The Living Desert
The Living Desert was the initial feature film in Disney's True-Life Adventures collection of docudramas focusing on zoological researches; the previous movies in the collection, including the Academy Prize-winning Seal Island, were short topics. The docudrama was recorded at the Westward Look Wyndham Grand Resort and also Health Club in Tucson, Arizona. A lot of the wild animals shown in the movie was donated to what would soon end up being the Arizona-Sonora Desert Gallery. The film was motivated by 10 mins of video footage shot by N. Paul Kenworthy Jr., a doctoral pupil at the College of California at Los Angeles. Kenworthy's footage of a battle between a tarantula and also a wasp interested Disney, that moneyed a feature-length manufacturing adhering to the lives of varied desert varieties. Disney was very encouraging of Kenworthy's job and its impact on nonfiction filmmaking, stating, "This is where we can tell a real, sustained tale for the first time in these nature images."