In "Jurassic Park," he worked behind the scenes to ensure that a boa constrictor didn't put the squeeze on actor Sam Neill. He prodded a monstrous spider into terrorizing comedians Tim Allen and Martin Short in "Jungle 2 Jungle." And in "The Mummy Returns" he filled a room with scorpions in one scene and in another kept a close eye on Brendan Fraser's asp.
So when producers of the summer flick "Snakes on a Plane," which opened Friday, wanted to bring actor Samuel L. Jackson face-to-fang with hundreds of deadly snakes on an aircraft, they turned once again to master reptile wrangler Jules Sylvester and his Reptile Rentals.
Born in England, Sylvester first encountered snakes as a child after his family moved to Kenya in the mid-1950s. "Black mambas and spitting cobras were everywhere on our property," Sylvester recalled in a interview from his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., near Los Angeles.
As a teenager, he first worked with reptiles at a snake park in Nairobi, where he cleaned cages and learned from the park curator how to catch snakes safely. "An important skill!" quipped Sylvester, who estimates he has handled more than 10,000 snakes in his career but only been bitten a few times.
In 1974, however, after supervising animal stunts for the Kenyan-based TV series "Born Free," he was bitten big time by the Hollywood bug.
Three years later, he moved to California and began supplying animals to the entertainment industry through his company, Reptile Rentals (www.reptilerentals.com). His critters, including snakes, spiders, scorpions, lizards, beetles, and more cockroaches than one could stomp on in a lifetime, have appeared in more than 600 commercials, movies and television shows.
Sylvester vividly remembers the January 2004 call from a producer inviting him to work on a new film. "He said he had a script that I was born to do," he recalled. The 55-year-old reptile lover was sold when he heard the title: "Snakes on a Plane."
When production began a year later, Sylvester rounded up some 400 of his best slithery stars, packed them into jars and picnic coolers in a small van and chauffeured them to the film location in Vancouver, British Columbia. His traveling companions for the three-day drive included corn snakes, rat snakes, king snakes, milk snakes, mangroves snakes -- about 25 species in all.
Getting a carload of snakes past security at the Canadian border proved to be no problem. "I had all the proper paperwork done," said Sylvester. "But I did get into trouble for having an apple on the car seat -- no fruit or veggies allowed into Canada!"
After collecting an additional 50 cobras, pythons and rattlesnakes from a Vancouver supplier, Sylvester set up his temporary "house of horrors" near the film's main set, a reproduction of a 40-foot section of aircraft fuselage. "The crew built a snake house next to the set, complete with cages and air-conditioning," he said.
Filming the live snake scenes took three months. During production, star Jackson was not permitted to have snakes within 20 feet of him on the set.
"His agent obviously didn't want him to get nailed," chuckled Sylvester. "Actually, he was a bloody good snake handler off the set. I told him if he ever gave up acting, he could come work for me."
Other actors and stunt doubles were often covered in snakes during filming.
"Some of the guys had five or six on their laps and a couple on their heads. But they were great about it, and were really careful not to injure the animals," said Sylvester.
About a third of the snakes on screen are Sylvester's. The rest, he says, are computer generated or animatronic.
Long before its release, "Snakes on a Plane" had amassed a huge Internet following, mostly on the strength of its title. The studio at one time proposed changing the title to "Pacific Air Flight 121."
"But Jackson strongly objected," said Sylvester, "so the original was retained."
Sylvester agreed that the name "sort of gave away the film plot. But it's such a cool title," he said. And, he pointed out, audiences won't be expecting a "Citizen Kane."
Copyright 2005 The Courier-Journal.
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