When the filmmakers behind "Snakes on a Plane" needed 1,000 snakes to slither over actors, glide through airplane machinery sets and slide over and around luggage, calling Jules Sylvester was a no-brainer. After all, the chatty Briton specializes in reptiles and has done bigger snake jobs before. In the late '80s he wrangled 1,400 of the reptiles for "The Witches of Eastwick." "We had 500 in Cher's bed and 10 just for her hair," he said.
When his snakes are not tangled in hair, hanging from celebrity shoulders (Selma Hayek's in "Dusk Till Dawn") or draped around doorknobs to create a spooky ambience (Tia Dalma's river house in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest"), they are carefully tucked away in a small converted garage up a bumpy road in Thousand Oaks.
It's there that the celebrity animal trainer houses them with a few thousand cockroaches, a couple of bullfrogs (seen in "The Hulk"), a territorial rhino iguana named Mofi, a lovely iridescent Chinese water dragon with a lavender neck (recently featured in a Sprite commercial) and two hairy, scary spiders that are just finishing their lunch of baby mice. (Little known fact: You can direct a Goliath Bird Eating Spider through a maze just by blowing on its rear end. At least, that's how Sylvester did it for "Arachnophobia.")
On the way up to the snake house, a delicate yellow Swallowtail butterfly floats in front of the car. Sylvester says he might be putting her to work if he can catch her -- he has a butterfly job next week.
He runs a clean, organized snake house. The deadly varieties -- such as the Southern Pacific rattlesnake that shakes its tail menacingly whenever somebody walks in -- are kept in specially designed lightweight cages with sliding glass windows that lock firmly. The brightly colored non-deadly corn snakes and milk snakes are kept on sturdy shelves along another wall in plastic sweater drawers with air holes drilled into them. Each drawer is carefully marked. The corn snake given to Sylvester by Frankie Muniz has the additional label of "mean." ("He is a nasty little bugger," says Sylvester, presumably of the snake).
Turns out those "killer" stars of "Snakes on a Plane" were mostly the safe corn and milk snakes. It's too complicated to bring poisonous snakes into Canada, where the film was shot, Sylvester says, so for the scenes requiring pythons and rattlesnakes he had to borrow them from friends up north.
How did the cast handle having to work with the slithery creatures? "They were very cool," Sylvester says. "We'd dump a bunch of a snakes around, they would scream, the director would cut and we'd say, 'All right, everybody, please pass all the snakes down to the aisles. And they just did it."
Sylvester was born in England, but grew up in Kenya. His first job in the business was working on the film "Born Free," which was shot on his father's farm. That was the first time he realized there was a living to be made in wanting to be around wild animals. When the film wrapped, he spent a year working on a vegetable farm, saved his money and came to Hollywood.
"This is a wonderful country," he said. "I have a very silly job."
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