Since the hippie invasion in the 1960s, the Bay Area prided itself as the bastion of diversity, tolerance, and open-mindedness. Yet after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, Bay Area schools erupted in virulent antisemitism as activist teachers spread falsehoods about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, leaving parents both stunned and outraged. The documentary, “Killing America,” investigates in detail how various forces and influences within the educational system permitted this hate — which first targeted whites and Asians — to erupt with impunity in such a “tolerant” place.

Shelby and Eli Steele will begin production on this new documentary in the spring of 2023.

Shelby Steele has long argued that systemic racism is more a strategy than a truth, and that the universal oppression of black Americans is largely over with. But the 2014 shooting of a black teen, Michael Brown, by a white cop shocked the nation. In 2020, America was once again rocked by the brutal killing of George Floyd. Didn't these killings, and others, put the lie to Steele's argument?

After being banned by Amazon, an outcry by major media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal forced Amazon to relent. The film rose to the #1 spot for documentaries and stayed in the top ten for over a month. Please visit: www.whatkilledmichaelbrown.com

This groundbreaking documentary opens simply: a multiracial father is stunned when his mixed race son is denied enrollment to an elementary school for refusing to check a “race box.” Why did race matter so much? To find out, the father takes an uncharted journey across America where he confronts and exposes identity politics. The result is an emotional, unbiased look at race that Adam Carolla called “eye-opening.”

Join America in exploring the impact of the multiracial baby boom upon a nation that has deepened its embrace of identity politics, leading to more Americans being locked into racial groups. Is it too late to begin the movement back to the individual?

How Jack Became Black was voted best documentary of 2018 by the legendary independent filmmaking magazine, Film Threat. Visit www.HowJackBecameBlack.com

Seth Singer, a young deaf man, believes in one thing: that he is no different from anyone else. Determined to prove his point, he throws his life savings into a pesticide business despite the presence of a well-established competitor. Along the way, Seth meets Alma, a double amputee, and they find romance as they bond over their disabilities. However, their relationship is threatened by the return of Nora, Seth’s high school girlfriend, who comes home after a disappointing modeling career and hopes to rekindle their romance.

In 2005, "What's Bugging Seth" was one of the most popular films on the film festival circuit, winner at over 12 film festivals. It was one of the last indie films made on 35mm film (shot on Panavision cameras) before the digital era. We have plans to digitize the film in the near future and it will soon be available.

After Hurricane Katrina devastated their New Orleans hometown, two poor teen survivors find themselves living a fish-out-of-water lifestyle in San Francisco with a yuppie family headed by two mothers and their spoiled children. Will they be able to adapt to their new home and thrive or will the call of their hometown prove to be too powerful?

Eli Steele was awarded the Filmmakers Breakthrough Award by MTV Networks for this 2007 pilot. We hope to digitize the 24-minute pilot in the near future and make it available for screening.

“Over dinner in an Arizona diner, I told two friends that I would soon be traveling to Northampton in the western part of Massachusetts to interview Jodi Shaw, the former Smith College staffer who rebelled against the college’s mandatory racial indoctrination program, a program designed to reduce her humanity to whiteness. My friends then told me a story.

“In the 1940s, a black teen left the deep South for the summer to earn college tuition money working the tobacco fields in Connecticut’s Farmington Valley, a short drive from Northampton. The teen marveled that he could sit in church alongside whites, dine in restaurants with whites, and when he faced discrimination, other whites stood up…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“When I first met Pastor Corey Brooks in Chicago several years ago, I was somewhat caught off guard by his gentle and peaceful nature. I admit I expected him to be more in the mold of a fiery, in-your-face type of preacher. After all, this was the pastor that established his New Beginnings Church and Project H.O.O.D., a community center, in the heart of Woodlawn, one of the most violent of 77 communities that make up Chicagoland.

“While most people in that neighborhood are salt-of-the-earth, working-class folk, it is also home to some of the most notorious and violent gangsters. How could this pastor transform these cancerous elements into productive members of society with his gentle and peaceful nature? What was his magic sauce, so to speak…?”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“When a person chooses to embrace an ideology grounded in race, the main goal is power over another group of human beings. Racial ideologies always claim to be motivated by a higher good; this self-flattering illusion only serves to hide the immorality of their acts. The only real thing here is power. Those were the thoughts in my head as I reflected upon the White Lives Matter rally that I had the misfortune of attending in Huntington Beach two weeks ago…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“The one thing guaranteed when one uses race as a means to power is absurdity. The actual truth is ignored for the optics that can be spun to serve those pursuing power. And the absurdity arises from the simple fact that many folks see the actual truth plainly but choose to ignore it for the power that the optics promise. 

