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By Nick Paumgarten
David Siegel and Scott McGehee, film partners for 3 decades, read and enjoyed Sigrid Nunez’s novel “The Friend” when it was published in 2018. They invited Núñez for coffee, then agreed on the film rights to the story, wrote a script. and began to make plans for its production.
The novel, which won the National Book Award, is told through the eyes of an unnamed Manhattan whose friend and mentor, a better-known Array, recently committed suicide. She inherits her dog, a Great Dane named Apollo. “The Friend” is about many things: pain, memory, loneliness, goat men, writing, teaching, today’s youth. . . But it is fundamentally a love story between two afflicted creatures, the dog and the dog, who seek comfort and companionship. A treacherous world.
Siegel and McGehee had actors in mind for the narrator and mentor, whom they named Iris and Walter respectively. In the fall of 2019, they got in touch with noted teacher Bill Berloni, who has been providing, hiring, and educating animals for levels and film for nearly fifty years. Berloni asked if he was a Great Dane. ” Great Danes are big, stupid and lazy,” he told them. (Or, as he prefers to say now, “they are susceptible and not known for their obedience education. “) “May I convince you to transfer to another race?”
The filmmakers insisted. The volume, the discomfort, the majesty, the gloomy aspect: those elements were essential. In addition, the canopy of the novel featured a depiction of a Great Dane, a harlequin Dane, white with black spots, with a red collar. It is a visual medium and its practitioners are visual. This image, as much as any description on the page, had captured his cinematic imagination.
Together with Berloni, they launched a nationwide search. Berloni also works as an animal officer, so he knew the landscape. The record of the hearings was filled with headbutts from some thirty Great Danes. They saw dogs in Chicago, St. Louis, and Washington, D. C. There’s an Aggro, a Thor, a Storm, and, in Louisville, a real Apollo. Henry, Logic, Kodiak, Legend. Berloni went to Fredericksburg to see Gage, to Sacramento to see Atom. Snazzy, on a stopover in Anchorage, had a tryout in New York for the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.
In February 2020, Berloni, Siegel and McGehee arrived in Iowa, just after the presidential caucuses. They had been hunting for six months and still didn’t have their co-star. Pre-production was due to start in a month. They met their new prospect at an obedience education club in Des Moines. I’m almost two years old and it’s a little less muscular and intimidating than some of the others I’d seen, with a softer air. Berloni put it to the test, giving it a diversity of popular commands, and Bing responded with elegance and ease.
“If they don’t rent this dog, I’m going to set it up,” Berloni said.
This time they followed his advice. In early March 2020, Bing and its owner, Beverly Klingensmith, Wells Fargo’s business systems representative, traveled from Iowa to Connecticut to spend time with Berloni and his wife and business partner, Dorothy. Klingensmith returned to Iowa, leaving Bing in Berloni’s care.
The filmmakers were able to shoot. And then, a week later, the world stopped. Covid. Bing went home. Then came the writers’ strike, the actors’ strike, and the tangram of timelines and skills projects. It took four years before they started popping up again, right after this year’s Iowa caucuses. Bing, who is now nearly six years old, has had a full election cycle to hone his skill and age in office.
Nunez, who wasn’t worried about the adaptation of her novel but had followed it closely, said, “I was very worried about Bing. Another thing that characterizes Great Danes is their longevity; Their average lifespan is only 8 years. “I was hoping Bing would hold on,” he said.
Bing arrived in New York City by minibus on January 9 of this year, along with Klingensmith, whom everyone calls Bev. She had enough paid time off at Wells Fargo to accompany Bing as a teacher on set. They planned to stay in the city and away from home for 3 months: one for rehearsals, then two for filming. No one, Bev added, would tell me how much he earned to search for and exercise Bing. “For other people living normal lives, it’s a big change. “She gets five figures for her involvement,” Berloni said.
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The production had rented a four-bedroom space on Staten Island. To qualify for a tax break for the film industry, the dog had to stay in New York, and Staten Island was the most productive option for an affordable rental with a giant garden. Bing and Bev moved there, as did Berloni and one of his coaches, Trisha Nguyen. Another coach, Kelli Gautreau, traveled from New Jersey. Over the next few weeks, Bing and her roommates traveled to Manhattan for rehearsals and educational sessions.
