With the success of the True-Life Adventure series, photographers around the country inundated Walt Disney with endless reels of wildlife film footage. But, it was the striking images by N. Paul Kenworthy of insect life on the great American desert which caught Walt’s eye. He was so impressed with Paul’s unusual film sequences that he hired the college student to return to the desert and gather more footage.
Roy O. Disney, later recalled, how Paul “practically lived down in the desert, like a desert rat, many months, in his little hut with cameras all set up, photographing tarantulas and lizards and desert flowers blooming. And we got the most wonderful batch of material…”
Subsequently, Paul’s footage was assembled with other freelance material to create the Studio’s first feature-length True-Life Adventure, “The Living Desert,” which garnered an Academy Award for best documentary in 1953. More importantly, the film, which featured such breathtaking sequences as a Pepsis… read more
With the success of the True-Life Adventure series, photographers around the country inundated Walt Disney with endless reels of wildlife film footage. But, it was the striking images by N. Paul Kenworthy of insect life on the great American desert which caught Walt’s eye. He was so impressed with Paul’s unusual film sequences that he hired the college student to return to the desert and gather more footage.
Roy O. Disney, later recalled, how Paul “practically lived down in the desert, like a desert rat, many months, in his little hut with cameras all set up, photographing tarantulas and lizards and desert flowers blooming. And we got the most wonderful batch of material…”
Subsequently, Paul’s footage was assembled with other freelance material to create the Studio’s first feature-length True-Life Adventure, “The Living Desert,” which garnered an Academy Award for best documentary in 1953. More importantly, the film, which featured such breathtaking sequences as a Pepsis wasp battling a tarantula and a King Snake pursuing baby Kangaroo Rats, underground, led to more assignments from Walt for the fledgling filmmaker.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Paul received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, followed by his master’s degree in motion pictures at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1953.
After the initial success of “The Living Desert,” his masterful photography of prairie dogs and other animals appeared in Disney’s “The Vanishing Prairie,” in 1954, which also won an Academy Award for best documentary.
Paul then went on to co-direct “Perri,” the story of the life cycle of a female squirrel, with Ralph Wright. In his book, “The Disney Films,” critic Leonard Maltin called the True-Life Fantasy, which featured live-action and animated sequences, “a truly dazzling accomplishment.”
For television, Paul directed “Rusty and the Falcon,” a story of a boy who finds an injured falcon and tries to train him, for the “Walt Disney Presents” series in 1958. He also developed a story about the first ascent of the Matterhorn in Switzerland, which became the 1959 live-action feature “Third Man on the Mountain,” starring James MacArthur.
Paul then returned to Pennsylvania to care for his family’s wool business, but by 1962, came back to the film industry, shooting television commercials in New York and Los Angeles.
His interest in motion picture camera work led him to help develop what became known as the Kenworthy/Nettmann Snorkel Camera, a remote-controlled periscope system originally developed to film architectural models, for which he received an Academy Technical Award, in 1977.
Kenworthy died on October 15, 2010 at the age of 85 in Ventura, California. —Disney Legends
