Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Here you can comment on the book 'Into The Wild' or any other book related to the story.
ladyandtramp
Posts: 22
Joined: Sat Jul 16, 2011 1:56 pm
Location: Paris, France
Contact:

Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby ladyandtramp » Tue Jul 19, 2011 10:12 am

Does anyone know if the Ron Lamothe documentary Call of the Wild is available on DVD?

Thanks

erikhalfacre
Posts: 173
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 12:48 am
Location: Palmer, AK
Contact:

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby erikhalfacre » Tue Jul 19, 2011 5:17 pm

You can get it from his website at

http://www.terraincognitafilms.com/store/buy.htm

But beware, he's got a few inaccuracies himself in his film.
Erik Halfacre - Moderator
info@pathfinderalaska.com
http://www.stampedetrail.info

ladyandtramp
Posts: 22
Joined: Sat Jul 16, 2011 1:56 pm
Location: Paris, France
Contact:

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby ladyandtramp » Wed Jul 20, 2011 7:27 am

Thanks! :)

ladyandtramp
Posts: 22
Joined: Sat Jul 16, 2011 1:56 pm
Location: Paris, France
Contact:

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby ladyandtramp » Mon Jul 25, 2011 7:59 am

erikhalfacre wrote:But beware, he's got a few inaccuracies himself in his film.


I'd like to know, what are those inaccuracies?

erikhalfacre
Posts: 173
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 12:48 am
Location: Palmer, AK
Contact:

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby erikhalfacre » Mon Jul 25, 2011 8:10 pm

Well, to start with the house he shows that Chris used to live in, is not actually the right house.

The 'roommate' he interviews is bogus.

And if you go through the photos in the 'Back to the Wild' book, it's pretty clear there was no arm injury.

In addition, I have it on good authority that the original toxicolgy reports were done on the actual seeds found in Chris' posession at the time of death, whereas later tests done by UAF were done on seeds harvested around the bus at a later season. That makes any results from later test merely evidence, and not conclusive proof.
Erik Halfacre - Moderator
info@pathfinderalaska.com
http://www.stampedetrail.info

solovoyager
Posts: 58
Joined: Wed Jun 22, 2011 1:34 pm

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby solovoyager » Mon Jul 25, 2011 11:59 pm

erikhalfacre wrote:Well, to start with the house he shows that Chris used to live in, is not actually the right house.


Geez I didn't know that. That's a big mistake to make.

erikhalfacre wrote:The 'roommate' he interviews is bogus.


The guy living in California that was a lawyer? He was so annoying! I couldn't tolerate him, he was insufferable and so self-satisfied. Or maybe you mean the guy living in NYC that worked for the NBA? Been awhile since I watched the Lamothe documentary.

erikhalfacre wrote:And if you go through the photos in the 'Back to the Wild' book, it's pretty clear there was no arm injury.


To be fair I think Lamothe said he wasn't sure either if Chris had injured his arm.

erikhalfacre wrote:In addition, I have it on good authority that the original toxicolgy reports were done on the actual seeds found in Chris' posession at the time of death, whereas later tests done by UAF were done on seeds harvested around the bus at a later season. That makes any results from later test merely evidence, and not conclusive proof.


That's interesting Erik. But then weren't these original test results the ones Krakauer based his theory on - that the seeds were toxic and caused Chris to not be able to digest food properly? Then why did Krakauer change his tune years later when the movie Into The Wild came out, saying the seeds had a mold on them that made Chris sick? Where did he get that idea from? I'm confused. :?

erikhalfacre
Posts: 173
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 12:48 am
Location: Palmer, AK
Contact:

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby erikhalfacre » Tue Jul 26, 2011 3:22 am

True, those would have been the results that Krakauer had based his original assumption off of.

I can only speculate on the reason for him changing his hypothesis to the mold theory but here's my guess:

We know that the original test was positive for alkaloid poisons, that would inhibit digestion. That test was done on the seeds that Chris actually had in his possession. Later, UAF goes out, tests the same species of plant, and determines that the plant itself is not actually poisonous. That leaves the poisons from the first test un-explained, unless some kind of mold or fungus or something was responsible for the poison. We know the seeds were being kept in a zip lock bag, un-refrigerated, at a time of year when the average temperature is in the 70s. If those seeds were somewhat moist when he bagged them, it's plausible to guess that mold or fungus might grow inside the bag on the seeds.

Again, that's just speculation. I too, wish that Krakauer had elaborated more about the reasons for switching his theory to the mold theory. I think a lot of people do. All I know is that when talking to Carine about Lamoth's 'debunking' of the poison theory, I was told that the original toxicology report was done on the seeds he had, and that it had in fact turned up poisons.

