No question about it. The sight of big, brave movie critics leaping to their feet as a tarantula is placed on an interview table is a sight to behold.
But there's no denying that Big Bob, as the "spider wranglers" called the tarantula star of "Arachnophobia," and his smaller relatives make for a fearsome sight. After all, Bob is as big as a baseball mitt. And he eats birds.In most ways it was the usual movie junket procedure in one of the continent rooms of the brand-new Dolphin Hotel at Walt Disney World -- six to eight entertainment writers sitting at each table, with celebrities being taken table to table for 20-minute interviews.
Except that in addition to the human "Arachnophobia" celebrities there were these arachnids, brought in by the two main handlers.
"In order to raise ('Arachnophobia') to another level and not have it be a B-movie, I felt it was important to include the spiders in the same shots as the actors," director Frank Marshall explained. He said the first plan was to use mechanical spiders. But then he came across two experts who helped him use real spiders for most scenes.
There's no way to train a spider. That's why we had Steve (Kutcher) and Jules (Sylvester) around, because they know the behavior of spiders. I just had to construct the shots so it would be possible to motivate the spiders, and we just hoped that it would work--and most of the time it did."
When Kutcher, a professional entomologist, came to our table he set down four cups, each containing little delena spiders found in New Zeland. They are used in the movie as Big Bob's offspring. Kutcher also set down three rubber spiders to show how realistic the dummies looked. One of the reporters jumped when the rubber spiders were placed too near her.
He said the title "spider wrangler" is unique to "Arachnophobia," but that he has worked in bug control, if you will, on other pictures, receiving such diverse billings as "butterfly wrangler" and "cockroach wrangler."
Kutcher's main job was to work with the smaller spiders, and even he was taken aback by Big Bob. "I've been bitten four times by California tarantulas, but I was a little more concerned about this bird-eater."
The Amazonian tarantula used for the lead willain in the film has a diet consisting mainly of insects and mice. It was suggested by Sylvester, whose Reptile Rentals company has long provided filmmakers with reptiles from his collection of some 50 snakes, 80 tarantulas, two scorpions and various rodents.
Sylvester, a cheerful man who clearly loves his work, sat at our table with a large cooler in tow. He took a tarantula out and placed it on the table. Though the creature was about half the size of Big Bob, it was still formidable-looking and Sylvester demonstrated how it could be motivated to move with just a slight dusting of a soft paintbrush. The tarantula struck a threatening pose and froze.
"This is a bird-eating tarantula," Sylvester said, his enthusiasm becoming rather contagious to the reporters at the table--though not contagious enough to keep us in our chairs. "He's about half-grown, and you'll notice the fangs that become evident as it rears up. He'll stay reared up for about 20 minutes."
And so he did.
Fortunately, there was the relief afterward of interviewing a mere movie director. Though Marshall has directed second-unit action sequences for a number of pictures--"Back to the Future," "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and the last two "Indiana Jones" films--"Arachnophobia" is his first full-fledged directing credit. On the surface, this would seem to be a difficult first film.
"I had had a lot of experience with this kind of movie, this kind of situation where you're dealing with sort of uncontrollable elements, like rats and snakes and whatever, from the 'Indiana Jones' days.
"I also felt it was a movie I was capable of doing. It was an ensemble movie, one where the movie itself was the star. I wouldn't have to deal with a major movie star. And several of the directors I've worked with, Peter Bogdanovich and Steven (Spielberg), for example, did a thriller as their first movie. Peter's was "Targets' and Steven's was 'Duel.'"
Marshall said it was also important that his first choice was not a gory horror movie. "When he first got the script, (Disney film production head) Jeffrey Katzenberg said, 'We want a movie that isn't terrifying. We want a move that's scary but fun.' So there was that challenge.
"We're calling it a 'thrill-omedy,' a thriller-comedy. I don't want it to be labeled as a horror movie. It's like a Hitchcock movie, or at least I tried to do that. I looked at a lot of Hitchcock movies and I learned that you need to have a story going on at the same time you have the problem. In 'The Birds' there was this romantic story between the two characters and then there were these birds that kept coming in and they kept invading the story. The same thing here."
To get the actors used to their arachnid co-stars, there was a get-to-know-the-spiders session where they all handled the various little delenas. But, Marshall said, when lead actor Jeff Daniels had his final confrontation scene with Big Bob, it was a difficult matter. "He didn't mind the little spiders, but he wasn't too fond of the big tarantulas. The big spider is much easier to control because he doesn't move as fast, but there wasn't a lot of acting in that scene where Jeff had to be scared."