she says, most productions want to do right by animals, and audiences are “becoming much more aware about animals’ rights.” As such, studios are being proactive and seeking out PETA’s input; the group no longer has to rely on a whisper network of what’s in development. Disney, for example, worked with PETA on 2021’s Cruella, not just in shaking out where it could use CG, but also to help “work on the messaging.” (A specific area of concern was Disney’s public relations scandal from the ’90s where 1996’s 101 DalmatiansThis led to a lot of dogs that were difficult to train being adopted, and then abandoned.

The final film does include some real dogs, but, as Thomasson puts it, “we are realistic; it’s Cruella.” PETA’s big win was in adjusting the way dogs were presented, and to normalize working with studios from the beginning.

For now, the main battle is to stop exotic animal use. PETA does not demand a ban on Western horses. But, it believes that using a mix of CGI, fake mechanical horses and tricky editing is better and more effective. The group’s mission is to let people know that “accidents still happen. Stress still happens,” according to Thomasson. This extends down to insects and bugs. “Roaches, insects, butterflies, spiders,” Thomasson says, are all candidates for CGI.

Someone who disagrees with that notion — and a whole lot else — is Paul Rutledge, an animal wrangler and stuntman/stunt coordinator with 37 years of experience in the field.

“I had hundreds of flies on a horror movie called The Prodigal,” Rutledge says. “They all swarm when the kid opens the door. We had to order them, get them breeding, and release them at a certain time.” Rutledge cites that instance plus “about 50 rats on an actor’s face for The Shadows: What Do We Do?” as something where having to mime a reaction for a later CG insert would “make it a little more difficult for our actor friends.”

Though Rutledge made his bones with horses, he’s currently known in the business as one who can source any animal you need. “I’ve worked with African porcupines with sensational long quills, with tigers, wolves, cougars, kangaroos, you name it,” he says with the nonchalance of a true professional. “Worked with a squirrel monkey on Night at Museum with Robin Williams, too.” His company Ontario Animal Casting, also trains the Maine Coon Leeu, better known to sci-fi fans as Grudge on Star Trek: Discovery.

“PETA is strong in their belief in how animals should be treated on set — and so am I,” Rutledge says. “They make me a living, they are part of my family, I take good care of them.”

Photo: Michael Gibson/Paramount Plus

Rutledge says that the people at PETA are “entitled to their opinion” about American Humane, but added that many of the group’s overseers who come to set are veterinarians, not just people who think that “animals are so cute.” When there are problems on set, it’s likely due to “not enough prep time” or a wrangler who is “too inexperienced” to ask for more time built into their budget to get the desired result. Productions can get frustrated and think “next time I’ll write it out, or I’ll use CGI,” but “working with the right people, figuring out what the production needs, and having enough prep time” is all a good wrangler needs, according to Rutledge.

That — plus the comfort to say when “an animal has had enough.” Rutledge says he’d feel comfortable working with anything, even a great ape or a chimpanzee, even though, as PETA’s Thomasson was happy to report, “there are no chimpanzees left in Hollywood, and the top 10 ad agencies have banned the use of great apes.”

Rutledge agrees with PETA and ILM that audiences are more likely to purchase a state-of the-art CG exotic animal due to their lack of familiarity. However, Rutledge was able to work on Civil War-set. Copper, there was a stable set up near his compAny’s studio in downtown Toronto. “The crew would come out at lunchtime, feed the animals, that sort of thing, like therapy,” says Rutledge. “A nice break from the craziness of filming to have some fresh air and pet a donkey.”

“Now, our culture is changing,” Rutledge notes. He hasn’t gotten calls from producers saying that they are making the switch to digital. “It’s more like you just don’t get any call.”

While proud of his work, a career he hopes to continue, Rutledge adds that spontaneity on set “like a bump from a goat in the middle of a line” is something that can’t be programmed. (TCM buffs certainly remember a camel sneezing in Bob Hope’s face in Morocco Road.)

My passion for classic films and my concern for all animals makes me a bit torn. Clint Eastwood should ride a horse. At key beats, dopey sitcoms should be redirected to an animated canine. Grudge the Cat is my favorite character Star Trek: Discovery. It is understandable that PETA wants to cut costs.

ILM’s Bruno Baron believes that in “a few or 10 years,” anything shot on a modest budget or above will likely have far more CG than it does now, even for nonexotic animals. And while he’s no doubt eager to continue to practice his craft, he understands that there’s always room for compromise. There’s a reason why Yellowstone 1883 creator Taylor Sheridan just used part of a $200 million production deal with Viacom to scoop up a ranch in Guthrie, Texas, on which he’ll raise horses and cattle that could appear in future series.

“Someone walking a dog, it’s just so easy to shoot,” Baron says. “And a horse on set, for now, will definitely look real.” But citing a darker moment from Hollywood lore, the visual effects artist adds, “If you want to throw your horse off a cliff — use CG.”