UCA Marketing Professor Benjamin Garner released his fourth documentary, “Arkansas Wild: The Story of Trout Tourism on the Little Red River” on April 11.

Garner began releasing documentaries in 2015, with his debut short “Glass Bottled Milk: Saving the Iwig Family Dairy,” which detailed a small dairy farmer’s struggle to keep business afloat during a storm of events.

Garner has released all of his films to the Public Broadcasting Service and has aired them across the country. His most recent film will air in Kansas City, Missouri; Topeka, Kansas; Memphis, Tennessee; and in Idaho, Montana, and Arkansas.

“This is my fourth film to air through PBS. Over the past six years, I’ve learned how to produce films that meet PBS’ production standards. The documentary is distributed nationally through NETA (National Educational Telecommunications Association) to PBS stations across the US. Not every single PBS station will air the film, but they have that option,” Garner said.

Arkansas is home to many rivers that help shape commerce throughout the southeast region and provide tourist opportunities that benefit the local economy.

“As a marketing professor, I was interested in several aspects of this project. I was interested in exploring the reasons why out-of-state customers/visitors come to this river to fish. I was also interested in thinking about how the Little Red is part of the state’s brand image as the Natural State,” he said.

“People come from literally all over the world to fish this river because it once held the world-record brown trout, caught in 1992. While that record has since been broken, people are now aware of this river and come to fish in hopes of catching a large brown trout. 

“Finally, my students really enjoy watching my documentary case studies and learn a lot from them, so I was excited to develop a new project that I can use in my marketing classes. All of these ideas inspired me to make a film about the river,” Garner said.

In making the documentary Garner worked with a friend, Lowell Myers, a local fishing guide, to tell the story of the Little Red.

“I grew up in Searcy, Arkansas, and learned how to trout-fish on the Little Red River when I was a kid. Over the past few years, I’ve had several conversations with my friend Lowell Myers, who is a fishing guide on the river and also a past president of the Little Red River Foundation, which is a nonprofit created to protect and preserve the river. Lowell and others felt like there was a good opportunity to tell the story of the Little Red,” he said. 

Garner’s goal in creating the documentary was to showcase Arkansas’s natural resources and to inspire others to join conservation efforts in the state.

“Overall, we have some amazing outdoor resources in Arkansas, and so one of my goals with the film was to encourage people to protect this specific river but also consider conservation opportunities in all of our wild places in the state,” he said.