I too, at one point, was inclined to believe Lamoth's conclusion. Having heard it from who I did though, I'm going to have to believe that she knows more about it than I'm ever likely to.
Erik Halfacre - Moderator
info@pathfinderalaska.com
http://www.stampedetrail.info

ronlamothe
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu Aug 18, 2011 7:16 pm

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby ronlamothe » Thu Aug 18, 2011 7:39 pm

Please see my separate posts in the Discussions on Chris section (topics “I AM INJURED” and “I FEEL LIKE I’M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!”) regarding the more significant inaccuracy claims mentioned above, but I also feel compelled to respond here about the other two—in one case doing a mea culpa, in the other, in order to stop myself from laughing. Okay, the mea culpa first: It seems that I blew it either when I was in Annandale or in El Segundo. I’m not sure which McCandless house I messed up, but from the above post it seems that, according to Carine, the house I show “that Chris used to live in, is not actually the right house.”

Now, I am assuming she means the Annandale house on Willet Drive they grew up in (that is, unless the El Segundo address listed on Chris’s birth certificate was not actually where he spent his first days on earth). Anyway, that’s my bad, I guess. You know, I never felt 100% certain when I shot that house. In fact, that’s part of the reason why I included in the film the odd way in which I came to that house in the first place—my chance meeting with Chris’s old neighbors who still lived down the street. They didn’t seem 100% sure themselves, and I intentionally kept/used my interaction with them in the documentary to suggest a degree of ambiguity and uncertainty in the discovery.

From the transcript: “Earlier in my travels, on my way South, I went to his old Annandale neighborhood in Northern Virginia, where the McCandlesses moved in 1974. I knew the name of the road he grew up on, but finding the actual house turned into something of a wild goose chase. That is, until I get lucky and run into one of his neighbors.” After discussing Chris briefly, the husband and wife try to remember which house it was. She says, “Twenty-six? Twenty-four is Watson.…” Her husband arrives, asking, “Didn’t Maura Foster buy that house?” She says, “No.” Again, I am introducing an ambiguity to the scene. And the next line is: “Following their directions, I find the house where Chris spent most of his youth.”

In some ways, this is what comes with the territory in this kind of first-person filmmaking, the subjectivity of the actual experience making the film. Without any other source, I had to rely on their mis-remembrance (which I had no way of knowing at the time), and ultimately had to go with it. It’s really not unlike how Jon Krakauer relied on Wayne Westerberg’s memory of events when Westerberg told Krakauer that he first heard about the anonymous hiker who sounded like Alex from a Paul Harvey radio broadcast. It turns out, based on our research into it, including correspondence and follow-up telephone conversations with his long-time producer, the Paul Harvey radio story does not exist (I would have loved to use it in the documentary—I grew up on “The Rest of the Story”). In such case, I don’t hold Krakauer’s feet to the fire that Westerberg had turned some radio story he might have heard into a Paul Harvey broadcast. He was relying on the memory of the only source he had at the time. Be that as it may, I regret, and am embarrassed that I got the house wrong!

Okay, now on to the supposed inaccuracy that has me rolling: “The ‘roommate’ he interviews is bogus.” Wow, when I first read that in the above post, well that really threw me for a loop. The idea that I would shoot a fake interview with a fake McCandless ex-roommate is simply preposterous. As a documentary filmmaker, I promise you that I would never, ever, do such a thing. Fred Widland, whom I have known for almost twenty-five years (following his transfer from Emory to Tufts), and with whom I once drove from Boston to New Orleans and back, and roomed with on Cape Cod in the summer of 1988, was most certainly Chris’s fall 1986 first-semester freshman-year roommate at Emory. I’ve known this fact for a long, long time, as have a large circle of my Tufts friends (and as a bunch of Emory alums must also know)—we used to talk about it quite a bit back in the mid-1990s; in fact, I can specifically recall a conversation we all had about it one day in NYC, ribbing Fred about Krakauer’s description of him. Not only do all of Fred’s stories about Chris ring true, and contain the kind of vivid detail that both supports their veracity and broadens our understanding of McCandless during this time period (as demonstrated in the Fred interview), but Fred’s biography fits perfectly with that found in Into the Wild. According to Walt McCandless, as reported to Krakauer for the book, “The roommate was a preppy kid from Connecticut, dressed like Joe College…Within ninety days the preppy roommate had dropped out.” That’s Fred. And I challenge anyone to refute this fact—I promise you that I will eat my hat if it turns out that I am wrong. If we have to, we can dig up files at Emory to prove it once and for all. However, I really hope this won’t be necessary. It’s him.

erikhalfacre
Posts: 173
Joined: Mon May 24, 2010 12:48 am
Location: Palmer, AK
Contact:

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby erikhalfacre » Thu Aug 18, 2011 8:42 pm

I'm just going on what I was told. I'm not going to try and defend it as I would have no way of knowing for certain. All I will say is that I'm positive my source was un-measurably closer to Chris than any roommate. Perhaps there was some kind of misunderstanding.
Erik Halfacre - Moderator
info@pathfinderalaska.com
http://www.stampedetrail.info

junkcollector
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Oct 31, 2013 6:17 am

Re: Ron Lamothe documentary available on DVD?

Postby junkcollector » Thu Oct 31, 2013 6:22 am

You can order the DVD but you will not get it. Evidently Ron Lamothe is no longer supplying the DVD, or he is just collecting the money you send via Pay Pal. Look elsewhere for the video.


Return to “Discussions on the Book”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest