A practicing dentist in Tacoma, WA, in 1951 [
William B. Treutle] was diagnosed with a terminal illness and given only six months to live. He closed his practice, dispensed with most of his possessions and, with his wife, traveled to Karamoja, a remote region of northern Uganda, where the natives still lived very primitively. Treutle used a 16mm Bolex camera to document the tribe's activities, including bloodletting, body piercing, and mutilation. Soon it became clear that he had been misdiagnosed and in the summer of 1952, he and his wife returned to America and he resumed his dental practice, this time in Sebastopol, CA. In order to help pay for the cost of the expedition, he sold everything he shot to exploitation movie producer
Kroger Babb. Babb was impressed with the nudity of the natives, as well as the circumcision that Treutle had captured on film. The footage was quickly edited with the nudity intact and released to theaters, with press material claiming that the tribe was the descendants of Ham, a son of Noah. Although some questioned if the events were staged, Babb dismissed them in the accompanying press book with the statement, "When a stupid jerk tries to outsmart proven facts, he should be in an asylum, not a theater." Babb's instincts were successful and "Karamoja!" led to the creation of the "mondo" genre of exploitation documentaries, best exemplified later by
Mondo cane (1962) and several similar films that followed.
