Eric Goode's - MONKEY BUSINESS

How a former nightclub impresario and reptile enthusiast became one of the most successful documentary filmmakers of our time.

- Lane Brown

Let’s see if we can get them to mate.” Eric Goode, the conservationist and creator of the 2020 Netflix docuseries Tiger King, is determined to give me a show. It’s a sunny June day at the Turtle Conservancy in Ojai, California, a breeding facility for endangered turtles and tortoises that he operates near his home. We’re standing over a pen of plowshare tortoises, which are among the rarest animals on earth, and Goode tells an employee to place a male near one of the females. “He’ll circle her repeatedly and then he’ll use that gular scute”— a bony plate—“under his chin to flip her over,” says Goode. “It’s a very violent mating ritual.”

We wait a few minutes, but alas, there’s no circling, no flipping, and no mating. The male plowshare is either insufficiently horny or just slow to get down to business, so he’s returned to his own enclosure. “We’ll go look at something else,” Goode says, and he walks me through a greenhouse where the facility’s associate director, a Frenchman named Simon Rouot, holds up a Burmese star tortoise.

When we get back outside, there’s a surprise waiting. In a nearby paddock, a large tortoise has mounted one of its neighbors and is thrusting with gusto. “Those are radiated tortoises from Madagascar,” Goode says over the sound of their clanking shells. “They have a strong appetite for sex.”

“And they’re both males,” says Rouot. “Well,” says Goode, “that’s what happens when you deprive them of females.” I mention the scene above not just for titillation but also because it happens to contain the three basic ingredients of Goode’s documentaries: exotic animals, eccentric humans, and a left-field twist that greatly improves on whatever best-laid plans Goode came in with.

Tiger King, which he produced and codirected with Rebecca Chaiklin, began as a