Two weeks before filming, Bing did a costume fitting at the Chelsea production offices. Berloni arrived early, after a meeting with the producers of a Broadway show. “They need me to help them stage as many dogs as possible,” he said. “Twenty-five to thirty dogs on the loose. A scene at a dog park. I look at them as if to say, “You realize, it’s true, that trained dogs are just going to sit there and wait for the command. “I did “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” twenty years ago. Ten dogs and I said, “I’ll never do that again. “»
Berloni is sixty-seven years old, slender, and his movements are considered in a way that makes him appear calm and tense. His attention to the temperament of animals is manifested through his balance. He has gray hair and a good-groomed beard and is reminiscent of Steven Spielberg, minus the billions. He regularly wears jeans and a black Carhartt jacket. He and Dorothy live in central Connecticut, on a farm they call Little Arfin’ Acres, with twenty dogs, 4 donkeys, 3 cats, two geese, a macaw, and a pig, all for hire. He grew up on another farm nearby; his father was a horticulturist in the city of New Britain.
“I wanted to be an actor,” he told me. I wanted to get into the Yale School of Drama, but my parents couldn’t. So I was assigned an apprenticeship job at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam. They organize revivals and musicals. Dozens of shows have been staged on Broadway. In fact, I was there to create sets.
It was the summer of 1976 and Goodspeed was releasing a new musical called “Annie,” discovered in the comic book. “There was a role for a dog, but they didn’t have a trainer,” Berloni said. “I was nineteen years old. I had no experience. They gave me thirty-five dollars to buy a dog and feed it all summer. I went to the Connecticut Humane Society and discovered a dog that was going to sleep the next day. after seven bucks for the dog, it was the first Sandy. Sandy had been abused and gently frightened, so Berloni kept the dog with him at all times, keeping him level on a leash while he built the sets.
The screen exploded at Goodspeed. Walter Kerr wrote in the Times: “The evening, like the comic strip, doesn’t even seem funny. Still, Kerr was kind to the dog – “Sandy’s fine (he’s bigger than Annie)” – and so, when Mike Nichols signed on to produce the play and bring it to Broadway the following year, Sandy and Berloni were asked to They repeated their roles. . Berloni had enrolled at New York University and was reading with Stella Adler. She now needed to hone her training skills. For one scene, as he recounts in his memoir, “Broadway Tails,” he devised a way for Sandy to avoid the middle of the scene; Instead of using a dog treat, which would bounce off the floor and make a sound, a cast member would drop some trash. This strategy would be known as Baloney Drop. Its author was Bill Baloney. (“Actually, I was Bill Baloney in third grade,” Berloni said. ) This time, the exhibit was a huge success, as was Sandy, who, at least according to Berloni, was the first dog to play a central character on stage. . Array “And that’s how I became a world-renowned animal master in my twenties,” he said.
Since then, he has been the go-to animal keeper in many musicals and Broadway plays. She has filmed other “Annies” and countless videos and TV shows, but she has a tendency to distrust Hollywood, like other people on TV and The Movie has unreasonable expectations about animals.
“We did ‘Annie’ on NBC a few years ago,” he said. Live, on the network. The manufacturers said, “We’ve already hired an animal master. It was a Hollywood animal master who said, “I can do it. “in 8 days. I said, “You can’t do it in 8 days!”A week before the transmission, on the second day, the dog bit a child in the face. Guess who gets the call?
How I felt about ‘The Friend. ‘” Scott and David don’t look like the filmmakers I’ve worked with,” he said. “They actually care about animals. They need to get it right.
Veteran movie producers would probably impose humorous bans against children and dogs, but few IMDb pages lack them. Rin Tin Tin, a World War I battlefield rescue, was the source of money that fueled Darryl Zanuck’s career and the rise of Warner Bros. Lassie helped mentor the industry through years of distrust toward the stars of Red Scare. Meanwhile, running shoes were building their own careers and fortunes. The greatest of these was Frank Inn, who had been assistant to Lassie’s teacher, Rudd Weatherwax, of the Weatherwax circle of relatives, also teacher to Toto, Old Yeller and Asta. (Many movie dogs were several dogs. ) Inn mutt Higgins, discovered in Burbank, was 16 when he came out of retirement, after six seasons on “Petticoat Junction,” to originate the role through Benji. Higgins’ daughter Benjean took charge of several sequels, adding “Oh! Heavenly Dog” (1980), with Chevy Chase and Omar Sharif. Cujo, if you’re wondering, she had at least 4 Saint Bernards, a mechanical dog, and a specialist dressed as a dog.
