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NOT ALL WILDLIFE DOCUMENTARIES ARE FILMED IN THE WILD

April 14, 1996 from WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY

LIANE HANSEN, Host: A lion stalks zebras in the Serengeti, male gorillas vie for dominance
with screaming, threatening grunts, a bald eagle swoops down and grabs its dinner of prairie
rabbit. These scenes are scenes that are the stuff of wildlife documentaries, but a recent
series of articles in the Denver Post questioned whether these films capture real events in the
heat of the moment or whether these scenes are staged to imitate life in the wild. Veteran
filmmaker Marty Stouffer, whose Wild America series has appeared on public television for the
past 13 years, is singled out in the Post articles. Mr. Stouffer did not respond to requests for
an interview, but reporter Mark Roberts did talk with a number of other documentarians and
discovered that deception is a common practice. (OPENING DOORS TO BARN)

MARK ROBERTS: On a cold, windy day, out in the Eastern Colorado plains, Pat Craig kicks
snow off his boots and opens the door to a big, round, wood frame barn on his property.
Inside the compound, tigers, leopards, lions, jaguars, cougars and bears, live behind steel wire
fences and single concrete cages open to the outdoors. Pat picks a beef bone off the floor and
shows it to Tut [sp], a male mountain lion.

PAT CRAIG, Animal Keeper: Yeah, we can get Tut to really talk up a storm. Here, watch. Tut-

(MOUNTAIN LION SNARLS)

PAT CRAIG: Tut-

(MOUNTAIN LION SNARLS)

PAT CRAIG: Tut-

(MOUNTAIN LION SNARLS)

MARK ROBERTS: This is what's called the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Conservation Center. Craig
cares for animals found in basements and garages and confiscated by police. He's got so many
animals, it looks like a small zoo.

PAT CRAIG: We're inspected and everything else. The only difference is, is that we aren't open
to the public. This is a home for animals, not a zoo for people.

MARK ROBERTS: But it's a place where wildlife photographers can find animals to use in
movies, TV commercials and wildlife films. Craig recalls he once worked on a movie called
Bears From Sugarloaf Mountain where the filmmakers used one of his tame bears and the
carcass of a road-killed deer to simulate the feeding habits of a hungry bear.

PAT CRAIG: And they said `Well, we've got to have that eating action,' so we went up there
and we stuffed the cavity full of everything- marshmallows and Oreo cookies and everything.
So we did a little trail of them to go up there and he followed it up there and he got to the
carcass and he smelled him and he just rips the carcass open and he's eating, and you can't
see 'em. We didn't use the marshmallows, I guess, because that was one of the problems we
had was the white part, you know? So we used Oreos and things like that. So he ate on the
carcass like that.

MARK ROBERTS: So long as his animals had fun, Craig says he liked film work, but he started
to feel jumpy about it when Wild America filmmaker Marty Stouffer hired him to take his take
his pet jaguar Freckles to Arizona, to film a scene where the cat encounters a guatamundi, a
raccoon-like mammal. The way Craig tells it, Stouffer supplied the guatamundi and a
cameraman to shoot the film.

PAT CRAIG: And he got the same directions when we got down there that he said to me that,
you know, `Marty wants you to put these things together and let the jaguar kill the
guatamundi.' And I said `Well, I don't know.' I said `She's never chased anything in her life,
never killed anything in her life.' And I said, you know, `I'm not really comfortable doing that.'
And so we discussed it and he wasn't really comfortable with it, either, and we were trying to

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figure out a way that we could come up with a scene that would be something that would
please Marty and what he needed, but at the same time not hurt either one.

MARK ROBERTS: So they found a big thorn bush next to a cactus and put the guatamundi on
the bush and the jaguar on the cactus and filmed the jaguar chase the guatamundi into the
brush where the cat couldn't follow. Craig says he finally refused to work on any more wildlife
films after he witnessed privately-owned mountain lions attack tame deer.

Craig's experience does not surprise Barry Clark [sp]. Clark makes natural history films and
chairs the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival. These days, he says, filmmakers face stiff
competition to provide more and more spectacular footage.

BARRY CLARK, Natural History Filmmaker: And in order to get that footage, they will cross the
line and rationalize it that they are doing something for the environment and for the animals
by actually sacrificing the lives of the animals to get the shot.

MARK ROBERTS: Wolfgang Bayer [sp] probably knows wildlife filmmaking history and what
goes on to date, as well as anyone. He's made some 150 wildlife films in his 25-year career,
including Yellowstone in Winter, which took five years to complete.

WOLFGANG BAYER, Wildlife Filmmaker: Twenty years ago, you know, nobody really thought
much of feeding a monkey to a snake, but now, you know, that's a no-no.

MARK ROBERTS: Bayer doesn't excuse the mistreatment of animals, but he explains the use of
tame animals to stage scenes has always been part of the business.

WOLFGANG BAYER: It started with Disney. Disney was one of the first producers of wildlife
films - The Living Desert, and, you know, the cougar films, and that's- they used extensively
animals that are trained or tame or controlled.

MARK ROBERTS: Bayer suggests over the years it's a matter of how much does one get away
with.

