This seminal work of avant-garde opera from composer Philip Glass and director Robert Wilson arrives full-circle, coming to France, the site of its 1976 Avignon Festival world premiere, at the tail end of this 2014 revival tour for a landmark Theâtre du Châtelet production and a first ever filming by award-winning arts filmmaker Don Kent. Eschewing conventional narrative, the opera revolves loosely around pacifist Einstein’s relationship to the creation of the atomic bomb.

The Office of Scientific Investigations tracks down the source of increased magnetism and radioactivity in Los Angeles, and discovers that a man-made isotope is consuming available energy from nearby mass every few hours, doubling its size in the process. Although microscopic, it will soon become big enough to destroy Earth; and how to stop it is yet to be determined. The film's Deltatron special effects footage is taken from the 1934 German sci-fi film GOLD.

Truck drivers Steve Hackett and Bill Purvis are fired from their jobs with the West Coast Trucking company for not using second-gear going down steep grades. Davis, the company vice-president, surprisingly asks them to carry a load of merchandise to Arrowhead and offers a $1000 bonus. He tells them it is a load of lettuce. Several miles out of Los Angelese, they are stopped by a mob of lettuce-farm workers on strike. When the first crate is tossed off the truck, it explodes and the two pals learn their merchandise is a cargo of dynamite. The workers let them proceed and they crash into a car driven by Mary Stevens, whom they had met at a restaurant. She and her dog, "Butch" (played by a Credited dog named Stooge), join them and they deliver their cargo, and learn unscrupulous real-estate operators have jammed the locks on the dam in order to ruin the ranchers and farmers and take over their property.

Joyce and Fred MacNeil's honeymoon comes to an abrupt and unsatisfying halt when Fred is accused of murder. Railroaded into prison through the efforts of politically ambitious assistant DA Marlin, Fred awaits his doom on Death Row, while Joyce works overtime on the outside to clear her husband's name