A Tiger's Tale - Tales From the Set by Barbara O'Brien - Ep 1
Do you remember the first time you bit off more than you could chew? When your overconfidence landed you in a pickle that you weren’t prepared for? Well, that's exactly what happened to me when I made the rookie mistake of booking a Siberian tiger for a high-end department store’s furniture shoot in my early days of running an animal actors agency. Picture this: a majestic tiger, a pristine white leather furniture set, and a terrified crew looking to me for a solution as chaos ensues.
Curious about what happened next? This episode offers a sneak peek into the unpredictable, often hilarious world of working with animal actors. So, buckle up and join me, Barbara O'Brien, as I narrate the first of many such Tales from the Set!
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And Remember, Animals Just Want to be Heard.
Hi, it's Barbara O'Brien and you're listening to Tales from the Set, episode one, a Tiger's Tale. All right, it was a really long time ago when I first started my animal actors agency and this was back when I would still, you know, because I didn't know any better. I would book things like you know, tigers or bears or wolves, and I don't do that. I haven't done that in years and years because I don't think people should have tigers and bears and wolves. I just wanted to get that out in the open right away. But this was way back.
Speaker 1:
I was just a kid and I had a client who wanted to, you know, book a tiger for a photo shoot. Well, this was a well known large department store, very famous, you know, national big department store, pretty, pretty high end, you know, and it was famous in the day and they wanted to do a furniture shoot. So they hired me to find the tiger, which I called my tiger guy, because, you know, everybody's got a guy. So I called my tiger guy and we bring the tiger to the studio and we unload the tiger and now you have to understand a tiger is really big. This is a big Siberian tiger and you know he's, but his tail is about as long as his body and his body's about five or six feet long, I think. I just remember him being like super big and his head would come up past my hip and you know, head's bigger than any dog. Or you know the size of a I don't know the size of a tiger big head, anyway, big, big tiger, right. And so we let the tiger you know he's supposed to A to B. So A to B means go from point A to point B across the set, and so we're just directing the tiger back and forth.
Speaker 1:
The tiger walks one way across the set and then turn them around, walks the other way across the set and the photographer is shooting and the furniture looks beautiful. It's all this beautiful leather, expensive furniture. It was pretty, white colored and fancy and, you know, not anything I could ever have or want. But that's not the point. Anyway, the tiger walks back and forth, he walks back and forth and then all of a sudden, oh my gosh, the tiger like jumps, jumps onto this giant ottoman, but he grabs this leather, this big round leather ottoman, and he starts tearing it apart. He's like, he's like lifting it up where there's paws and he's he's chewing on it and you know, and like tiger's, like just playing with this, this ottoman, and and the clients are freaking out. I mean they're freaking out because oh my God, oh my God, look, oh, oh, oh, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And they all look at me, you know, and I'm, I'm just like standing there, like because I you know what. So I look at the tiger trainer. Now he's a pretty calm fellow and he's pretty laconic and he just kind of standing there. And what are we going to do? They say, and he looks at them and kind of puts his head down a little bit, looks back up and he says I say we let him have it. And that's my tiger tail. Thanks for listening. Join us next time.
Speaker 1:
Tales from the Set.
