Childhood  Days by Satyajit Ray

Author:Satyajit Ray [Ray, Satyajit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2000-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

Project Tiger

No one can beat Hollywood when it comes to making films with animals in them. I remember films in my childhood—and there were quite a few of them—that had an alsatian called Rin-tin-tin. This dog’s acting was more impressive than a human’s. Later, we got to see three or four other films with a collie called Lassie. It seemed that the director could make Lassie do just about anything. These trained dogs were famous stars in their own right, and the money they earned was no less than what a real film star got. Their owners could easily make as much as a hundred thousand rupees from just one film.

I realized how reverently these animal-actors were treated when I happened to see the shooting of a film twenty years ago in Disney Studio in Hollywood. The main character in this film was a large dog, the kind that Americans call a ‘shaggy dog’. I reached the studio to find that the shooting had not yet started; the cameraman was getting the lights ready. It is customary for actors to be present when the lights are arranged, for they have to show the cameraman how they’ll walk, or where they’ll stand, in a particular shot. In the case of very famous stars, this job is done by their stand-ins. A stand-in is usually a person who is physically similar to the real star. The stars themselves arrive only when the lights are ready and it is time to take a shot.

Here, in Disney Studio, I noticed that a few actors were moving about in the set, and on one side, standing quietly, was the protagonist—the same large dog. The cameraman shouted to everyone to take their positions. But the dog remained where it was. This puzzled me. Could it be that it was not required in the next shot?

Before I could ask someone, a strange thing happened. From nowhere appeared a little dwarf, followed by another man carrying a hairy dog-skin. Then, to my perfect amazement, the dwarf went down on all fours on a chalk mark on the floor, just like an animal, and the dog-skin was draped over him. Then he crawled from one mark to another, and the cameraman got busy with the lights. It finally dawned upon me that this dwarf was paid to be the dog’s stand-in!

Every animal in a Hollywood film is well trained. It is not difficult to train a horse or a dog. But have you ever heard of trained ravens? Not just one or two, but nearly a hundred of them? Even this was made possible in Hollywood, when the creator of some of the best suspense films in the history of cinema, Alfred Hitchcock, decided to make a film called Birds. In the story, birds from all over the world start attacking humans. Hitchcock needed a variety of birds, but what was required in the largest number was ravens. Notices were placed in the press all over the United States, asking people to contact the film-maker if they knew how to get hold of trained ravens.

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