The AHA’s jurisdiction is broad but far from complete. American productions working outside a union agreement or shooting internationally are charged a contractual fee of $80 per hour for a monitor, not including travel expenses. But, according to internal AHA Film & TV Unit advisory board meeting minutes from 2010 reviewed by THR, many productions simply decline to participate. Meanwhile, only about 50 percent of animal action is monitored domestically, according to Film & TV Unit senior adviser Karen Rosa. The gap is due to a variety of factors, from nonunion productions that opt out to late notifications, distant locations, fluctuating shooting schedules and inexperienced crewmembers who either don’t know or — in certain cases — don’t want to ask for monitoring in the first place. In addition, because of the increase in movie and television production in recent years, the AHA sometimes doesn’t have enough safety representatives to handle requested coverage, resulting in brief visits by monitors, or even none at all. “Reps get sent to multiple sets in a day, which means we can check off a set as ‘covered’ even though we only stayed there for five minutes,” says one staffer, who notes that limited personnel resources are allocated toward the riskiest scenes. “I feel that, more and more, this is done not to make sure we at least see the trainers and animals and make sure that it’s not a horrible situation, but rather to keep the numbers up and make it look like we are monitoring more than we actually are.”
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 06:54:36 +0000
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