Les Jones

Timothy Treadwell > Leonardo DiCaprio May Play Timothy Treadwell

From a comment today on this post I discovered that Leonardo DiCaprio plans to play Timothy Treadwell in a movie production tentatively titled The Man Who Loved Grizzlies:

Leonardo's production company, Appian Way, has teamed with Columbia Pictures to produce the biopic about Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist who was fatally mauled by the bears he wanted to protect. DiCaprio, who supported Treadwell's charities, will take on the role of Treadwell, who was a man Leo has long admired for his insistence on viewing wild animals as natural friends rather than potential predators. Co-execs on the project are Matt Tolmach and Shannon Gaulding. DiCaprio and Simpson will produce, with Zeman and Barnz as executive producers. Jewel Palovak, co-founder of Treadwell's educational foundation, Grizzly People, will also serve in a producing capacity.

DiCaprio's film The Aviator covered the life of aviation pioneer Howard Hughes. That film did a good job of illustrating Hughes' legendary mental decline. However, it tended to explain it in terms of Hughes enemies (such as the Senator played by Alan Alda), rather than organic mental illness, prolonged drug addiction to heroin and codeine, or the late stage effects of syphillis, which Hughes is known to have had. Will the Treadwell movie be any more revealing?

Audiences are naturally sympathetic to the person whose point of view is presented, and moreso when that person is played by a popular, handsome actor. I can only imagine how Treadwell will be romanticized, despite he and his girlfriend having been killed and eaten by a grizzly bear, and thus proving the "potential predator" side of the debate to be the correct one. Treadwell's life and death proved a lesson, namely, that treating wild omnivores as cuddly stuffed animals is a fatal mistake, and that an unarmed man is not the top of the natural food chain in Alaska. If history is any guide it's almost certain Hollywood will devise its own pretty but misguided lesson for ticketbuyers who want to treat wild nature as a faraway land of make believe, giving the nod to beauty over truth.

Previous:
- Treadwell Documentary "Grizzly Man" Opens Today
- Timothy Treadwell was Technical Advisor on Disney's Brother Bear
- Bear and Big Cat Attacks