Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film

Epilogue

epilogue On February 9, 1996, the Denver Post published a front-page story that made national news. Marty Stouffer, an Aspen ~lmmaker and creator of the popular nature series Wild America, broadcast on PBS for eleven seasons, was “accused of staging scenes in his documentaries, mistreating animals, and de~ling public lands.” The charges stemmed from a lawsuit ~led by the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies that alleged Stouffer had illegally cut a trail across its property to reach an unauthorized encampment in a national park. The trial and the $300,000 judgment awarded to the plaintiffs brought out further disclosures from former animal handlers and staff of Stouffer’s production company. Allegedly, caged, tethered, and tame animals and splices of footage shot in different locations were used to construct the dramatic chase, kill, and mating scenes of animals in Wild America.1 In the early 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt had attacked the credibility of realistic animal stories written by authors such as Jack London and William Long, accusing them of using sentiment to sell nature. In the 203 early 1930s, William Douglas Burden and others publicly condemned Paul Hoef_er’s Africa Speaks for its Hollywood fabrication of a lion charge in a supposedly authentic picture about the Colorado African Expedition. In the early 1950s, naturalist-photographers, critics, and the public had questioned Disney’s claim that the True-Life Adventures were just that, unstaged and candid. Now once again, as the century drew to a close, national attention was drawn to the arti~cial (and sometimes cruel) means employed in the production and marketing of nature for popular consumption. Editorials that followed the Stouffer incident reveal how ~rmly Americans wish and expect nature ~lms to be the real thing. “Films that depict otherwise,” The Denver Post remarked, “do a disservice to the animals and negate the very point of making wildlife documentaries, which is to help humans appreciate the natural world around them.” Nature ~lms are expected to give us direct, unadulterated access to wildlife. Immersed in nature through the camera lens, we depend upon the naturalist-photographer to give us an experience that is pure and unadorned. The conscience and integrity of the naturalist-photographer are our only assurances that we have not been deceived and nature has not been exploited. Stouffer initially claimed that the charges of faking nature leveled against him were “character assassination.” PBS appealed to Stouffer’s unquestioned “integrity” in assuaging public concerns about Wild America. Eighty-~ve years earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had vouched for Cherry Kearton’s character to assure the authenticity of his African wildlife motion pictures. Integrity and the issue of character have always been important criteria in distinguishing the scientist from the showman and authenticity from arti~ce in nature on screen.2 Although PBS cleared Stouffer of any wrongdoing, newspaper copy and editorials consistently judged that Stouffer went astray by succumbing to commercialism. Denver Zoo of~cials recalled that when Stouffer approached them to photograph the zoo’s two famous animal celebrities, the polar bears Klondike and Snow, he had wanted to shoot a scene that involved a fake den that would represent their “home.” The zoo had refused, asserting: “We’re a scienti~c organization, and this was theatrics.” Like Martin and Osa Johnson in the 1920s, Stouffer was accused of manipulating nature—for example, using explosives to provoke endangered trumpeter swans to take _ight—strictly for ~nancial gain.3 The temptations were great. Unlike the limited market and _eeting success of travelogue-expedition ~lms, nature entertainment has become a lucrative business with market staying-power. What was educational enter204 reel nature tainment in the early decades of the twentieth century for urban upper and middle classes is now a part of popular culture and mass consumption. The immediate postwar years saw an explosive growth in nature audiences when Disney, Perkins, and others successfully appealed to, and captured, a market composed of America’s baby-boomers and their parents. War-weary Americans looked to nature for wholesome entertainment for their children. When the baby-boom generation came of age, these childhood experiences of the wide world of nature became the seeds of 1960s environmental activism. The environmental movement in turn sparked even greater audience demand for natural history shows. National Geographic’s television specials, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, The World of Survival, and The Wild Wild World of Animals are just a few of the nature programs that appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s...