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SharePASADENA, Calif. - Move over, Lon Chaney Jr., there’s a new Wolf Man in town. And this one doesn’t just howl at the moon.
This one cuddles, licks, snarls and growls just like the real thing. Shaun Ellis is the unorthodox animal researcher who lived with a pack of wolves for 18 months and lived to tell the tale.
Well, actually National Geographic Channel is telling the tale April 16 when it presents “A Man Among Wolves,” a documentary chronicling Ellis’ run with the pack.
Ellis has been interested in animals ever since he was a kid. “I was no different from other children,” he says seated at a round table in a bar-lounge at a hotel here.
“We were brought up with a fear of wolves through stories and rhyme and `Red Riding Hood.’ They were bad, aggressive, demonic, if you like. But there is another side to them: a close family bond and a commitment to each other to survive. I think that’s what intrigued me. We could see so much of our own lifestyle and upbringing or how we should’ve been brought up in these animals and that to me was the challenge to see what we had to teach.”
As a boy he wangled a job as a gamekeeper in his native England, but lost it as soon as the landowner discovered Ellis feeding the game he was supposed to be protecting to the foxes.
His fascination with foxes led to his interest in wolves. Since there are no wild wolves in England, he traveled west to indulge his passion for the canines.
“I was working with wolves at that time, traveling to Idaho, Canada, did a lot of work throughout Europe. It was through that we started to gain orphan wolves who couldn’t be raised in a captive environment by keepers because their schedules were so busy or animals that were injured. A lot of our wolves came from rescuing,” he says, his dishwater blond hair pulled tight in a ponytail.
When a pack of cubs were abandoned by their mother, Ellis seized the day. “We were going to provide one of the females as a nanny. Unfortunately what we didn’t plan on was her abandoning the pups. That’s what happened, so it changed the criteria completely where we were going to live and raise the pups as hers we had to remove the pups and stop them from being killed or dying.”
That was when Ellis became the den mother, moving in with the pups. His devotion to the pack may have cost him his long-term relationship with the mother of his four children, though he claims that happened “for reasons beyond the wolf pack.”
Today he’s flanked by girlfriend Helen Jeffs, who supports Ellis in his preoccupation with the mammals. “These guys obviously put a tremendous strain on a relationship and loved ones, but you have to have an understanding,” he says. “And I guess she’s the true hero of everything because she has to hold it all together while I’m getting down and dirty ... with the wolves.”
Though initially Ellis hoped to be able to release these captive wolves back into the wild, that was not possible. “Because of their socialization. They set the blueprint for us to be able to use that to release future generations of wolves into the world,” he says.
“Observation took us so far but interaction with them gave us a little bit more, gave us some of the darker secrets of these wolves that had to be discovered in order to help them.”
Ellis says the wolves didn’t view him as a human. “They don’t actually see you as human or wolf and any domestic dog owner will tell you or should tell you that their dog doesn’t see them, the person. We all love to say our dog loves us the person, but it’s actually a social position that you hold and that’s what was significant about the wolves. It didn’t matter whether you walked on two legs or four legs, the only thing that mattered to them was could you perform the daily functions of that social position to safeguard them and the food sources that would see them through the winter.”
Ellis admits that his approach is unconventional and regarded skeptically by many in the science community. “It’s 18 years of study but sometimes you can get clouded with other disciplines,” he says. “We worked very differently and intimately with these animals. Having a science background or applying it to science would be something we didn’t need to do.”
Timothy Treadwell, who died at the hands of one of the grizzly bears he’d been studying for 13 years, was an entirely different case, insists Ellis.
“Treadwell, it’s a tragedy,” Ellis says shaking his head. “When you work with animals there’s always a danger no matter what you do. As a whole the wolves themselves are a very social animal. Bears are not. They’re a very solitary animal and the difference between the two was we were working with a naturally enhanced pack of wolves they were still captive. These were wild bears.”
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“The Sopranos” will be returning April 8 for its final nine episodes on HBO. There was some question on the part of creator-executive producer David Chase as to whether he wanted to continue or not. If the first two episodes of the season are any indication, he should’ve quit while he was ahead. The first episode seems to have been written by committee and, in fact, it was. The show has lost its focus and its intensely memorable characters are beginning to fade into stereotypes. Let’s hope it gets better before the fat guy sings.
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NBC is offering a truly funny comedy this spring with its “Thank God You’re Here” improv premiering April 9. David Alan Grier and Dave Foley are co-hosting, sort of. Well-known actors are invited on the show and dressed in a costume, thrown onto a set and forced to ad-lib in a situation to which they have no advance notice. The settings might be an archeological dig in Egypt, a beauty contest or a convergence of super-heroes. What the actors come up with is funnier than most script writers could devise and it’s fun to see how each one handles it. The show originated in Australia and proved to be one of the most popular TV shows down under.
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Even famous actors have their heroes. Alec Baldwin has finally found a project worthy of his talent in NBC’s “30 Rock,” where he plays the absorbed network chief with such smooth aplomb you’d swear he was to the executive office born. Baldwin was a fanatical movie fan when he was growing up. Once when he was home from school with the flu, he watched “Inherit the Wind” every day for five days until he had memorized every line.
He thinks of Marlon Brando as the sublime archetype in film acting. He has seen “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Serpico” 25 times. And he says that when he first met Anthony Hopkins, “I wanted to kneel down in front of him, he was so great.”
