## The Full Account of What Remains
The story that the LIFE photographs introduced in 1971 and that the Roar production extended across the 1970s and that the Shambala Preserve has continued to develop across four decades since then is, in the end, a story about the specific cost of a specific ambition.
The ambition was genuine. Noel Marshall believed the film he was making had value — that the experience of watching humans in genuine proximity to genuine wild animals, unmediated by the conventional apparatus of Hollywood animal filmmaking, would produce something that no conventional production could produce. Tippi Hedren believed it alongside him. They committed the resources and the years and the physical safety of themselves and their family to producing it. The film that resulted is exactly what they said it would be: a film in which humans and wild animals are genuinely in proximity, and in which the proximity is genuinely dangerous, and in which the audience can see the difference between this and manufactured spectacle.
What they did not fully reckon with in advance — though the evidence suggests they understood, at some level, what they were risking — is what the cost of that authenticity would be in human terms. The injuries were the cost. The gangrene and the facial wounds and the sutures and the surgeries and the year-long halts in production and the sold houses and the ended marriage — these were the cost. The film that resulted from the cost grossed under two million dollars. The animals that required care after the film had been completed are still at Shambala, still requiring care, still the ongoing responsibility of the institution that Hedren built from the project’s wreckage.