“Those were my thoughts as I drove over the bridge from San Diego to the island of Coronado on a sunny and humid August day. The small town, home to the Navy SEALs, had made news this past June during the Division 4-A regional championship when the Coronado High School basketball team was condemned for throwing tortillas at Orange Glen, a mostly Hispanic high school. Like many others, I cringed at the national media reports on this latest proof of all-American racism…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“When I drove through the industrial streets of West Side Chicago and passed the city limits into the village of Oak Park, I was charmed by the lively downtown where Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright once strolled. I felt I had traveled back in time to old America where mom-and-pop shops and eateries dominated the streets instead of chain stores. I saw children and adults of various races playing and gossiping. These genuine moments seemed to hold hope for the future in an America still reeling from the aftermath of the George Floyd killing. I noticed these interactions with interest because I came here to interview an interracial family who felt that this hope was threatened by the introduction of critical race theory into the local schools…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“On the flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, there was an older, well-dressed man in the aisle seat and he leaned toward me to ask what my business in Chicago was. I told him that I do documentaries and wanted to know what Pastor Corey Brooks on the South Side thought of the critical race theory controversies sweeping the nation. The man hesitated before revealing that even his tech company had not been spared. Then he said, "As a White man…" and let his voice trail off as if no further explanation was needed. I pushed back. Why say White? I expected him to somewhat acknowledge the absurdity of his words, but he eyed me as if I was the absurd one. "If I speak up, I could lose my job." We did not say another word to each other…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“Ten years ago, Pastor Corey Brooks tested his faith when he crossed the street from his New Beginnings Church and climbed onto the roof of a violence-plagued motel in the middle of a brutal Chicago winter. The pastor had become tired of the murders, drugs and prostitution that took place daily at the motel, which sat two blocks away from an elementary school. The pastor also had become tired of the deadly inaction from the city’s desensitized leaders; not even the Chicago Sun-Times’ ranking the pastor’s Woodlawn neighborhood as the most deadly was enough to stir them. So the pastor remained on the roof for 94 days through blizzards until he raised enough to purchase and demolish the motel. His faith paid off.  Today, the pastor finds himself testing his faith once again…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“One rarely hears of the American Dream these days. The belief that anyone can move upward and achieve their own version of success regardless of what class or zip code they were born into has taken a beating in recent years.

“In speeches, politicians often point out how the American Dream is only for the privileged class, rarely evoking the unifying qualities of the dream. In many middle- to upper-class K-12 schools, educators continue to dismantle the honors track and other ladders of upward mobility, giving the goal of achieving racial equity a higher value than the dream. From universities to corporations, many elites, seeking innocence from America’s history of racial crimes in this post-George Floyd era, pour millions upon millions of dollars into racially engineering diversity, a practice that belittles the dream. Within this national culture where power is to be found in the external markers of one’s identity, why pursue the difficult and often lonely path of the American Dream…?

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“When Shana Chappell gave birth to Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui on Jan. 4, 2001, little did she know that her newborn’s first months on this earth would be the only time that America was not at war during his lifetime. On Sept. 11, 2001, America suffered her most deadly attack since Pearl Harbor. President George W. Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom and the war in Afghanistan officially began on Oct. 7, 2001. As Shana nursed her baby in the small horse town of Norco — some 60 miles east of Los Angeles — she had no way of knowing that her son, along with 12 other warriors, would lose his life 20 years later at the end of America’s brutal and tragically failed war in Afghanistan…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“I was setting up my camera to film a rally on the steps of Tweed Courthouse in lower Manhattan when a disheveled middle-aged man clutching an odd assortment of papers to his chest stopped and stared at the gathering of parents and community leaders. They were there to protest Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ongoing attack on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the sole gateway to one of New York’s nine specialized high schools. Their hand-drawn signs read, "Stop picking on Asian kids!" "Fix failing schools!" and "Keep the test!" The disheveled man began to yell aggressively and I turned, to lipread him: "You Asians take all the spots at these schools! Only eight blacks got into Stuyvesant High, only eight! You gotta give us blacks a chance, that’s all we’re asking for, man!" I turned my camera to capture him but he saw me and fled…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“We all have a purpose in life. Some of us never find it. Michelle and Eric Smith found theirs in a Jacksonville, North Carolina, coffee shop that sits several hundred feet from where many of the storied Montford Point Marines are buried. When the wife and husband team began Brewed Downtown nine years ago and gradually built it up into a solid business, they could not have foreseen that they would one day be hit by a pandemic, a supply chain crisis, inflation and the ever-expanding corporate machine. 

“What kept Michelle and Eric going was not money, though they certainly needed to earn enough to maintain a lifestyle Michelle described as "not poor but not middle class either." Perhaps working Americans is the best way to describe them, and what kept them moving forward was community…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“I was setting up my camera to film a rally on the steps of Tweed Courthouse in lower Manhattan when a disheveled middle-aged man clutching an odd assortment of papers to his chest stopped and stared at the gathering of parents and community leaders. They were there to protest Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ongoing attack on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), the sole gateway to one of New York’s nine specialized high schools. Their hand-drawn signs read, "Stop picking on Asian kids!" "Fix failing schools!" and "Keep the test!" The disheveled man began to yell aggressively and I turned, to lipread him: "You Asians take all the spots at these schools! Only eight blacks got into Stuyvesant High, only eight! You gotta give us blacks a chance, that’s all we’re asking for, man!" I turned my camera to capture him but he saw me and fled…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

 “When I asked Daniel Idfresne, a 17-year-old student at Brooklyn Technical High School, if he would have received the same national attention had his skin been white, he did not hesitate: ‘Of course not.’ Daniel wrote an essay titled, ‘I’m 17. And I’m immunized from Woke Politics.’ It was published in the New York Post and other publications. Daniel knew that my question, unfair or not, exposed the sad conundrum that often frustrates many free-thinking blacks: did the spotlight swing their way because of their own merit, their skin color, or both? Daniel may have avoided wokeism, but even he cannot escape America’s lingering problem when it comes to race: identity politics…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.

“Paul Rossi used to work at Grace Church School in lower Manhattan as a math teacher to the city’s privileged children. On the Upper East Side, a former investment banker named Andrew Gutmann used to walk his young daughter past the security guards dressed in red cardigan sweaters onto the elite grounds of Brearley School. Both Rossi and Gutmann had never crossed paths before they wrote their letters excoriating their schools’ embrace of Critical Race Theory, a rebellion that severed their ties with these schools. These two men seemed to have little in common based on outward appearances, yet the names of Rossi and Gutmann will be yoked for the time being and perhaps into the distant future because of their refusal to conform…”

Click here to read full article accompanying the documentary.