Stepping Out: The Debolts Grow Up

With its four operas, seventeen-hour running time and months of rehearsal, Wagner's "Ring Cycle" is a daunting undertaking for any opera company. Jon Else goes backstage to show this rare event entirely from the point of view of union stagehands at the San Francisco Opera.

The Day After Trinity (a.k.a. The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb) is a 1980 documentary film directed and produced by Jon H. Else in association with KTEH public television in San Jose, California. The film tells the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967), the theoretical physicist who led the effort to build the first atomic bomb, tested in July 1945 at Trinity site in New Mexico. Featuring candid interviews with several Manhattan Project scientists, as well as newly declassified archival footage, The Day After Trinity was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 1980, and received a Peabody Award in 1981.

Drawing upon recently declassified documents, archival footage and behind-the-scenes interviews, "Wonders Are Many: The Making of 'Doctor Atomic'" chronicles the creation of the monumental opera based on the mysterious and paradoxical “father of the atomic bomb,” Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, as his team prepares to detonate the world’s first atomic weapon.

National Geographic's Explorer gives viewers special access to the issues of the day.

Just before the advent of the Great Depression, Henry Ford controlled the most important company in the most important industry in the booming American economy. His offer of high wages in exchange for hard work attracted workers to Detroit, but it began to come apart when Ford hired a private police force to speed up production and spy on employees. After the depression hit in 1929, these workers faced a new, grim reality as unemployment skyrocketed.

This is a biographical documentary about Arthur and Lillie Mayer - their own lives and their adventures in the formation of "Hollywood" from its earliest days