We get them primed to play, but you can only let it go on so long. "You have two dogs that really get along and you put them together and you pull them apart. "What looks like dogs fighting is dogs playing," said Beal. There's a considerable degree of violence, human and animal in "Max," but Ray Beal, one of Hollywood's hardest-working animal wranglers, said it's never quite what it appears. Once we came on the idea for a military dog, that was the hook, and it stuck."
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"No one had done a dog movie in a long time," said Yakin, "not one that had a real canine protagonist, one treated with respect and intensity, like Rin Tin Tin or even ‘Old Yeller.' Not an anthropomorphic dog, not a cute dog and not a comedy dog. The dog, in turn, is called upon to cope with everything from adolescent angst to illegal arms dealers. Max is sent home but has bonded so fiercely with Kyle, and Kyle alone, that his future looks bleak - until he encounters Kyle's much younger and far less together brother, Justin (Wiggins), who is guilted into taking on his brother's unhappy dog. The title dog in "Max" has been trained by a Marine named Kyle Wincott (Robbie Amell), who is killed early in the film during a Taliban attack. They'll search sides of the road for ambushes, sniff ground for explosives, and do it all completely off the leash and out of earshot of the handler. In "Max," the central canine is a Malinois and a "specialized search dog," which the dog-loving Lettich said was among "the most highly trained and smartest animals - they will go out in front of a patrol up to 300 meters. With all due respect to Lassie, there are a number of parallels between RTT and Max (who is played by five different dogs), among them the war connection (RTT was found among an abandoned litter on a French battlefield during World War I) and the big-screen exposure of a lesser-known breed of dog: the Belgian Malinois, a shepherd type increasingly being adopted by police and military personnel around the world. survive some tough times and enjoyed massive audience appeal, endorsement deals and a $2,000-a-week salary - at a time when that figure was a lot more breathtaking than it is now. The result - "Max," which opens Friday and stars humans Thomas Haden Church, Lauren Graham and newcomer Josh Wiggins - marks a return to what was once a standard of Hollywood production, and Hollywood lore: the dog as leading man.Īs Susan Orlean ("The Orchid Thief") wrote in her 2011 book, "Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend," the famous German shepherd was the star of 13 silent films, helped Warner Bros. They learned about dog handling, dog training and the sometimes unhappy fate of war-vet dogs. "The guy said, ‘Here's the number of the animal guy at Camp Pendeleton. "They love ‘Rambo III' and ‘Bloodsport,'" he said.
Lettich's writing credits apparently changed military minds. And I'm going to send you my IMDb page, too.'"
So I said, ‘I was in the Marine Corps myself take a look at my papers.
"They weren't going to give us help because we had no script. "When we first were discussing the idea, Boaz and I got in touch with the Marines," Lettich said, referring to director Boaz Yakin. In fact, Lettich's history with Sylvester Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme helped get "Max" - the story of a canine veteran of the war in Afghanistan - the military aid it needed. The title character of "Max" is the "Rambo of dogs," says screenwriter Sheldon Lettich, and he knows whence he speaks.