Broadcast Schedule Talkback Get the Video			About SING FASTER, Producer Jon Else says, "For twenty years I've done nothing but films about nuclear war, civil unrest, economic depression, environmental destruction and institutional greed. I decided it was time to make a musical, something really accessible and entertaining; Wagner's "Ring Cycle" may have been an odd choice but I think it worked." Else filmed SING FASTER during the summer of 1990, but was unable to complete it until 1998 due to a lengthy fundraising quest which involved submission of 137 separate grant applications to foundations and public agencies. (Wagner himself took 21 years, from 1853-1874, to complete "The Ring Cycle.") Jon Else is a documentary filmmaker, perhaps best known as producer-director of The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb (1980). He has chosen to work mainly in prime-time television and was series producer and cinematographer for Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years (1987). Else produced, directed and photographed Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven (1989), A Job at Ford's for the Blackside/PBS series, The Great Depression (1992) and three films of the Cadillac Desert series (1997). He worked briefly as a producer for ABC and HBO in the early 1980s and has served as cinematographer on hundreds of PBS and BBC documentaries, including the BBC/PBS History of Rock and Roll (1993), Who are the Debolts? (Academy Award, 1976), numerous commercials and MTV videos. Before turning to documentaries, Else worked in construction and was on the staff of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi and Alabama during the turbulent Civil Rights struggles of 1963-1965. He is now a Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley and Consulting Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He was a MacArthur Fellow from 1988 to 1993 and has won several national Emmys, Columbia DuPont Awards and Peabody Awards as well as several Academy Award nominations and the Prix Italia. He received his B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and M.A. in Communication from Stanford University. Else is beginning work on a new documentary about options traders.
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