Jack Couffer

Jack Couffer was one of Disney’s key naturalist / cinematographers on the True-Life Adventures series and many Disney feature movies.

Couffer grew up in Glendale, California, near the Verdugo Hills with their oak woodlands and plentiful wildlife. Fascinated with natural history he raised hawks, owls, bobcats, even a deodorized skunk named Aroma.

During his high school years, Jack worked as a student assistant at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History. It was on his seventeenth birthday, during a collecting trip to California’s Channel Islands, that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The museum party was marooned on Santa Rosa Island as all West Coast ports were immediately closed following the attack.

Jacks museum mentor was an expert on bats. He was charged by the War Department to research a secret project that would use bats as carriers of miniature incendiary bombs. As a part of this team, Jack was drafted into the Army before high school graduation. Half of his military service was spent on this seemingly nutty but surprisingly valid idea. Jack has written of this bizarre scheme in his book: Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon.

After the war, he worked as a commercial fisherman and paid crewman on yachts. In 1947, he married. Their son, Michael, follows his father’s passion for wildlife and is now a biological consultant and surveys for rare and endangered wildlife.

Jack enrolled at USC to major in zoology. But a lecture in the new School of Cinema Arts changed his direction. He collaborated with fellow students Conrad Hall and Marvin Weinstein in a class project that won the first (now annual) ASC student film award and sold to TV. Encouraged by this success, the partners formed a production company, Canyon Films, and became entrepreneurs while still university students.

At USC, Jack became friends with practicing film-maker instructors Irving Lerner, Andrew Marton, Laslo Benedek, and Stirling Silliphant. Lerner employed the partners on a feature called Edge of Fury. There Jack met young actor Jean Allison, who forty years later he would meet again.

With abilities as a naturalist and filmmaker, Jack joined Walt Disney Studios in the early 1950s as a camera­man. One of the great experiences of his career was an assignment in what was then one of the most remote spots on earth. Jack and Conrad sailed a 28-foot ketch to the Galápagos Islands where they lived off the land and filmed wildlife for nearly a year. He worked for Disney as writer, director, producer, and cameraman on and off until the mid-1980s. He has published eleven books. In the late 1979s Jack took an assignment directing one of the Born Free films and fell in love with Africa and a woman in Kenya where they lived together for 30 years.

He is a member of the Directors and Writers Guilds, and the ASC (American Society of Cinematographers.)