My latest man crush (besides Alton Brown) is Les Stroud of ‘Surivorman’. The premise of the show basically is that he goes out into the wilderness for 7 days and tries to survive off of the land. With his history of film-making and survivor-ing his show is a great marriage between them both. Sometimes he has these scenarios where all he has with him are his multi-tool and whatever else he came with.
Les Stroud is the man. He carries all his camera gear himself. He sets up intricate shots where he’ll walk ahead set the camera and hit record, walk back to pick up the rest of his gear and then walk through the shot and then have to walk back to pick up the camera. Whew, that’s a lot of work considering he hardly eats anything.
I read “Into the Wild” again recently in preparation for seeing Sean Penn‘s film based on the book. I would love to get in touch with Les to get his thoughts on Chris McCandless and his lack of surviving in the Alaskan wild. Maybe I would even suggest an episode of ‘Survivorman’ where Les hangs out where McCandless did. If there was a way to do it respectfully that would be a cool show. I just think it would end up showing us that McCandless wasn’t too smart in the ways of surviving. He was more into the romance of it. You gotta use your brain out there, too.
YOU Said That?!?