Marty Stouffer - Life

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.