Don’t Look Up (Movie)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      What a Times Journalist Learned From His ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment

      by

      A new film about a killer comet revives memories of a nail-biting night in The Times newsroom two decades ago.One of the thus-far theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just wandered into Earth’s path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.In the new Netflix film “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover that a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the news.It doesn’t go well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned with her poll numbers. Television talk show hosts ridicule the scientists. Rich oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” may be the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the End of the World since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”Watching it brought back my own experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the new deputy science editor of The Times, and my doomsday audience was small but elite: The Times’s top editors. I had been on the job for only a month. Nobody really knew me. My direct boss, the science editor, had taken the week off, leaving me in charge.And so, late in the afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 news meeting where editors pitch stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a late-breaking story by the distinguished reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a pretty good story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”Brian Marsden, the astronomer who calculated that in 2028 the asteroid 1997 XF11 would come within 30,000 miles of Earth.Evan RichmanThe source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is the International Astronomical Union’s clearinghouse for cosmic discoveries, as well as its Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on Oct. 26, 2028 — and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.“In more than 40 years of computing orbits, I had never seen anything like that before,” Dr. Marsden later said. He felt he had a duty to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.The front-page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from newsroom colleagues who wanted to know whether they should continue to pay their mortgages, and responding to queries and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a fuzzy dot in the darkness. I was having an adrenaline-fueled crash course in the scrutiny a front-page story receives in the newsroom before it can be published.I didn’t want to go home that night but eventually did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already all over. Pictures of the asteroid from several years earlier had turned up overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated the orbit and found that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe for civilization.An image of the asteroid 1997 XF11, now minor planet 35396, taken on March 11, 1998, over an interval of 30 minutes by the astronomer Bernadette Rodgers of the University of Washington.Bernadette Rodgers/University of Washington/Astrophysical Research ConsortiumIn the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly scolded by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who had made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before blindsiding the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.Dr. Marsden apologized for generating such a scare, but noted that he had helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Much as the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed a scare like that to bring attention to this problem,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that for us not to make the announcement as we did would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness,” he said.I felt bad for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I had known for 20 years of reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the possible end of the world after only a month on the job? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!,” I took it personally.The New York Times’s front-page article of March 12, 1998, and The New York Post’s cover of March 13.But the incident was indeed a kind of turning point, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on “Don’t Look Up.”In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?Humor helps, Dr. Mainzer added: “We’re saying it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to go down this path.”Sync your calendar with the solar systemNever miss an eclipse, a meteor shower, a rocket launch or any other astronomical and space event that’s out of this world. More

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      How Meryl Streep Prepared to Play the President in ‘Don’t Look Up’

      by

      Meryl Streep explains how she prepared to play a fictional (and not especially competent) U.S. president in Adam McKay’s apocalyptic satire “Don’t Look Up.”Who would you turn to if you learned a comet was on a collision course with Earth and decisive action was required to prevent the extinction of all life on this planet? If your first thought was Meryl Streep, you have made both an excellent and terrible choice.In “Don’t Look Up,” from the writer-director Adam McKay (“The Big Short,” “Vice”), two scientists played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence find themselves facing this end-of-the-world scenario and must turn to a United States government led by the fictional President Orlean for assistance.The good news (for the movie, which will reach theaters on Dec. 10 and Netflix on Dec. 24) is that Orlean is played by Streep, the venerated film and TV star; the bad news (for humanity) is that Orlean is a self-centered scoundrel who cares a great deal about her public image but little to nothing about running the country.Orlean is one of several malefactors in “Don’t Look Up,” a social satire that McKay wrote about climate change but that he fully expects will be interpreted as a commentary on the pandemic. The president is also a character whose many faults and shortcomings Streep delighted in bringing to life, and she credits McKay for giving her and her co-stars the latitude to indulge in awfulness.As Streep explained in a recent phone interview, “He never lost heart or confidence in this vision that he had for this thing, which was to make an atmosphere as free as possible for everybody — just go nuts and do what you want. But with a deadly serious intent.”Here, Streep and McKay explained the steps they followed to put President Orlean in the Oval Office.Create a back story.Based on what she’d read in McKay’s screenplay, Streep said she was already envisioning how President Orlean could have won office. “You could imagine a group of various miscreants was pulled together, and she was the least bad of a lot of other candidates that they could have put out there,” Streep said, adding that she thought of Orlean “as someone whose elderly husband had a lot of money, and she got rid of him, and it was in California so she got half. She had no real agenda except to have and retain power, and when she got there, she just realized that the job was pretty easy.”McKay said that in naming the character, he was thinking of New Orleans — “It’s a fun city, but it’s kind of in jeopardy” — and not the fact that Streep played the author Susan Orlean in “Adaptation.” (The notion that he manifested Streep in the role by naming it for her, McKay said, is “definitely not the case.”)Draw on real-life inspiration.McKay said he thought of President Orlean as “a goulash” of recent chief executives. That meant “the self-serving con man aspects of the last president, the dangerous inexperience of George W. Bush, the slick polish of Bill Clinton, the celebrity of Barack Obama and the coziness with big money,” McKay said. Another inspiration was the finance expert Suze Orman, whom McKay described as “a brash populist with a strong fashion statement.”To that recipe, Streep said she added a dash of the “Real Housewives,” whose televised squabbles often play in her house when her daughters come to visit. Though Streep won an Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady,” she said that performance was instructive only up to a point. Thatcher, she said, “wielded a kind of femininity that was intimidating to men, and part of her power was how she could pull it together — it was very specific to the ladder she climbed there.” Orlean, she said, is “more of our time — algorithmically put together.”Streep on the set. Her look was modeled on that of news anchors.Niko Tavernise/NetflixLook the part.Streep had a hand in devising Orlean’s fashion sensibility, which she said communicated something essential about the character: “So what if she’s 70 years old and dresses like she’s 35?” she explained. “No one told her you can’t be 35 forever.” That meant attire modeled after TV news anchors who, Streep said, “tend to pick these broad swaths of bright, happy colors to put on themselves — no prints, no polka dots or plaids or, God forbid, florals. None of the things that other people wear. Just these power suits and pencil skirts.” It also called for a specific hair regimen: “When I was in high school, you’d set your hair in rollers, then take it out and brush it 100 times,” Streep said. “This is the kind of hair where you take it out of rollers and just leave it like that — the longer the better. And then those are sprayed and crisped and the ends curl out in weird ways. And that’s a thing. It has always escaped me why this was good. So I thought, well, I’m going to try to that — God knows I won’t do it in my real life.”Get ready to face the crowds.All that advance planning may still not fully prepare you for the demands of the presidency, as Streep discovered on her first day of shooting. She had spent several weeks in isolation, as screen actors have been required to do during the pandemic. Then, on the appointed day, she said, “I bundled up in my big down coat, put the dog in the back of my car, drove through a snowstorm to Worcester, Mass., and got out at a stadium and parked.” Once there, Streep said, “They tried to turn me away at several points to get into the set. I said no, I’m in it.” After getting into hair, makeup and costume, Streep took to the stage where she saw her face on a Jumbotron and heard the delayed echo of her voice as she spoke to a crowd of several hundred extras. “And I just lost it,” she said. “I thought, well, I clearly have to retire. I can’t do this. I actually can’t do this. It was really a crisis of confidence.” Needless to say, Streep did find her bearings, but, she said, “it took a while.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More