Joe Martin: The most dangerous movie star of the silent era was an orangutan
As Jordan Peele’s Nope made us all painfully aware, working with animals on a movie set isn’t just an annoyance; it’s something that can have truly catastrophic consequences.
It’s a practice that has (rightfully) been put to bed for years now. CGI has gotten so convincing that a decent movie production can replace an animal if it needs to do something out of the ordinary. Animal care has gotten so good that if an animal just needs to be on screen, one can rest assured that it was treated with utmost caution and respect by the production. Especially if we’re talking about a production near the top end of the Hollywood pile.
Whether you’ve seen the Jordan Peele masterpiece or not, I don’t need to tell you that this wasn’t always the case. Animals and, tragically, animal abuse, used to be a very common part of the movie-making process. So much so that certain animals that responded “better” (a word doing a lot of heavy lifting there) to being on a movie set would become stars in their own right. With featured placements in some of the biggest pictures of the day.
For proof, look no further than the life and career of Joe Martin. Martin had an acting career that most human performers in the movie industry today would kill to have, despite the fact that he was an orangutan whose first credit came in 1914. Not a whole lot is known about his early life, as he was most likely acquired from the thriving black market trade of exotic animals, but the most common theory is that he arrived in Los Angeles when he was around five or six months old.
Like most men who become stars in Hollywood, he also got away with a whole lot of very bad behaviour.
How did Joe Martin last so long in the movie industry?
Since Martin had been around humans since birth, he was accustomed to them. The majority of the time, he was gentle and happy around humans, which made him a natural fit for a movie set. Well, as natural a fit as you can get when you’re dealing with a wild animal that fundamentally cannot be tamed. The majority of his pictures passed without incident, yet still, he had a temper. The kind that got the better of him on more than a few occasions.
Most notably of all was the 1922 picture Trifling Women, where he played a sidekick to Barbara La Marr’s character. Now, Martin and La Marr got on famously well. The problems began when La Marr and Martin had to share a scene with other men. Martin was possessive and didn’t like seeing La Marr interact with other men. So much so that in one scene, Edward Connelly needed to put a necklace around La Marr’s neck. After working on the scene for hours, Martin finally snapped and attacked Connelly.
Martin bit Connelly hard enough to draw blood. According to some sources, he broke his arm and mangled his hand. It took four men, one of Martin’s handlers and three crewmen, ten full minutes to prize the outraged ape off Connelly, with the picture’s film editor Grant Whytock adding the colourful detail that “it took three of us twisting his balls to make him let go”.
Clearly, this was an animal that wasn’t safe around humans anymore (if he’d ever been), but as a sign of how Hollywood was the wild west at the time, this wasn’t his final film credit.
No, Martin had four full movie credits before the danger he posed on set became too much, being sold to a circus in 1923. Quite possibly the one entertainment industry of the time that treated animals worse than Hollywood.