Marty Stouffer

Early influences

At age 19 Stouffer traveled to Alaska on his own with a 8mm movie camera. He returned home to a warm reception by an audience of 1,800 local Arkansas residents in the Fort Smith Municipal Auditorium who turned out to view what was basically a home movie. To that audience, he first aired an unsophisticated movie of his adventure in the North, paid for his summer vacation many times over, and easily made an early decision to spend his life creating many more such productions. Soon after that success and his decision to pursue a career in wildlife documentary-making, he graduated from college and began his career in earnest. In 1970, Stouffer graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in English. From there he traveled to Botswana to spend most of a year filming a feature-length documentary entitled Botswana, Where a River Dies. While in Africa, he was confronted with the often cruel and wasteful killing of animals, political unrest and human tragedies. As a result, he returned to America with the intention of producing films promoting nature conservation. One of these efforts was The American Wildlife Project.

Marty Stouffer's Wild America

By the mid-1970s, Stouffer had compiled several full-length specials that aired on television as prime time network documentaries. At that time, he approached the programming managers at the PBS about a half-hour-long wildlife series. PBS signed for the rights to broadcast Stouffer's series Wild America in 1981. The series almost immediately became one of the most popular aired by PBS, renowned for its unflinching portrayal of nature, as well as its extensive use of unique film techniques such as extreme slow motion, close-ups and time-lapses through the seasons of the year.

Stouffer's stories, incorporating dramatic "facts of life," and told simply in his home-spun style, won the hearts of a loyal audience. It was one of PBS's most highly rated regular series, never leaving the Top Ten, and in more than one year, it was the Number One highest rated regular series to air on the network. It remains the most-broadcast Series which has ever aired on Public Television. At the time, it was common for producers to limit the number of broadcasts to 4 airings over a period of 3 years. Stouffer saw no good reason for that limitation and he was the first producer to offer unlimited broadcasts of the series by the network. Many of the 260 PBS stations chose to broadcast the programs multiple times each day throughout the weeks. In some weeks, according to Nielsen ratings, it was viewed by more than 450 million viewers. In total, the Wild America episodes have been viewed untold billions of times by hundreds of millions of viewers. Wild America has become the strongest, most popular and most recognized brand in existence on the subject of North American wildlife and nature. It has amassed sales of videos, both VHS and DVD, totaling more than $60 million. In March 2015, Stouffer attempted to finance a 4K resolution remastering of Wild America via a Kickstarter campaign. The Kickstarter ended in failure March 18, 2015, having raised only $3,410 of the target $1,250,000 (0.27%) and amassing just 39 backers.

The movie

The lives of Marty Stouffer and his brothers Mark and Marshall, in the town of Fort Smith, Arkansas, were adapted for the 1997 movie Wild America. Headlined by child actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas, the movie dramatized how the boys became intrigued with the production of wildlife documentaries. Both Mark and Marshall are filmmakers as well.