Clockwise from
main: Bart (right)
has a roaring
good time with
his cub pal Youk,
played by Douce
and alternates in
The Bear (1988);
Getting those
lungs out again
in 12 Monkeys
(1995); Chilling
out in 1988
comedy The
Great Outdoors.training their animals — bobcats, cougars,
wolves, raccoons, coyotes — for “bits and pieces”
on Grizzly Adams. However, they knew if they
were really going to compete, they’d need
a bear. A big one. “I just tend toward bears,”
says Doug. “I started out hiking in the wild
and watching them, for relaxation. They have
ape intelligence, you know. And they can’t
be dishonest. No pretenses. No bullshit.
Everything is upfront.”
In January 1977, they bought Bart for $50
from Baltimore Zoo in Maryland. Weighing 6lb,
he was the result of an unplanned pregnancy.
The Seuses were smitten. “Naturally, we just
loved him as a parent loves a child,” Lynne says.
A child who, within nine months, tipped the
scale at 900lbs and scoff ed whole roasted
chickens. For his feature-fi lm debut, in 1981
Western Windwalker, Bart performed his fi rst
combat scene, in which he was stabbed and
speared by Cheyenne braves. “Bart thought it
was the best game, because it tickled and he
could break the spears like matchsticks,” Lynn
reveals. “The scenes looked for all the world
like he was being stabbed, but really he was
just having a fun playtime.”
During the next two decades, Bart became
Hollywood’s go-to grizzly, typically cast as
fearsome, ill-fated aggressors. But his — and
Doug and Lynne’s — finest work remains
enshrined in two pictures, both must-sees if
you’re a filmgoing arctophile:The Bearand
The Edge.IN THE WILD, the most common killer of
grizzly cubs is the adult male grizzly. Yet the
central conceit of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The
Bear was that a cute, orphaned cub (played by
bears not owned by the Seuses) and a surly
adult male Kodiak (Bart) would team up to beat
the hazards of humankind and nature. To avoid
any of his young stars being cannibalised,
Annaud hired Jim Henson’s Creature Shop
to craft animatronic bears. But Doug felt that
combining them with real animals would only
emphasise the artifi ciality of the puppets, no
matter how ingenious Henson’s creations. He
took aside associate producer Pierre Grunstein
and said to him, “This can be a masterpiece or
a Muppet show.”
In two weeks, Doug promised, he would
train Bart and the cubs to share the screen. He
started by swapping the bears’ hay, to accustom
them to each other’s scent. Then he gradually
introduced the bears, at fi rst letting them see
each other from a distance, then carefully
bringing them closer. “Finally, we had them
doing absolutely amazing things,” says Lynne,“like crawling on their bellies together and
standing up together.” Such behaviour
astonished biologists, who, Doug recalls, wrote
him letters saying they thought such behaviour
“couldn’t be achieved”. Bart, though, was not
without his limits.
Lee Tamahori’s The Edge was shot in the
Canadian Rockies in 1996. In the role of a man-
eating grizzly, Bart had to attack the camp of
plane-crash survivors Anthony Hopkins, Alec
Baldwin and Harold Perrineau, before dragging
off Perrineau (doubled by Doug) by the leg. “It
was a night-for-night shoot,” Seus says. “Full
moon. Storm. Legitimate front coming in. The
rain made the ground so sloppy you couldn’t
even stand up. The bear would slip and slide. He
was in hyperphagia, the annual period in a bear’s
life when they are accelerated emotionally and
physically to prepare for winter. We were ready
to go. The juices going, the adrenaline going.
Then the lights go bust. Shatter. Now you’ve got
a volatile situation. Do you realise what might
have happened if I hadn’t had a relationship with
Bart?” He lets the question hang.
Empire wonders if Doug was ever hurt by his
star bear. He laughs. “Are you kidding me? Are
you out of your mind? Sure! That’s part of the
OJT — on-the-job training! Come on. If you’re
gonna work with a big, robust, top-of-the-food-
chain [creature], you’re gonna go through your
licks! But that’s also part of building trust and
a relationship. To have camaraderie, you gotta
go through thick and thin.”
Tamahori himself insists he never felt
endangered by Bart. He innately trusted Doug
and Lynne, while the ground rules were always
clear: “No-one’s to approach the bear. Don’t look
the bear in the eye. Camera crews look away.”
Bart also came with a long list of production
requirements. “Forty-eight cooked chickens
every week. Twenty-seven^ pizzas. Fourteen ❯