The story of a youngster and his pet cheetah
makes its way to the silver screen.
By Caleb Daniloff
They'd grown up together in Kenya. He was like a brother to Xan. They played soccer and chased each other about the ranch. He taught Xan respect and kindness, kept the boy's secrets, and corrected him when necessary. He was the fastest thing Xan had ever seen—zero to 60 mph in two seconds.
"Dooms was ridiculously fast," Alexander "Xan" Hopcraft '06 recalls. "His body was complete rippling muscle. He was just so fluid."
This is how it was between an African cheetah and an American boy raised under the same roof in the 1980s and '90s. When Dooms died suddenly, a heartbroken Xan worked out his grief through a scrapbook about his loyal pal. That scrapbook morphed into a children's book called How It Was with Dooms (Simon & Schuster, 1997), and the story, adapted for the silver screen by Warner Brothers, premiered last fall in New York and Los Angeles.
"I liked the movie," Xan says, sitting in a back booth at the Grille. He's dressed in baggy jeans and tan barn jacket. Except for a thin moustache and goatee, his face seems as boyish as the childhood photos in his book.
"But the story that's told in the book is very different from the story that's told in the movie," he says. "It's very fictionalized."
Duma, Swahili for cheetah, was directed by Carroll Ballard of Black Stallion fame. And while the film has struggled to catch on nationwide, it has received rave reviews from critics. The New York Times called it "a soulful, piercingly beautiful story," and Roger Ebert described it as "a grand tale of adventure . . . an extraordinary film, and intelligent younger viewers may be enthralled by it."
In Duma, the setting and characters are South African, rather than Kenyan, and the plot centers on young Xan and his mission to return his pet cheetah, Duma, to the wild. Their trek across the desert puts them in the path of a mysterious tribesman and marks Xan's journey into adulthood.
"It was surreal seeing the movie," Xan says, playing with his jacket cuff. "They changed my mom's name and my dad's name, but they kept my name. And my father, he's definitely still alive." Another discrepancy between the book and film, Xan says, is returning the cheetah to the wild—an idea the environmental studies major doesn't support.
"If you have any wild animal from a really young age, reintegrating it is going to be pretty hard," he says. "It'll have instincts, but if it's been living in a home, it would be at a great disadvantage. But it's a nice story for Hollywood."
Orphaned as a cub, the 200-pound cat had been living at the family game ranch for several years by the time Xan was born.
"Dooms was there when I was a baby, so growing up he had a big influence on my life," Xan says. "It was completely normal. People would be like, 'you have a pet cheetah?' and I'd be like, 'don't you?'"
The ranch, run by Hopcraft's Kenyan father, is located on 20,000 acres of remote savannah outside Nairobi. The family lived without electricity, and their nearest neighbor was five miles away. Growing up, Xan saw more gazelles, wildebeests, zebras, and giraffes than humans. He was home-schooled and spent much of his free time with Dooms.
"Dooms was an intelligent being. He'd understand emotions. It was like having a friend who'd listen. I'd have conversations with him, and he would just sit there and purr, which was great comfort 'cause you felt like he understood everything. He was patient, but if you tried to push him around, you would get what for. I definitely learned the values of patience and respect."
More family member than pet, Dooms took five o'clock tea with the Hopcrafts and watched television. Other times, he lounged under his favorite tree, chased the cats, climbed the papyrus roofs of ranch buildings, and went for long walks with Xan.
"He was free to come and go," Xan says. "He'd go off and hunt sometimes and then come home. We never forced him to stay; it was always his choice."
Though he exceeded the life expectancy for cheetahs in the wild, Dooms's sudden death from liver failure hit the family hard. To deal with their sorrow, Xan and his mother, Carol, an American wildlife photographer, put together a memory album. Friends urged them to turn it into a book. Before long, it attracted the interest of Simon & Schuster.
"Xan's voice brought the child's perspective and sense of realism to the project, and his drawings contributed to the scrapbook feel of the book, while Carol's photographs gave us a vivid picture of the landscape," says Emma Dryden, vice president of the Simon & Schuster imprint Margaret K. McElderry Books. "Together, everything clicked beautifully."
The book, still available in paperback, was well received, and film offers came in immediately. "The pictures of a toddler snuggled up with a wild cheetah were mesmerizing," says Duma producer Kristin Harms. "Even though the picture book was slight on story, it was so original we ultimately couldn't resist pursuing it."
The Hopcrafts—and Kenyan fans of the book—were disappointed the location was changed to South Africa, but had nothing but praise for Ballard, the film's director. "[He] did a superb job of interpreting the story—the scenes of Africa, the cheetahs and other animals in the bush, especially the close-up of Dooms's eye whilst hunting," Carol Hopcraft says. "There were many inspired touches."
Campbell Scott and Hope Davis play Xan's parents, and South African newcomer Alexander Michaletos plays Xan. "There are parts where I can see my identity in him, but there's a lot of stuff that would be different," Xan says. "I feel like he didn't use a lot of common sense sometimes." As for real life, Xan plans to pursue graduate work in environmental policy and hopes to return to Kenya and work on wildlife preservation issues.
"My experience with Dooms helped create the foundation for my beliefs," he says. "I mean, if you watch the National Geographic channel, and you see an animal that's almost extinct, you feel bad. But the program will end and you'll flip the channel. For me, my whole upbringing was learning about these relationships. It defined who I am."
A few weeks later, Xan sits in his dorm room, flipping through the pages of his book. Outside, a snowstorm swirls; on the wall hangs a map of Kenya, where it's 85 degrees and sunny. Xan lingers over a photo of himself, six or seven years old, standing next to Dooms, an arm draped around his pal's neck.
"Wow, my expression is absolutely crazy," he chuckles. "I remember this picture so well. A lot of times when we took pictures, I felt a real connection with Dooms because we'd be there together, and I felt like we'd be thinking the same thing, 'I don't really want to be here.' We just wanted to be off playing."
And that's how it was.
Caleb Daniloff wrote "The Art of War" in the spring 2005 issue of Middlebury Magazine.