In the Chelsea production offices, an elevator door opened and there was Bing, masterful in every way: a lean, muscular guy who weighed one hundred and forty-five pounds and, according to the film’s props, department metric, it measured forty-two inches. from its front legs to the top. of his skull. His muzzle, like Roger Federer’s neck, turns red when he is tired or stressed. He has a spot on his scrotum and a long, wiry tail. He projected slight curiosity, self-control, a certain awkwardness: your fundamental vibe when you arrive at the office. Bev, next to him, was wearing a long parka and jeans, had short black hair and glasses, and projected patience and intelligent humor. Berloni said that I may greet Bing once, but then I avoid petting him or making eye contact, so that his loyalty and attention is focused on him and Bev, as well as Naomi Watts, who was betting on Iris, the film’s protagonist. . . Bing and I enjoyed our moment, he left some slime on my sweater and then they put him to work.
Prop designers, Gino Fortebuono and Rebecca Spiro, had come up with a variety of beloved necklaces and straps, in other sizes and shades of red. ” We’re for the best size, the best width, the best red,” Spiro said. “Really, it’s an homage to the canopy of the book. “
Bing sniffed the necklaces and then stood still while Fortebuono put one on him, in a deferential attempt at delicacy and haste. Everyone took a step back to assess Bing while Bev and Berloni made him do some poses.
“I know it sounds crazy, but we see a brighter red,” Spiro said. They exchanged necklaces. Spiro, probably used to running with actors, told Bing, “You’re beautiful!There’s no one more charming than you. “
There were other props and designs to consider: Fortebuono pulled a stuffed giant panda out of the box, to use as a stand-in for Bing’s set-up and lighting, and a new air mattress, to rehearse scenes taking place in Iris’s apartment. He and the prop crew talk about a type of thin chrome mat they were considering for a photo shoot on a Brooklyn pier. They didn’t need to divulge Bing’s paws on the old chipped forums and nails sticking out of the dock, so they discovered some “chroma” to roll on like a rug. The board design would be restored in post-production, using C. G. I. Michael O’Brien, the crew’s boat captain, came here to talk about the modifications he had come up with to Bing’s trailer, because the metal stairs were too steep and the dog ramps too narrow to accommodate Bing and the I love him. Instead, O’Brien had purchased a mobile van ramp. They also devised a strategy to build a bench for a boat scene and a special passenger seat for a car scene so that Bing’s head would be on par with Watts’. “We’ll have to remove the seat and reposition it with anything else,” Berloni said. “And I will hide in the ground at his feet. ”
In cinema, we have intuition, we even celebrate ingenuity and solutions in the service of illusion. Fake blood, railroad cars, Potemkin towns, not to mention infographics, herds, armies, and storms that exist only in code. We don’t take the frugal. We consider all those tricks to be excessive and unnecessary, in practical rather than aesthetic terms. Fidelity to the script and to the filmmaker’s vision – the determination to deceive – demands changes in the global of genuine things that would possibly, to a layman, seem accustomed to getting by, excessively elaborate. Why not rewrite the scene to make it more comfortable to shoot?Why not opt for a splinterless, flush pillar with freshly driven nails?Because there’s a magic carpet, and that’s fantastic. And we have to make sure that no animals are harmed during the filming of this film.
Spiro said to Bing, “Need to check a good set?
They put a zippered sweater around his neck and then a harness.
“Are there too many people?”
“It’s too technical. “
“Can we have an image of him in the sphinx position?You’ll be in this position on a train.
“Down,” Bev said in a subdued tone. Bing settled on the sphinx, his ears erect and his tail tucked into his buttocks. “Good boy!” he said in falsetto. An executive manufacturer drove by, tried to throw an empty coffee cup into a nearby trash can, and failed. “Let it go,” Bev whispered quietly and hoarsely. The dog gave him a downcast look and resumed his pose for the camera.
Bev lives on a ten-acre plot of land in Newton, Iowa, with one of her two adult sons and her husband, a criminal officer. He breeds Great Danes and also has a specialization in dog photography. His calf is called Foto Danes. On his forearm he has a tattoo of a paw print, with the symbol of a camera opening in the position of the metacarpal pad. ” My two loves,” she says.
