Earlier this season, John Adams made his Metropolitan Opera debut with the New York premiere of his 2004-05 opera, Doctor Atomic. The opera, which examines the final hours before the detonation of the first atomic bomb, received its world premiere on October 1, 2005, at the San Francisco Opera House, with Donald Runnicles conducting, in a production directed by Peter Sellars, who had also assembled the libretto. Beginning tonight and throughout this week, on PBS stations across the country, the series Independent Lens will broadcast Wonders Are Many, the 2007 documentary film that captures the making of Doctor Atomic, culminating in its world premiere. 

Wonders Are Many goes behind the scenes to examine both the creation of this monumental work and the working relationship between the longtime collaborators Adams and Sellars. The film's director, Jon Else, who directed the 1980 Oscar-nominated documentary The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, uses both archival footage and interviews in Wonders Are Many, combining the frenetic backstage action at the opera house with the real events from the Manhattan Project that inspired Doctor Atomic.

For more information on the documentary and broadcast information on a PBS station near you, visit pbs.org.