Biography
Jack Couffer was born on December 7, 1924, in Upland, California. Growing up near the foothills of Glendale, he developed a passion for natural history, raising hawks, owls, squirrels, skunks, and coyotes. During high school, he worked afternoons as a student assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. On his 17th birthday, while on a museum collecting trip to California's Channel Islands, the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. The group was stranded for two weeks on Santa Rosa Island as all West Coast ports were closed immediately after the attack. At the museum, Jack's mentor, a bat expert, was recruited by the War Department to research a secret project using bats as carriers of miniature incendiary bombs. Jack was drafted into the army in June 1943, shortly before graduating high school, and spent half of his military service working on this unusual but effective project. He later detailed this unusual plan in his book "Bat Bomb, World War II's Other Secret Weapon." The rest of his service involved serving as a crewman on high-speed PT-type air-sea rescue boats.
After the war, Jack spent a few years working as a commercial fisherman and paid yacht crewman. In December 1947, he married Joan Burger. Soon after, while living aboard their schooner, he enrolled at the University of Southern California to study zoology. However, after attending a lecture in the new Department of Cinema Studies, he was captivated by the teaching of department head Slavko Vorkapich. Collaborating with fellow students Conrad Hall and Marvin R. Weinstein, Jack worked on a class project that won the inaugural ASC student film award and was sold to television. Buoyed by this success, the trio founded Canyon Films, launching their production company while still students. At USC, Jack befriended filmmaker-instructors Irving Lerner, Andrew Marton, Laslo Benedek, and Stirling Silliphant. Lerner hired Canyon Films to produce the feature film Edge of Fury (1958) in South Carolina, where Jack met young actress Jean Allison, whom he would reunite with 45 years later after three husbands and two wives. His son, Mike Couffer, born January 7, 1962, grew up to be a biologist and collaborated with Jack on a series of natural history adventure books for children during his teenage years.
Combining his skills as a naturalist and filmmaker, Jack joined Walt Disney Studios as a cameraman on the early "True-Life Adventure" series. One remarkable experience early in his career was a Disney assignment to the then-remote and seldom-visited Galapagos Islands. Jack, Conrad, and an assistant sailed a 32-foot ketch there, living off the land and filming wildlife for nearly a year. He worked at Disney for over a decade in various roles—writer, director, producer, and cameraman—and contributed to more than two dozen films. Jack and Joan separated in 1975. Since then, he has worked on television and feature films for most major Hollywood studios and numerous independent producers. He has authored 11 books, both fiction and non-fiction. In 1972, his travels brought him to Africa, where he fell in love with the country and a woman. He lived in Kenya for 32 years, sharing life with 'Marchesa Sieuwke Bisleti' until her passing in February 2005. Jack now resides in California with retired actress Jean Allison (Toorvald), the ingénue from the first feature film he shot.