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Bing is her sixth Great Dane, if you count only the ones she and her circle of relatives have kept at home. When an executive producer of “The Friend” first approached her in 2019, Bev deleted the email. implausible and crazy,” he said. But then he took it out of the trash. After production was halted, he postponed its repair, as the film’s script called for an intact man.
The key to Bing’s functionality was its relationship with Watts. They had begun rehearsing together at Watts’ home in Tribeca as soon as he arrived in New York. For the last session, an assistant pulled Bing, Bev, Berloni and Nguyen out of the rain, and Watts walked down a wide ladder holding his own dog, Izzy, a Yorkie-Chihuahua mix. Watts was wearing yoga pants and a baggy sweater. Izzy and Bing, who had become friends, greeted each other first, Bev and Berloni made sure the big dog didn’t run over the little one. (Izzy was on set and ended up appearing as an extra in a scene at a puppy store. ) Watts then greeted Bing. The first time they met, Watts had given him pieces of salami. This time, Berloni handed her a brown bag containing equally delicious but healthier treats she had prepared on Staten Island. Her goal, she said, was for Watts to surpass him in Bing’s control hierarchy, to take second place to Bev. Now control has been handed over to Watts, whose goal was to expand the company’s control over Bing while he appeared on camera as clumsy, something new, for the sake of the story.
They worked in a mirrored gym in the main hallway. Watts guided Bing on a few laps. “Walking through doors safely is a skill,” Berloni said. At one point, when Watts told Bing to stay, Berloni tried to distract him by dancing and making noise. Bing maintained his stance. ” Good boy!” Bev and Watts cried.
“He doesn’t like it when he makes mistakes,” Watts said.
She took him for a few laps around the block, with Berloni and Nguyen running to serve as sentinels on street corners, on the lookout for dogs or other threats. The streets were dangerous. ” By desensitizing you to scary things, you don’t need to “throw it to the bottom,” Berloni said. “Two poodles at noon. “
Bing is the most admired. Everywhere he went, other people saw him.
“He’s like a rock star,” Watts said.
I’d hung out with him before, in busy neighborhoods near the production offices. Passers-by were smiling and making comments. ” What a beauty”; “Magnificent. What a great beast”; “What is it?”; “It’s a pony”; “Horse”; “I have two Danes in my apartment building, owned by a Dane. “When Bing raised his leg on a flowerpot, the civilians scattered. The creek is reminiscent of a fireboat at Hell Gate.
In Tribeca, the consultation ended with Watts and Bing lying on the ground side by side. A hug to the co-stars. ” I’ve never worked on a film where there’s so much cooperation from an actor,” Berloni said. “I’m jumping on the inside. “
The Staten Island house on a busy Mid-Island street, a few blocks from the freeway. A row of prodigiously used bags of excrement guarded the garden gate. “Welcome to the space too small for two Great Danes!”Berloni said.
Dane Bing’s other stand-in, a Chicago Harlequin named Wilder, also lived in the house. “There’s no backup for Naomi Watts,” Berloni said. It’s all about celebrity. “
Wilder and Bing have a grandfather, a standout exhibition champion named Fender. Wilder, like Bing, has two other colored eyes and a spot on his scrotum. When Stephanie Kelley, its owner, got a call from Bev about the understudy job on “The Friend,” she bought Nunez’s book, but Wilder chewed it before he finished reading it, so he doesn’t know how it ends.
Wilder in the kitchen. ” Get ready to drool,” Berloni said. “Don’t look him in the eye. You’re an excuse for an educational session: how to bring a stranger into the inner sanctum. This has never happened before and will never happen again. It’s like arriving in a Hollywood villa occupied by two Marlon Brandos. Using a leash and clip, Berloni and the others had installed a makeshift harness around Wilder’s buttocks to prevent his tail from hitting objects as he shook — a belt of joy.
Wilder and Bing, being intact males, were not allowed to be in the same position at the same time, for fear of fighting. They had never muzzled others, even though they shared the house. Five weeks looking to make more productive friends with them?No,” Berloni said. Running shoes had developed a formula for letting one dog out while the other remained in his room. Wilder differed from Bing in his Chicago Cubs collar and relative exuberance. Even though he has become more sober under the tutelage of Berloni and others. “He didn’t smell my crotch today!” said Kelli Gautreau.
They took Wilder to the basement for exercise. At every turn, he looked at me, the stranger in the sanctuary. (“Good observation,” Berloni said when I talked about this. ) Eventually, Gautreau took Wilder to his money account. on the second floor, and Bev went to find Bing. “Do you need the ham down?” She called from above.
