Injury, death and disaster, all convincing excuses for shutting down a shoot, right? Well, best intentions have been delayed and even thwarted for sillier reasons. We contacted producers, lawyers and film associations for stories of bizarre or archaic laws that have unexpectedly kept producers up at night. Here are the top three anecdotes we came across.

ITALY
Throughout Europe, strict rules apply to advertising to children. Sweden banned advertising to kids in the 1990s, while the UK recently scrapped junk food ads that target tots. In Italy, however, an attempt to reign in children's marketing proved disastrous for the local production community.

In 2004, the Italian government passed the Legge Gasparri (Gasparri Law), a controversial bill that included an amendment barring Italian children under 14 from participating in commercials. Instead of protecting kids, the law drove productions abroad until it was repealed last summer.

"It was surreal," remembers FilmMaster EP Karim Bartoletti. "We ended up shooting in places we'd never thought of."

In FilmMaster's award-winning "Underwater World" spot for appliance-maker Aqualtis, the final shot of the Italian version showed a child peeking into a washing machine. Although the entire job could've easily been shot in Italy, the Legge Gasparri made casting a local child impossible, so FilmMaster moved the shoot to a Barcelona studio.

Bartoletti says he could accept restrictions on children's advertising, but he couldn't fathom the reasoning behind the law. Crews were losing out on work as advertisers easily skirted it, in turn creating a production boon for competing markets. Clients quickly realized they could save 10 to 15% by shooting in Spain and up to 40% in Croatia, he says.

"That stupid law opened the eyes of clients who were a conservative about traveling abroad. They realized Spain could be more cost-effective," he says. "The effect was similar to when the SAG strike brought productions to Canada."

ICELAND
Archaic laws in the Icelandic capital Reykjavik ensure horse transport moves at a slow gait or gallop. But that's not the horse-related provision that cost a local prodco a month-long job for a star-studded Hollywood film last March. The director of the forthcoming Neil Gaiman-penned fantasy epic Stardust thought Iceland's landscape a perfect backdrop and tapped Truenorth to do line production. The hitch: the script features unicorns, and Iceland passed a law in 1904 prohibiting the importation of foreign horses, meaning the producers couldn't fly in their trained stunt horses. The film was shot at the UK's Pinewood Studios instead.

"Under no circumstances are you allowed to import horses into Iceland, because of the threat of diseases and genetic changes," says Truenorth's EP Leifur Dagfinnsson. "Hence, only two days of filming occurred [here], instead of 30 or 40 days, which obviously would have been nicer."

UNITED KINGDOM
Understandably, many governments are sensitive to the portrayal of their national monuments in advertising. When a prodco tried to shoot a British Airways spot for the US market on a London street with the Tower of London as a backdrop, Tower officials arrived on the scene and asserted they could not shoot there because the Tower is 'Crown copyright'.

"Copyright in buildings is not breached by filming them and, in any event, copyright lasts for the life of the architect plus 70 years," says Stephen Davies, chief executive at the UK-based Advertising Producers Association, noting that "rights were asserted where they did not exist."

Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, designed the White Tower in 1078 and died 30 years later. This fact did not deter Tower officials, who complained that filming was taking place on their land, even though the shoot was located nearby. To back up this claim, they proclaimed that land within a cannon-shot of the Tower was, in fact, Tower of London property.

"That may have been true in the Middle Ages," says Davies. "But that might come as a surprise to the banks and other financial institutions of the City of London that are under the impression they own their own premises."

The shoot eventually happened, although producers might've had an easier time if they'd opted to film Italian children racing through city streets on horseback.