![]() ![]() On film, every so often at the end of a take, she drops her serious persona and glances directly at the lens-toward Hugo, her director. These precious rolls of film held the promise of something rare: a new perspective on Jane. In 2015 they were found in an underground storage facility in rural Pennsylvania. What the editors didn’t use, the outtakes, went into film cans and boxes for storage and over time were forgotten. A fraction of the work made its way into the 1965 television special and National Geographic magazine. When Hugo first went to Gombe in 1962 to document Jane’s discoveries, he shot thousands of still images and more than 65 hours of 16mm film footage. The two-hour feature, JANE, draws from never before seen footage to offer a revealing portrait of the woman whose devotion to chimpanzees made her famous. Now she is the subject of a new National Geographic Documentary Films release about her life and work. Jane has been the subject of more than 40 films and has made countless appearances on television. And Jane still travels about 300 days a year to lobby governments, visit schools, and give speeches. Today the Jane Goodall Institute’s Roots & Shoots program is in nearly a hundred countries, training young people to be conservation leaders. at Cambridge University, authored dozens of books, mentored new generations of scientists, promoted conservation in the developing world, and established several sanctuaries for chimps. It was especially poignant at a time when women typically were discouraged from pursuing careers in science. In Jane, National Geographic found a telegenic researcher and storyteller with a film-ready setup: an attractive white woman doing scientific work in the African bush. The exposure brought Jane international acclaim and ignited what became a legendary career in primatology. ![]() National Geographic executives had specifically told Hugo which shots to get, Jane remembers: “They gave us a list: Jane in the boat, Jane with binoculars, Jane looking at a map.” When Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees was broadcast on CBS on December 22, 1965, an estimated 25 million North American viewers tuned in-a huge audience, then and now. They’ve been present in her life ever since. Those months had been a remarkable period of solitude and discovery, a time before cameras were present. She appears to be doing field research-but in reality, Jane says, she was reenacting events from her first six months at Gombe so that photographer Hugo van Lawick could film them. She’s wearing high-top canvas sneakers and khaki shorts, and her blond hair is in the ponytail that became her signature. The young Jane on the screen is hiking through the forest of Gombe Stream Game Reserve in what is now Tanzania. “Think how fun it would be to be that age again,” Jane says with a smile. The primatologist, 83 this year, studies her 28-year-old self. But now I’m playing it for her on a laptop at the West London home of a friend. Jane became widely known because of a film, Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees, which came out in 1965 and was produced by National Geographic. Hugo and Jane disliked such frivolous scenes, but they went along with the requests, to keep the funding for Jane’s research flowing from the National Geographic Society. National Geographic assigned Hugo to document chimp behaviors but also to film and photograph what they called “human interest”-Jane playing with the chimps and even washing her hair. ![]() They were shot in the early 1960s at Gombe Stream Game Reserve, in what is now Tanzania, by cinematographer Hugo van Lawick. These frames are from reels of film outtakes that were found in storage in 2015.
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