Bing didn’t pay attention to me. “It’s the difference between a trained dog and an untrained dog,” Berloni said.
Always devout and moody, Bing followed orders and devoured treats. They had specific behaviors to teach and scenes to prepare for, or indeed create their own choreography, the human gestures and framing position that would elicit the desired canine reactions. It was an ever-changing exchange of control, like ownership of the conch in “Lord of the Flies. ” There was a scene in the script where Bing walked around Watts while she slept on a bed on the floor (Berloni hid and pretended to hide treats under the bed); the one in which Bing, contrary to his nature, puts a paw on his chest; and some other where, contrary to his formation, he scratches a door. There were dozens of what Berloni called “difficult actions. ” At one point, Bing was supposed to take a T-shirt and play with Watts – “A huge plot point,” Berloni said – but it was difficult, the source of Bev’s biggest worry. “A few years ago, he didn’t even like anything in his mouth,” he said.
Upstairs, Wilder, jealous, was yelling at his cash register.
On weekends, Berloni tried to return to the estate, even if it was just for one night, but the preparation and filming of “The Friend” took him hours. He was also busy with other jobs. He drove around the three-state domain at all hours to meet animals, and during his trip, he mixed up text messages on his phone.
“On Monday morning I’m going to see New Jersey,” he said one afternoon. “It’s a cow I knew. A dairy cow. He had to leave his bulldog Myrtle, who is a normal person in “And Just. “Thus. . “, the sequel to “Sex and the City”, for an A. T.
He had set up a workplace in the extra room on Staten Island, across from Wilder’s cash register. On the wall, a photo gallery of some of the additions to the cast of “The Friend. “Cutie, Rocco, M. Tibbs. Stella, a French bulldog in a wheelchair, an experienced actor. Some of them were his, from his farm. He replaced them all. Since Bing can’t play with other males, Berloni took him to the farm to audition some females. “He chose the four he was looking for in his film,” Berloni said.
“Now I have an earthworm production assembly,” Berloni said. It has been supplying animals to Sesame Street for twenty-five years. At the office, he won a Zoom call about an upcoming comic strip that included a bed full of Canadian earthworms. Manufacturers sought out Berloni to make the verses faster and more active. “There’s not a lot of speed with worms,” he said. In the end, his recommendation to speed up the film.
Downstairs, Bing prepares to rehearse a scene in which he steals a hot dog from a vendor. “They need a comedic sip and we’re leaving,” Berloni said. “A hot dog and a bun is a lot. It’s either. “Take with a hot dog and bread, or 3 servings with hot dogs, without bread. There is no such thing as a movie hot-dog eating diary.
In the kitchen, Bev passed a franc to a muffin. Bing smelled it, gently took it out of the bun, and began to chew it, so that the tip shook like a cigarette. Funny, perhaps, but he didn’t swallow it and it disappeared. They recorded two attempts. ” We will send it to the director today for discussion,” Berloni said.
Hot dogs presented another kind of challenge once filming began. American Humane, the organization responsible for the “no animal was hurt” designation, monitors productions of all sizes and types. The manager for “The Friend” was a woman named Kendall Tinston. During filming, he kept an eye on Bing, Bev, and Berloni, asking them if Bing was tired or bloodless or even suggesting to administrators that the dog might want a break. Berloni, director of animal education and habits at the Humane Society of New York, was not at all opposed to her presence and welcomed the addition of a voice, but the demands of a shoot rarely made it difficult for her to intervene.
That’s what happened with hot dogs. Berloni had mistakenly thought they were treats and not accessories, falling under the purview of American Humane. Tinston asked Berloni for the ingredient list, which showed lines of garlic powder and onion powder. “Dogs can be allergic to them. ” Berloni said, “The ingredients don’t say how much, but American Humane doesn’t need a dog to react. “Tinston recommended that paprika-seasoned hot dogs only be available in New Jersey, so one of the accessory manufacturers went out and bought 4 dozen. (In the end, they never filmed the scene. ) Then, a few days later, Berloni, running toward a scene asking Bing to drink water, added poultry broth to the dog’s dish. Again, Tinston asked to see the ingredients. Onions. ” I still felt bad,” Berloni said. “I had no idea about it as an accessory. ” He ended up formulating his own broth by microwaving Bing’s cooked bird in a bowl of water.
