Following service as a Navy pilot during World War II, Ernie Rose attended UCLA on the G.I Bill and became a member of the first class of film students in that newly established program. Three years later he earned the first MA Degree ever awarded by the University of California for a documentary film he made in lieu of a traditional written thesis. In a career spanning almost 70 years he has worked on more than 200 non-fiction films in many parts of the world. In 1953, while making films for the U.S. State Department in Iran, he was out in the streets amid the rioters shooting newsreels of the revolution when the government of the Shah was overthrown (the first time) by the Prime Minister. Rose was kicked out of his hotel room in Czechoslovakia to make room for a Russian General the night hundreds of Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague to crush Premier Dubcek's liberal political movement. He was invited to tea by the Queen of Tonga while making two films in that South Sea Island paradise. While working with the Los Angeles Fire Department, Rose learned to crawl through blazing buildings while shooting footage of fire fighters in action. During the 1960s he headed the facility at Berkeley that produced films and TV programs for all nine campuses of the University of California. In mid career Rose was awarded a Mass Media Fellowship (a predecessor of the MacArthur Grants) by the Ford Foundation to do whatever he wanted for a year. He used that time to enroll at Stanford University, earning a specially approved Ph.D. there combining advanced studies in the fields of Social Psychology, Cultural Anthropology, Political Sociology, International Relations and Communication Theory. Rose has served on the faculty of six universities in the U.S. and several abroad as a 4-time Senior Fulbright Professor. He has a modest working knowledge of several foreign languages. His scholarly writing appears in nine books and in many academic journals. For the U.S. State Dept. and the United Nations he has undertaken advisory assignments on communication matters to governments in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Prior to retiring from academic life, Rose served as the dean of a large liberal arts college in Southern California and as dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. During 1996 and 1997, he was called back to Washington and retained as a film consultant and expert witness by the U.S. Department of Justice where he was asked to appraise the dollar value of the famous 8mm camera original footage filmed by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. 

- IMDb Mini Biography By: Ernest D. Rose