‘Bug Wrangler’ Scratches Filmdom’s Itch for Insects

Steve Kutcher never met a bug he didn’t like.

As a child, Kutcher discovered he could stave off cheek-pinching relatives by pulling a spider from his pocket. The 44-year-old Pasadena man has been a bug nut ever since. Insects are Kutcher’s profession and his passion: Bugs are his life.

While the world at large runs for the Raid, Kutcher sees splendor in the housefly, glory in the roach. “I’ll play with bugs for free,” the entomologist said, shaking a container of termites like a maraca.

Kutcher, who got a master’s degree at California State University, Long Beach, in insect behavior, also plays with bugs for money.

“My real loves are conservation and education,” said Kutcher, who teaches biology part time at West Los Angeles and Glendale Community colleges and often takes his pet polypeds and pro-bug message into local schools. But to keep his collection of 3,000 live insects in stale bread and cabbage, Kutcher also provides insects and entomological services to the entertainment industry.

Dreams of Zoo

Kutcher would rather talk about his dream of a local insect zoo or about an insect fair to be held today in Arcadia. But he indulges a visitor’s curiosity about his work as a Hollywood bug wrangler, the term sometimes used in his movie credits. Just as other professionals provide film makers with horses and other animal actors, Kutcher finds the angry swarm of bees or the photogenic praying mantis called for in a particular script.

“I caught the fly on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head in ‘The Terminator’ in my front yard,” Kutcher said proudly. He also provided--and rendered harmless--the wasps that terrorized Farrah Fawcett in the film “Extremities.” He has filled orders for 40,000 carpenter ants, 18,000 ladybugs and countless tarantulas, including one whose brief but memorable film career consisted of crawling across the torso of a nearly nude actress.

Among the talents Kutcher brings to bug wrangling is knowing where the livestock hide out. With help from his friends, he once caught 1,100 butterflies in just over three hours (they were subsequently released at a wedding). More recently, he has been gathering arachnids to play small but important parts in “Spiderman,” a film that will begin shooting later this month.

Rustling in aquariums in his living room are hundreds of ground beetles that figured in one of the more revolting special effects in John Carpenter’s movie “Prince of Darkness.” “Since then, they’ve been in ‘Fright Night, Part II,’ which hasn’t been released yet,” Kutcher said.

His wife, Laurie, not only tolerates a houseful of bugs, but she keeps them fed. (The Kutchers had two wedding cakes, both shaped like five-foot-long caterpillars.)

Positively Athletic

Kutcher said he likes the problem-solving aspect of filming with insects, which often requires practical applications of his knowledge of insect behavior. Although he declines to reveal how he accomplished the stunt, he once succeeded in getting a cockroach to run for a foot and then flip over on its back for a commercial. Not just another stupid pet trick, when you realize that cockroaches can’t be trained like puppies.

Kutcher has also perfected a method for harvesting spider webs without tearing them.

The high point of his Hollywood career didn’t strictly involve insects. It was wrangling leeches, a kind of worm, for Steven Spielberg’s film “The Goonies.”

But insects definitely provided his low point. “I had to release a thousand flies in a bathroom for the movie ‘Multiple Listing,’ ” he recalled. “That wasn’t so bad. But I had to collect them all afterward because it was someone’s house.”

Kutcher is uncomfortably aware that his film work often feeds the entomophobia, or fear and loathing of insects, that he fights so hard against outside the studio. But he soothes his conscience by using his entertainment income to underwrite serious work with and for insects, including traveling to entomological conferences and speaking to students. He also makes it a point not to see the horror movies in which his tiny proteges appear.

Kutcher takes enormous pleasure in seeing children lose their fear of insects as they participate in such classroom activities as shaking “hands” with his tarantula Dolores. The tarantula knows that even small children are far too large to be prey and therefore doesn’t bite, Kutcher said.

Befriending Demons

He estimates that Dolores has assuaged the anxieties of 8,000 schoolchildren in recent years. Dolores’ predecessor gave her all for education, he said. “I had one for nine years, but she ran off a little girl’s hand and hit the floor.”

Kutcher revels in making children aware that there is a vast world of insects all around them, doing fascinating things that go largely unobserved. He shows them ground beetles that play possum and tells them how to make excellent bug cages out of plastic soda bottles.

He routinely advises teachers to do more with local insect species that they can gather without paying anything. Many teachers, he pointed out, purchase silkworms for their classrooms. He recommends that they plant passion vines instead. The vines will attract gulf fritillary butterflies that will lay their eggs on the plant. The eggs can then be harvested and the insect’s entire life cycle observed.

Kutcher also warns children to think before they grab. The occasional insect, such as the poisonous black widow spider found throughout Southern California, is dangerous.

A Bug for All Reasons

He has a butterfly garden at his Pasadena home, filled with milkweed, mustard and other plants that attract the loveliest of insects to his yard. Bug-related items inside include his collection of bug mugs and his extensive files on insects. “I have files on bugs in everything--bugs in music, bugs in art, bugs in history,” he said. “I even have a file on bugs in erotica.”

And, of course, there is the inevitable file of bug jokes. An example:

Customer: “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.”

Waiter: “It’s possible the cook used to be a tailor.”

Although Kutcher sometimes uses the term bug generically, he is actually interested in all insects and their relatives, creatures with their skeletons on the outside and jointed legs. True bugs are insects with mouth parts adapted for sucking, he explained.

One day Kutcher hopes that Angelenos and visitors will be able to study the whole range of insect life at a specialized zoo such as the one in Cincinnati. “You can have and feed hundreds of insects for the cost of keeping one elephant,” he noted.

The entomologist said he hopes that today’s insect fair at the Los Angeles County Arboretum will generate interest in the project. Kutcher will be one of more than 40 exhibitors at the fair, sponsored by the Los Angeles Lorquin Entomological Society. Hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Depleting Food Chain

Kutcher says a society that is cavalier about its insects is at risk of losing all its natural glories. He frets that Angeles National Forest has no formal plans to preserve indigenous insects, despite the fact that many larger local animals depend on them for food. He also believes that Caltrans should stop placing non-native plants along the highways and start landscaping with native plants that would attract local butterflies and other insects.

And then there is the problem of the American mother, who may be Insect Enemy No. 1.

If insects are ever to assume their proper place in the hierarchy of natural wonders, Kutcher said, a lot of mothers are just going to have to stop telling future entomologists, “My house is clean. No bug crosses my doorstep.”