WOLFGANG BAYER: If you go into some Third Worlds and, you know, if you're somewhere
filming and nobody's watching, you know, you may want to try to get away with more than
being here in the national park where you have a lot of people, you know, looking over your
shoulder.

MARK ROBERTS: Perhaps the most popular nature TV show ever, Mutual of Omaha's Wild
Kingdom with Marlin Perkins, was more made-up movie than natural history film. Seventy-
two-year-old Dick Robinson [sp], who worked for Wild Kingdom over his 35-year nature
filmmaking career recalls a phony snake fight. The crew, he says, found a big mud hole and
brought in a 16-foot anaconda with its mouth taped shut.

DICK ROBINSON, Nature Filmmaker: Marlin got into the mud puddle up to his knees and so it
looked pretty deep. And you take the camera and open the camera up a little bit and get it in
close, and you can't see anything else. So all you saw was the fight and the splashing and the
water and Marlin hollering and yelling and thrashing around with the snake. And it's probably
one of the most memorial scenes that he ever filmed.

MARK ROBERTS: After Wild Kingdom, Robinson started his own nature filmmaking business.
He kept a number of animals, including two grizzly bears. So filmmakers came to him to shoot
films. Robinson's bears appear in the Jeremiah Johnson and Grizzly Adams movies. He
remembers meeting Wild America filmmaker Marty Stouffer in 1977. The two, he says, agreed
to stage a fight between Robinson's two grizzlies, Pooh and Willie. Stouffer claims the fight
was an unexpected accident caught on film. Robinson insists it was carefully planned. He says
the two aging bears, with missing claws and teeth, couldn't hurt each other. The fight, he
recalls, lasted about 10 minutes until the bears wore each other out.

DICK ROBINSON: The animals were tired; they were exhausted. They put a lot of effort into
it. You got two big 750- pound bears that are really wading in, and we were right there and
slipped chains on them. And we were right there at a creek and we let them go over and take
a bath in the creek and get drinks. And eventually they went back into their cages.

MARK ROBERTS: The struggle, portrayed as two male grizzly bears fighting over a female,
shows up in a 1977 film The Predators, narrated by Robert Redford. More recent Stouffer
films, Spectacular Showdowns and Dangerous Encounters, show the same fight.

(EDITING WILDLIFE FILMS)

MARK ROBERTS: In her studio at Taurus Productions in Colorado Springs, wildlife

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cinematographer Ginger Katherines [sp] edits a nature film about Arctic ground squirrels. The
footage shows the animal asleep in what looks like an underground nest. But it's a recreated
scene at a University of Alaska research lab.

GINGER KATHERINES, Wildlife Cinematographer: Because all ground squirrels live

underground, it would be very difficult to do a film on ground squirrels if we didn't use animals
in sets.

MARK ROBERTS: To protect animals in the wild, Katherines is among those who argue
filmmakers must sometimes stage events. The use of staged scenes, she insists, is not a
deliberate attempt to fool anyone, but simply a way to tell a story.

GINGER KATHERINES: And really, what is the point of what we're doing? We're trying to
educate our audience, and there is a big of magic involved in that.

MARK ROBERTS: But Barry Clark, the chairman of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival,
suggests Katherines offers what he calls a risky point of view, which assumes filmmakers
know the truth about animal behavior. He points to British natural history filmmaker Hugh
Miles, [sp] who refuses to stage scenes.

BARRY CLARK: He's one of these people who will camp out with an animal for months and
months and creep slowly towards, say, a pack of wild dogs in Africa until they accept him as
part of their environment. And he would- he would not, in any way, create an enclosure and
put a wild dog in the enclosure and a gazelle in order to get the shots. He sees himself as a
scientist-filmmaker.

MARK ROBERTS: But Clark admits for some productions, such as Jaguar, Year of the Cat, his
show on jaguars, he must stage scenes because he may never see a jaguar in the wild to
show how a jaguar kills its prey. He says today's TV technology can create illusions without
showing a real kill to make the film. Still, veteran filmmaker Wolfgang Bayer notes a wildlife
film producer can also stage events and show a predator killing another animal and get away
with it, if he edits out pens, fences or snares from the final film.

WOLFGANG BAYER: Well, a real good giveaway is if somebody has a wide-angle- filming with
a wild-angle lens, and the animal starts chasing right to the camera and basically jumps over
the camera. Well, it's going to be a little tough to be- if someone's in Africa and have a
leopard come running towards you and then run- jump over the camera in pursuit of a
gazelle.

MARK ROBERTS: To put to rest any notion that staged events mislead viewers, Bayer and
some other filmmakers suggest wildlife films include a disclaimer at the beginning of the film,
or in the final credits.

WOLFGANG BAYER: Then at least we admit our sins and we say `OK, we used some certain
tricks and as long as no animals have been hurt, we are depicting a natural event.'

MARK ROBERTS: So, how can viewers tell if a wildlife film is faked? Filmmakers suggest you
look for clues such as changes in film quality and animal markings. Or the animal sounds real.
The loud roars in Dick Robinson's grizzly bear fight, for instance, were dubbed in for the final
film. Watch the film credits for the names of zoos or private wildlife game parks, and, chances
are, if a scene is too good, it's likely a staged event. I'm Mark Roberts in Denver.

LIANE HANSEN: You're listening to Weekend Edition.

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