Instructor

James is a documentary producer, filmmaker, and author. His first TV show, “The Conrad Hilton Story,” which aired in 1975, was followed by films and books about pop culture. He has produced dozens of projects about Hollywood that have aired on Discovery Channel, A&E, Cinemax, Starz/Encore, PBS, and Pearson Education. After nearly two decades of producing, he tired of the Hollywood shuffle and began to teach university-level media courses and earned a doctorate in urban planning at the University of Southern California. Since retiring from full-time teaching, he took on the subject of censorship in the documentary “Roddenberry’s Trek,” about the challenges Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, faced by creating a multi-racial crew in the mid-1960s during the Jim Crow era. James also developed and narrated a show about his mother, who worked as a personal secretary to Elvis Presley. The show, “Elvis und das Mädchen aus Wien” (Elvis and the Girl from Vienna), was made for the Austrian TV network ORF in 2017.