Fernando Celis(I)

After a 50-year career supervising and working with wild animals in the movie industry in Hollywood and around the world, adding over a hundred film credits to his resume, and with another similar number of credits gathered from coordinating and performing as a stuntman also in Hollywood movies and television serials, it was time for F. Celis Belina to retire and dedicate himself full-time to a new career as a novelist. In 1963, Belina's small private collection of wild animals in Acapulco, Mexico-including several lions, a young Indian elephant, three young chimpanzees, two leopards, and assorted smaller native animals-opened the doors to Hollywood, when his collection of animals and the natural and accessible jungles in the area attracted Tarzan and his movie crew for the first of several movies and a television series, to be filmed in the Acapulco area in years to come. The same production company took Belina and the animals to the jungles of Brazil for almost two more years. And from there, they all were taken to Hollywood, California. Being the only person who would wrestle with his own big cats opened new horizons for Belina when he started doing work as a stuntman. Very soon, he was wrestling other people's animals. Horse falls, high falls, and bar fights came next, followed by car chases and car rolls, and getting blown away by all kinds of weapons, including those of extraterrestrials. Eventually, this movie career led him to the idea for writing Land of the Elephants.