The Skirball Cultural Center presents the L.A. debut of the “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller on Thursday, Nov. 10, at 8 p.m. The one-night-only screening will feature Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sam Green narrating the film in person while the acclaimed indie rock band Yo La Tengo performs their original score. The documentary traces the career of 20th century futurist, architect, inventor, and author R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), who experimented for 50 years to find out what a single person can do on behalf of humanity.

Architect and inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller is the focus of a live performance at the Skirball Cultural Center. (Photo courtesy of Stanford University Libraries and The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

In The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, Green explores Fuller’s utopian vision of radical social change through a design revolution. Fuller was a grandiose and generous thinker, teeming with ideas, who once put together a 42-hour lecture series called “Everything I Know.” He was an early proponent of conservation and environmental stewardship as social justice: he was interested in “doing more with less,” so that everybody could have enough. He redesigned human structures from cars and bathrooms up to entire cities, inspiring figures as diverse as the industrialist Henry Kaiser, John Cage, and Stewart Brand.

Admission to exhibitions start at $12. The Skirball Cultural Center is located at 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles. For information, call (310)440-4500, or visit www.skirball.org.