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Diane Orr is a documentary filmmaker and photographer whose films have explored subjects including Idaho’s 1961 SL-1 nuclear reactor accident, the 1976 Teton Dam disaster, the disappearance of Everett Ruess, and the 1973 standoff at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Several of Orr's films document the culture and history of the American West and the issues facing Native Americans. Her photography highlights Western landscapes and rock art (pictographs and petroglyphs). C. Larry Roberts collaborated with Orr on several works. In the 1970s he was a producer for KUTV’s news magazine, EXTRA . He taught filmmaking at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the California Institute of the Arts, and San Francisco State University and served as artist-in-residence at the Utah Media Arts Center. Roberts died on July 26, 1988.

In 1979, Orr and Roberts began collaboration on SL-1 , a documentary film about the January 3, 1961 meltdown of the Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One at the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) located west of Idaho Falls, Idaho. The meltdown killed three people and led to the exposure of approximately 790 individuals to dangerous levels of radiation. Drawing from government documents, photographs, and film obtained through a Freedom of Information inquiry, Roberts and Orr reconstructed the accident and its causes. SL-1 was released in 1983. It won the Josef von Sternberg Prize at the International Film Week festival in Mannheim, Germany and was aired on New York public television station WNET.