The things you learn when wrangling a dog

You'll be surprised how much information can be gleaned simply by getting a dog to look the right way, says Rob Long

The dog Uggie, featured in the film "The Artist", is pictured after leaving his paw prints in cement in Hollywood. (REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

I have a friend who is, in entertainment industry argot, a “dog wrangler”. What she does – and she’s probably the most successful dog wrangler in the business – is train and prepare dogs to act in films and television shows.

In general, in show business, a “wrangler” is anyone who deals with – that is, “wrangles” – a particularly complicated piece of personnel or equipment. There are dog wranglers and horse wranglers and baby wranglers and computer wranglers and camera crane wranglers and even mega-star wranglers (though we don’t call them that) and in all cases the job is the same: translate the needs and requirements of the moviemaking schedule and the directors’ instructions into whatever language the wrangled object understands.

My friend was the dog wrangler behind Eddie, the famous dog from the hit television sitcom Frasier, and she was responsible for getting him to cock his head in just the right way and at just the right time, to jump on the sofa with effortless comic timing and basically steal the show.

She also wrangles other animals – snakes, chickens, you name it – but her area of expertise is dogs, so when the producers of a certain movie about dogs, based on a best-selling novel, needed a reliable dog wrangler, they gave her a call.

They told her that the budget was tight, that the shooting schedule was compressed, and that aside from wrangling all of the dogs involved she’d be responsible for guaranteeing that on the exact morning at the exact hour that the production schedule demanded it, the lead dog would give birth to puppies.

“You’re not serious,” she said. They shrugged. Yes, they knew that such a thing was impossible to guarantee. But the president of the studio was being difficult. He didn’t understand, they said, the vagaries of moviemaking and the need for a certain amount of flexibility. He had come from the packaged food business, where, apparently, you always know in advance what’s coming down the assembly line at any given moment.

“If he doesn’t understand anything about making movies,” she asked, “then why is he the president of a movie studio?”

No one really knew the answer to that. The answer turned out to be that that large cable television corporation that had purchased the movie studio a few years earlier had some executives from the consumer products company it had purchased a few years before that left over, and had simply transferred a few to Los Angeles. One of them had managed to work his way to the top of the movie studio without ever having made an actual movie.

She did what she could, of course but at the appointed hour the key dog just wouldn’t start giving birth, and so the production was stalled for a few very expensive days. The executives and the studio, irrationally, blamed her, and the sad truth is that in the four years since the release of that picture, she hasn’t worked at that studio again.

I thought of my friend the dog wrangler when I read recently about the large American restaurant chain, The Olive Garden. There are branches of this quasi-Italian restaurant all over the world – there is even one in Al Wahda Mall in Abu Dhabi – and they’re famous for their unlimited breadbaskets and enormous salads. Recently, though, the company has been more famous for its lacklustre earnings and faltering performance.

Which is not unlike the current climate in Hollywood, where box office receipts are lower and television viewership is off.

What happened at the company that owns The Olive Garden is probably what’s about to happen to a lot of movie studios and entertainment companies around town: it was bought by a ruthless group of investors who brought a new management team on board. And the first thing the new CEO did was something a little different.

The new CEO and his team had to work a night or two at The Olive Garden, serving breadsticks and pasta and unlimited salad bowls. Fancy executives in expensive suits had to don work uniforms and meet their actual, real life customers.

The result was that they learnt an awful lot about their business. They learnt what was working and what was failing and they learnt that it was hard to fix certain things and why. They learnt to simplify their offerings, support their key employees (and they learnt who those key employees were) and they learnt that there’s a whole layer in the organisational chart that is categorically and reliably useless. And they turned their business around.

My advice to whichever team of ruthless investors buys the next movie studio is, essentially, follow The Olive Garden Method.

Make your executives get out of the office for a week. Work on a movie set as a wardrobe assistant or a loader. Hear a television series pitch. Sit in on casting. Wrangle a dog. Because, when you get right down to it, a good dog wrangler is worth infinitely more than the president of the studio. And there’s only one way to learn that for sure.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl