Er, exclusive! 1999’s Stuart Little presented an unusual production problem, thanks to an incident with a cat. More here.
I’ve been writing about film, on and off, for a couple of decades now, and – even in the era when AI can seemingly do everything I can do for a fraction of the price – I’ve never quite found a story quite like this.
Back in 1999, the first Stuart Little movie hit cinemas. A cherished family film, it’s the other film that M Night Shyamalan was involved in that year (he co-penned the script for Stuart Little, he wrote and directed The Sixth Sense). The Lion King’s Rob Minkoff directed, and Stuart Little turned into a $300m global franchise starter.
The producer of the film, Douglas Wick, would be on the stage of the Academy Awards just a year or two later, clinging onto a gong when Gladiator took home the Best Picture Oscar. Wick also – along with Lucy Fisher – produced the newly-released Gladiator II, and it was in conversation with the pair of them that I casually dropped Stuart Little into the chat.
At this stage, things took a turn.
“You’re always dealing with these weird practical things, just not as big”, explained Douglas Wick, as he drew a contrast between the smaller scale of Stuart Little and the epic nature of Gladiator II. “On Stuart Little, we got a call one day… there was one trained cat. It was the only one that could do a certain type of scene.”
Stuart Little needed real animals for certain scenes, which were provided by Boone’s Animals For Hollywood. They’d made the decision to go with a CG main character and real cats, but this came with a price.
“We got a call saying we had to shut down”, Wick said. “I said ‘how come’. They said it’s because the cat’s asshole fell off.”
Take that in a second. A $100m Hollywood production was going to lose a day of filming because a cat’s backside had come off.
“I said ‘what does that mean?’”, Wick continued, and he got his answer. “It’s a physical thing called a protruding asshole, which comes from stress”.
Here’s your clickbait then, chums. Filming Stuart Little made an individual cat stressed to the point where its bum fell off, potentially derailing filming. Don’t believe me? Wick tells the story in this podcast episode here.
They got around the problem in the end, of course. “Part of the pleasure of production is that people say crazy things, and you have this team of incredibly gifted people implementing them”, he said. Even on Gladiator II though, to the best of my knowledge, backsides remained firmly attached to the animals they were supposed to be attached to.
Stuart Little is widely available now. Gladiator II is in cinemas.
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