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Wildlife Filmmaker Chris Palmer Says Nature Documentaries Are Manipulative

By Dan Solomon (Subscribe to Dan Solomon's posts), Posted Oct 1st 2010 5:30PM
Filed under: Features, Hot Topic
Cheetah on Bob Poole's car
If you thought that the credibility issues raised by the controversial documentary 'Catfish' could have been solved if they'd opted to abandon the Internet romance and instead head down to the bayou to film actual fish, we have bad news for you.

According to a new book by longtime wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer, the footage in nature documentaries isn't any more legitimate than, say, Joaquin Phoenix rapping in the studio with Diddy.

Palmer's book, 'Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom,' reveals a number of ways in which animals and audiences have been manipulated by filmmakers. For instance, jellybeans and M&Ms are often placed inside animal carcasses to draw scavengers -- "scary" animals that may, in fact, have been rented from game farms. Another example: One documentary crew buried a whale skull at the bottom of the ocean and then filmed it. Because of such tactics, Palmer says that there are three main problems with nature documentaries: They deceive audiences, they harass audiences, and they sensationalize the truth, all of which jeopardizes the conservation message of the work.

Naturally -- no pun intended -- Palmer's book has antagonized some of his peers, including fellow documentarian Erik Nelson, who Palmer cites as being a pioneer of the "animal attack" genre. Nelson told the Washington Post that Palmer brings "a sort of sanctimonious smugness to his book that sets my teeth on edge."

But as Moviefone has learned in an exclusive interview, Palmer is undeterred by the criticism. Keep reading to learn what he has to say about how long this has been going on, who gets it right, and why you shouldn't live every week like it's shark week.
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Game-Changing Technology Breakthroughs and the Movies That Spawned Them

By Dan Solomon (Subscribe to Dan Solomon's posts), Posted Sep 9th 2010 4:00PM
Filed under: Features, Hot Topic
Resident EvilWhen the first trailer for 'Resident Evil: Afterlife' hit, it downplayed the swords, zombies, and Ali Larter-in-the-rain aspects of the film in favor of a technical detail that rarely gets its props: the Fusion Camera System, which makes this the first post-'Avatar' film to have utilized Cameron's invention.

It surely won't be the last, of course -- any time a technological breakthrough is partly responsible for a film grossing almost three billion dollars worldwide, we'll be seeing a lot of it. We took a look at some of the movies that spawned innovations we've since come to take for granted.
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Meet Jeff Glosser, Michael J. Fox's Basketball Double in 'Teen Wolf'

By Dan Solomon (Subscribe to Dan Solomon's posts), Posted Aug 26th 2010 1:00PM
Filed under: Celebrity Interviews, Where Are They Now?, Features, Behind the Scenes
In the pantheon of great basketball movies, 'Teen Wolf' is often overlooked. And that's a shame. After all, it has every bit as much dramatic tension as 'Hoosiers' or 'White Men Can't Jump' -- but it also has a werewolf.

Do 'Hoosiers' and 'White Men Can't Jump' have werewolves? No, they do not. 'Teen Wolf' > 'Hoosiers' and 'White Men Can't Jump.'

Michael J. Fox, of course, has deservedly received nostalgic praise for having brought his boyish charms to the winsome 1985 film about a hirsute young man dreaming of basketball glory. But the movie features another performer whose efforts have previously gone unheralded -- and no, we're not talking about the guy who played Chubby.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of 'Teen Wolf,' let's finally meet the Wolf himself: Jeff Glosser.

These days, Glosser is an assistant principal at an Arizona prep school, but back in 1985, as a freshman at Loyola Marymount University, he was offered the opportunity to be a part of what, a quarter century later, still holds up as one of the finer basketball films ever made, werewolves or no. Moviefone tracked Glosser down in the middle of a workday and persuaded him to tell us about the lone credit on his IMDB page.
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