Filmography

My filmmaking career, spanning five decades and many hundreds of films, has take me everywhere, thanks to ABC Sports, Anglia Television, Discovery, PBS (WNET/Thirteen and WGBH), the Walt Disney Company and National Geographic Television. My passions are many: nature, science, the brain, wildlife crime, biography, the American West, the Middle East, and, critically, Africa.

Warlords of Ivory

Investigative journalist Bryan Christy is setting out on a groundbreaking mission to expose how the ivory trade funds some of Africa's most notorious militias and terrorist groups. Working with one of the world's top taxidermists, he conceals a sophisticated GPS tracker inside an incredibly realistic faux ivory tusk and drops it in the heart of ivory poaching country and monitors its movements to track down the kingpins of the ivory trade.

U.S. Crushes 6 Tons of Seized Ivory to Save Elephants

The U.S. government destroyed nearly six tons of ivory on November 14 by crushing the products into tiny pieces. This symbolic event aimed to bring attention to the corruption and illegal activity surrounding the killing of elephants for the ivory trade.

Battle For The Elephants

"Battle for the Elephants" tells the ultimate animal story - how the earth's most charismatic and majestic land animal today faces market forces driving the value of its tusks to levels once reserved for gold. This groundbreaking National Geographic Special goes undercover to expose the criminal network behind ivory's supply and demand. It also demonstrates how the elephant, with its highly evolved society, keen intelligence, ability to communicate across vast distances and to love, remember and even to mourn, is far more complex than ever imagined. More revelations are sure to follow, only if the outspoken and brave crime investigators and conservationists showcased in "Battle For The Elephants" prevail.

Bones of Turkana

Bones of Turkana follows the story of famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and his wife Meave, daughter Louise and their colleagues, as they work in the arid northern regions of Kenya's Turkana Basin to unravel the mysteries of human evolution.

Stress: Portrait of a Killer

From baboon troops on the plains of Africa, to neuroscience labs at Stanford University, scientists are revealing just how lethal stress can be. Research reveals that the impact of stress can be found deep within us, shrinking our brains, adding fat to our bellies, even unraveling our chromosomes.

A Year On Earth

"A Year On Earth" follows the journey of three normal American teenagers on a global environmental research expedition, through Africa, Latin America and Asia. They have a single mission: to take the pulse of the planet and report back to their generation what on earth is going on.

There have been countless highlights over the course of the several hundred films I have made. Two examples are these:

I was lucky working on both The Brain and The Mind series with the great Richard Hutton. We shared many outstanding moments. One instance was during the production of The Mind when I was producing and writing the show called “Aging.” In it, I assigned myself the task of internalizing aging’s inexorable progress, so all viewers, young and old, might understand and feel its reality.  To do so, I turned to art.

Just as The Mind aired, I was tapped to be producer, director, writer and host of a new PBS series called “Travels.” It was to feature a rich array of writers, actors, chefs and celebrities introducing us to their favorite corners of the globe, as well as to places they aspired to visit. Over four seasons, with the support of Chelle Tutt Mason, I had the good fortune of being one of those travelers. So it was that in the second season of Travels, I journeyed to the most remote inhabited island in the world, Tristan da Cunha. This would be the first full-length film ever made on that storm-tossed sea mount. For me, this was kismet.