You just never know who’s behind the front door of any given house in Los Angeles. For just one example, at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac in Arcadia is a normal enough home. The only suggestions of something out of the ordinary are the metal sculptures of flies in the yard. In the living room are impressionistic landscape paintings made by the artist — with the help of beetles and other insects dipped in paint and let loose to saunter across the canvases.
The art expresses the creativity, the humor, and the livelihood of Steve Kutcher, known for a half-century as Hollywood’s Bug Guy. He’s worked on more than 100 feature films, plus TV shows and music videos, “all with insects.”
But while the entertainment industry is as interested as ever in making movies about all manner of animals, work is drying up for Kutcher and animal handlers like him. With runaway production and the advent of AI, demand has fallen.
These days, bug movies — as well as lion movies and wacky-pet movies — can easily be made animal-free. The spiders are losing their jobs.
Steve Kutcher makes paintings with the help of insects dipped in paint. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
Kutcher provided the spiders for Arachnophobia, the locusts for The Exorcist 2, those mosquitos in amber for Jurassic Park. He’s the sort of guy who can fly a bee around on a leash. Remember the 2002 Spider-Man movie? With the irradiated red and blue spider? That spider didn’t come that way.
“The spider is black, so we painted it blue, spray painted it,” he says. “They were alive, and so we had to make sure that they didn't get damaged or hurt, and that's a big deal, and that's why I get hired.”
Steve Kutcher shows how one paints a spider. (Very carefully.) Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
Right after the good-old spider painting days, the business started to change for Steve Kutcher.
“I would say that since the 90s and early 2000s, it's dropped off 95%, and the number of animal trainers has diminished as well as the number of animals.”
“The number of days worked on set with animals has gone down a minimum of at least 5% to 10% year-over-year,” says Joel Norton, a trainer and the owner of Hollywood Paws, which deploys cats, dogs, and other little critters for movies, TV, commercials and, more and more, social media. “It's not just me, everybody feels it.”
Norton says there are only 10 or 15 animal-rental companies left in Southern California, and “almost no exotic animal rental companies anymore. That absolutely was the first to go.”
There are a few reasons for the shrinking industry. One is common to Hollywood at large: productions relocating to other states or Canada to take advantage of tax incentives and cheaper costs. Those are also places that tend to have fewer restrictions on things like owning a tiger. So while you’ll still see the occasional real bear onscreen, it probably won’t be a bear with a California driver’s license.
Or any other kind of California license. In fact, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife issues licenses for people to own exotic animals, and while they approved 26 in LA County last year, that’s less than half what it was 20 years ago.
(Norton did say that with shows like Yellowstone and other nouveau westerns, there’s still business for a couple of real types of animals: “Those [shows] are absolutely littered with horses and livestock.”)
One of Steve Kutcher’s artist bugs at work. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
The other reason for the shrinking industry is the use of computer-generated images. For productions with tighter deadlines and tighter budgets, a CG animal is just easier to create. (Kutcher, it should be noted, disagrees when it comes to insects.)
Of course, if you’ve seen Mufasa try to emote lionishly, you already know: The animals look fake. Or at least weird.
But Norton says as artificial intelligence gets better, expect to see even more animated animals. They can do it all.
“AI will never say that it's too hot for this animal to be outside or this set-up is too dangerous for whatever reason.”
(It’s also presumably safer for the actors. Hard to imagine a real bear mauling Leo DiCaprio as successfully as the CG bear did in The Revenant. Or maybe a real bear would’ve been successful, but it would’ve meant a lot fewer DiCaprio movies in the future.)
That was the part of the appeal of using CG in the 2020 Harrison Ford movie The Call of the Wild, where Ford growls against a CG dog named Buck as they have all sorts of perilous adventures.
“We didn’t have to shy away from any moment. We could put it all up there,” says the film’s director, Christopher Sanders, a longtime animator and director of How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch. “Whereas if it was a live dog, you probably would be cutting a lot of the shots because they would be impractical-to-impossible to pull off.”
Sanders says he liked that the computer dog was a predictable performer with a lot more range. But there’s always a trade-off: “It was always a funny situation where we were going to get more emotion, more acting out of the animals, but it was going to also tend to constantly remind you that these are not real animals, because they are acting on cue.”
As the technology gets better, you may not mind. Unless, like Steve Kutcher, it’s your business.
“The ants in Ant-Man have no hair,” he points out. “Well, ants communicate using their hair. So for me, it's just, I lose the story right away because I'm distracted by all these things.”