Life
At age 18, Marty traveled to Alaska on his own with an 8mm movie camera. He became trapped by snowfall in a remote valley, but survived by hunting and trapping local wildlife. He returned home and with the warm reception of his unsophisticated movie of his adventure in the north, decided to pursue a career in wildlife documentary making. In 1970, Marty graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in English. From there he traveled to Africa to film a new documentary. While in Africa, he was confronted with massive and wasteful killing of animals and returned to America with the intent to produce films that argued for nature conservation.
Marty's stories, incorporating these dramatic "facts of life," and told simply in his honest home-spun style, won the hearts of a loyal audience. It also helped that the programs were magnificently filmed in slow-motion, time-lapse, telephoto and closeup cinematography. The Series became an almost-instant hit. It was one of PBS's most highly-rated regular Series, never leaving the Top Ten, and it remains the most broadcast Series which has ever aired on Public Television.
In 1993, Stouffer was accused of cruelty to animals as part of the production of Wild America. Stouffer denied cruelty to animals, but admitted that he sometimes took tame animals into the wild, and filmed them. A PBS investigation found fault with 15 out of 110 shows.
Stouffer earned $135,000 per show from PBS. The broadcaster dropped the show in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Marty Stouffer
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“It were sad to gaze on the blessèd and no man I loved of old there;
I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased,
I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair,
And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)