There were a few things that kept Berloni awake as filming approached.
For starters, there’s the first day: Apollo at the vet’s office. “The vet exam haunts me in my dreams,” Berloni said. It’s a tight, hot set, with Bing on a table and a stranger touching him in a way he can’t help. “Oh, it’s the face, the butt, the ears, the lips, everything,” Berloni said afterward. But Bing handled the scenario well. The next morning, at half-past four with Berloni and Bev, he was worried about leaving. As the weeks passed, he seemed more and more excited about the prospect of working.
There were other scenes that troubled Berloni: a near-collision with a cyclist, a memorial service aboard a boat on the East River, a beach series with the lapping of the waves. The script also called for a butterfly to land on Bing’s nose. “Bill doesn’t make butterflies,” Gautreau said. (“Actually, I made butterflies,” Berloni said, describing an ad he made for Huffman Koos furniture, for which an entomologist he hired brought six monarchs and a bottle of “sex potion. “– a Baloney Drop for the butterflies. )
A day of filming in Washington Square Park ended with a dog race scene, featuring the women with whom Bing was introduced at Berloni’s farm. But, after initial discussions about who would choose what (Berloni to one of the directors: “We’re going to pick up our dogs’ feces; I hope you don’t expect us to pick up other dogs’ feces), the Parks Department told the filmmakers that maybe not. Closing the dog enclosure to the public, which would prevent the production from filming there. Instead, the filmmakers envisioned an expanse of synthetic turf nearby, but the ministry allegedly wouldn’t allow the dogs to be off-leash, even if they all had their own master on hand. “The invisible strap is the goodies you carry in your pocket,” Berloni said. The filmmakers reworked the shot.
Another fear had nothing to do with Bing at all. In the film, in a series more fantasy than flashback, Watts has some scenes with Bill Murray, who plays Walter, and a dachshund. They were filmed in a brownstone in Brooklyn, the fourth week of shooting. The set was closed, but Berloni, a few days later, recalled what they had decided to call D-Day: “Dachshund Day was absolutely stressful. We had a fight. Dachshunds are very nervous. I told them that. I said we had to sniff out the dachshund before filming. Space deserves to be empty. If dogs like that feel safe, at least they pay attention. But once they got us there, everything was ready, the team was ready. “The dachshund just has to sit on the couch. Let’s shoot. ‘ And then it didn’t stay, it didn’t stay, it didn’t stay, it didn’t stay. “Are you going to stay?” “Um, probably not. “” “Take it away!””So, actually, they couldn’t get the vaccine they wanted.
On set, Murray grunted, “Maybe I’ll do a bigger job of educating a wasp. “(While filming a scene with Bing near the Brooklyn Bridge, Murray slipped bird bits under his shoelaces for Bing to enjoy. )
The next morning, at 6 a. m. , Berloni spent an hour alone in space with the dog. “And that day we won all the vaccines,” he said. 20 captures of the dachshund jumping on a chair. “
Bing turned out to be a pro. He controlled the difficult actions, adding the cut of the shirt. (“He played really well,” Bev said. ) Every time an actor finished, the cast and crew, as is tradition, clapped on set, and each time, Bing screamed. During the sixth week, Bing directed the beach scene on an Oyster Bay beach. Take after take, lying on his side in the sand, he looked over his shoulder at Watts, as the script demanded. During an installation, Siegel, the director, saw on the monitor that Bing’s testicles seemed more prominent than usual and asked Bev if he could slide them under his cock. He tried, under the gaze of Tinston, the representative of American Humane. “They can’t bend,” Bev said. When the day was over, Siegel hugged Berloni and Bev. He predicted that Bing would fail and they would have to resort to C. G. I. Berloni is glad he didn’t know sooner: “It would have been a bundle of nerves. “
Before Watts’ final day with Bing, Berloni told people, “If Naomi cries, we haven’t done our job. Sure enough, after completing his last scene, in a Metro-North car, he learned that he would never see Bing again and ran back to his van with tears in his eyes to say goodbye.
It is possible that Berloni will now look back on all those years and locate the goal and the meaning, the hand of fate. “Annie will be reborn in 2027,” he said. After that, I’ll let go of the leash and retire. “
Messi, the Border Collie from “Anatomy of a Fall,” had just won his cameo at the Oscars; Next year it will be Bing’s turn. By then, he’d probably be neutered by now, in time for the rigors of the promotional tour. ♦
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