Film based on game warden Guy Bradley

Does anyone know if TCM still airs this? My grandfather, Toby Bruce, has a small role in it and I've never seen it. He plays the rumrunner Joe Bottles. He was good friends with Budd Schulberg who wrote in the role special for him. I grew up listening to stories of the filming and his interactions with Gypsy Rose Lee and the other stars.

Sadly, as the Narrator states in the beginning of the film, coupled with several women donning way over the top feathered and highly decorated hats, the price haberdashers were willing to pay was around $80 to $100 per pound for the feathers to decorate their hats.

Ornithologists commonly measure bird's feathers as a proportion of total body weight. According to Cobb-Vantress (a poultry research and development firm) a 5-pound broiler chicken's feathers weigh about 74 grams or 2.6 ounces, or 3.3% of its body weight. Since that chicken has some 9,000 feathers, each one weighs about .0082 grams.

I don't know what type of birds are depicted in the film or the average weight of those birds, but using the above example, and the estimate of 5 million birds being slaughtered, there'd be 45 billion feathers at stake. And it would take about 6 birds to provide 1 lb of feathers, and at the midpoint price of $90 per pound we're talking about a $75 Million industry at the turn of the century.

By the way, it takes a bird several months to regrow new feathers (after they molt) and it requires more protein for the bird to consume as protein is need for producing a high quality offspring coupled with replacing new/damaged feathers. It's just my observation that had these poachers considered raising birds of the type they poached (my gut tells me that they indeed HAD considered it) then they would have been "burdened" by providing the feed, assuming they were aware that added protein was needed in a diet. But instead they were just decided to poach, and receive the instant monetary advantages, with the only real costs being time and buckshot.

These unscrupulous actions, along with the wholesale slaughter of the American buffalo a few decades before in America's expansion out West, are simply unconscionable.

Would be cool to see a Guy Bradley biopic, even if it wouldn't be very successful with mainstream audiences.

"The storm cannot be stopped, but it can be survived.'"

It's an interesting tribute to the early conservationist movement.