Nicholas Cage is known for aggressively pursuing roles. Fifteen years ago, he apparently ate a live cockroach in seeking one role. He notes that this would no longer be legal: animal rights concerns now cover cockroaches. The creature would have to be a remote control cockroach.The name of the movie containing the scene in question is Vampire's Kiss. In addition to Cage and the unfortunate cockroach, the 1989 film also stars Maria Conchita Alonso, Jennifer Beals, and Elizabeth Ashley. A 1997 release, Addicted to Love, starring Meg Ryan and Matthew Broderick, features a similar scene: a roach unwittingly eaten by a restaurant critic. Credits state simply that no animals were harmed in the course of making the film.
Barry Sonnenfeld, who directed 1997's Men in Black, commented on the presence of representatives from the American Humane Association at scenes involving cockroaches. "In each shot we had to tell them how many roaches we were using. So if we had eighty roaches coming out of a Dumpster they would actually count—'We're still missing three, guys'—and we'd be shooting at ten thousand dollars an hour, looking for three roaches." But Sonnenfeld expressed puzzlement that if any roaches were unaccounted for by the end of the day, the crew was still allowed to fumigate the stage. For its part, the Humane Society invokes the "slippery slope" metaphor to explain its policy—that if cruel treatment of cockroaches was allowed, it would then be a small step to allow cruelty towards cats, dogs, and horses.
During the filming of The Shawshank Redemption, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals objected to a scene in which a crow is fed a maggot, requiring filmmakers to substitute a maggot that had died of natural causes. One was found, and the scene was filmed.
