Les Guthman is an American director, writer, editor and production executive, who has the distinction of both having produced three of the 20 Top Adventure Films of All Time,[1] according to Men's Journal magazine, and having won the National Academy of Sciences' (U.S) nationwide competition to find the best new idea in science television, which led to his film, Three Nights at the Keck, hosted by actor John Lithgow.
The Advanced LIGO Documentary Project was formed in the summer of 2015 to document and produce the definitive documentary about Advanced LIGO's search for, and expected detection of, the first gravitational waves, a discovery that would open up the 95% of the universe that was dark to our existing observatories and space based telescopes—the violent warped side described by Caltech's Kip Thorne 30 years ago in Black Holes and Time Warps.
[4] On October 3, 2017 LIGO physicists Rai Weiss, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
[9] Guthman produced the two LIGO programs at the 2016 World Science Festival in New York, including the main stage Saturday night panel moderated by physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene, and featuring Weiss and Barish, three of their colleagues and four short videos from the Advanced LIGO Documentary Project's exclusive footage inside the discovery.
[12] As part of his 3D work, Guthman licensed the exclusive worldwide 3D rights to Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, in a partnership with Brazil's TV Globo.
[15] As founding Executive Vice President and Executive Producer of Outside Television,[16] Les Guthman produced 28 feature-length expedition, adventure and environmental documentaries, including Michael Brown's Farther Than the Eye Can See, which was nominated for two primetime Emmy Awards in 2004,[17] the awards for Outstanding Sports Documentary and Outstanding Sports Cinematography.
Into the Tsangpo Gorge and Farther Than the Eye Can See, along with his production, Into the Thunder Dragon,[24] by filmmaker Sean White, were honored by Men’s Journal magazine as three of the 20 Top Adventure Films of All Time.
His Outside Television production, In the Shadow of the Condor[25] won the 2001 Teddy Award[26] for Best Conservation Film, named in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt.
He co-created and produced the CableAce Award-nominated science series 21st Century, which included the last interview[28] with Dr. Jonas Salk, discoverer of the polio vaccine.
[33] In 2008, on the tenth anniversary of The Hudson Riverkeepers, Guthman re-edited the two films into one feature-length documentary under the title, The Waterkeepers.
The film features, and is written and co-produced by, Dr. Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini-Huygens digital imaging team, and includes commentary by evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins.
[45] In 1989, Guthman brought the annual Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award ceremony to PBS in a primetime broadcast[46] hosted by Tom Brokaw and featuring a human rights address by Sen. Ted Kennedy and a keynote speech by Polish Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa.
The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award was given to Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi, who was being protected inside the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time of the broadcast.
Selected XPLR-produced and distributed films also stream on Amazon Video,[12] Hulu,[54] Roku,[55] EPIX,[56] Comcast Xfinity,[57] Verizon FIOS,[58] Xbox,[59] Redbox Instant,[60] Google Television and Sony,[61] Panasonic and Visio televisions, and are available on mobile devices and tablets through the Snagfilms and Amazon Video apps.