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    The Newest ‘Godzilla’ Film Is Stranger Than Fiction

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    Effects artists annihilate cities in movies all the time. Tokyo really was destroyed, a reality the best Godzilla stories have always taken seriously.A mighty monster stomps across the skyline, scaled and unstoppable, leaving destruction in his wake. Bridges, skyscrapers, electrical towers: Nothing can withstand his might. Every step produces a shock wave, every breath a firestorm. He swats away missiles and artillery shells like so many gnats. Civilians race before him through the streets, necks craned upward in terror. Godzilla was hardly the first movie monster, but he is undeniably the king. Across almost 40 feature films, the aquatic kaiju has gone from inscrutable menace to heroic savior and back again. Even the casual movie viewer can picture the formula: rubber-suited men wrestling above miniature model cities while puny humans look on with horror and begrudging respect. These rampages have become quaint and kitschy, safe enough to be parodied by Austin Powers and Pee-wee Herman.Yet for the Japanese audiences who saw Ishiro Honda’s “Gojira” in 1954, the sight of annihilated cityscapes would have been quite familiar. Just after midnight on March 10, 1945, a fleet of American B-29 bombers firebombed Tokyo, targeting the city’s wood-built low-income neighborhoods with napalm. The firestorm rapidly spread, and over the following hours at least 100,000 people died, “scorched and boiled and baked to death,” in the words of the operation’s mastermind, Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay of the Air Force. Survivors recalled rolling banks of fire. Temperatures so high that metal melted and human bodies burst spontaneously into flame. By Aug. 15, this strategy had expanded to 67 cities and included the dropping of two atomic bombs. It’s been estimated that 400,000 Japanese civilians were killed and that nearly nine million more were made homeless. Honda’s film directly calls up these events. His Godzilla is a prehistoric beast, a dinosaur awoken from a subterranean chasm by underwater hydrogen-bomb testing. The monster acts with the implacable, impregnable logic of a natural disaster. His destruction of a village on remote Odo Island resembles a typhoon or a tsunami. When he finally reaches Tokyo, humans can do nothing as he rages, torching streets and crushing train cars in his teeth. Shooting in stark black and white, Honda frames the monster against a horizon of fire, like the annihilated cityscapes of the very recent past. Godzilla would go on to fight a giant moth, a three-headed dragon from outer space and King Kong. But the same traumatic kernel has always remained at the core of his appearances. At the start of Takashi Yamazaki’s “Godzilla Minus One,” released this fall, Tokyo has already been destroyed — by Allied firebombing. It is 1946, and the kamikaze pilot Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) has returned home to a leveled landscape. His parents are dead. So are the children of his neighbor and the families of just about everyone he meets, including the plucky thief Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and Akiko, a baby orphaned by the bombing. As it happens, Koichi had a run-in with Godzilla in the last days of the war, but he is less concerned with monsters than he is with finding warm clothing and food for Akiko, who is malnourished — and with his guilt over surviving his suicide mission. He cannot make peace with the world or with himself. As he tells Noriko, “My war isn’t over.” For all the seat-shaking power of Godzilla’s roar, there is no sound more unsettling than an air-raid siren. Yamazaki’s film resembles, at first, many postwar melodramas, depicting a generation of men so traumatized by their experiences that they do not know how to move on with their lives and a society struggling to shake off a wartime culture of death. Koichi takes a dangerous job clearing mines left behind by both U.S. and Japanese forces, a lethal embodiment of the war lingering long into peacetime. It is this work that reunites Koichi with the monster of his nightmares. In this film, Godzilla is a deep-sea beast given powers of regeneration and destruction by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. These powers embolden and enrage the animal; even launching its catastrophic heat ray seems to scorch the creature from the inside, making each attack a mutually destructive act. Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood recalls the 1923 Kanto earthquake, with each step splitting the earth and even the brushing of his tail causing buildings to crumble, crushing hundreds beneath the wreckage. Yet this is all prelude. When the army finally arrives to drive Godzilla back, the creature charges up its fiery breath, letting loose a thermonuclear blast that flattens the city, murdering thousands in an instant. The creature roars, and Yamazaki’s camera pans up to reveal a mushroom cloud blooming in the skies over Tokyo.It is an immensely discomfiting moment, and something about it reveals why Hollywood’s numerous attempts to bring the monster to America have never creatively succeeded. Beginning with Roland Emmerich’s 1998 “Godzilla,” the monster has flattened New York, San Francisco and Boston, to increasingly dull effect. Emmerich’s bombastic approach to destruction renders the action glib and meaningless. Honda shows us a cross-section of Tokyo society to underline all the life about to be lost; Emmerich’s misanthropic disaster epics, from “The Day After Tomorrow” to “2012,” marshal large casts in order to gleefully pick them off. So many Hollywood blockbusters these days end with a beam of colored light shooting into the sky and the whole world in peril. Thanks to teams of overworked effects artists, it is easier than ever to snap your fingers and annihilate entire cities, to make the deaths of thousands, even millions, seem banal. No American city has ever directly experienced the catastrophe of modern warfare, and you feel filmmakers grasping at the same examples over and over again. Zach Snyder invokes Sept. 11; “The Batman,” from 2022, ends by blowing Gotham’s levees, as if the city were New Orleans. Yet all this imagery feels cheap, deployed as a backdrop to the superheroic deeds at center stage.Tokyo really was destroyed, a reality the best Godzilla stories have always taken seriously. “Minus One” stays with the human victims as they race through the streets, horrified that their home is being destroyed, again, and so soon. Where Emmerich’s film exults in the carnage of laying waste to a city, Yamazaki’s insists on the damage, the destruction that recurs, returns, revictimizes. And he grounds it in very real terror; for all the seat-shaking power of Godzilla’s roar, there is no sound more unsettling than an air-raid siren. The writer W.G. Sebald once argued that the destruction of German cities from the air was so extensive that it left almost no imprint upon the popular consciousness. The bombing could be captured in statistics and generalizations but never as “an experience capable of public decipherment.” Faced with such mass destruction, the individual experience shrinks, until even those who live through war choose not to recall it. A similar thing could be said of our cinematic depictions. When a city is annihilated with a deadening wipe of one digital hand, it implies something foregone, even natural about the process. Indeed, LeMay’s forces modeled their firestorm on the one caused by the 1923 Kanto earthquake, and in the testimony of survivors the conflagration takes on a life of its own, a ferocious beast attacking from all sides. But there is nothing natural about the destruction of cities in wartime. Such devastation must be planned, ordered and executed, conscripting thousands to kill many thousands more. Someone has to build the bombs, and someone else to drop them from on high. There are homes below, schools and parks and hospitals, the topography of an entire life, buried under the rubble. When these images appear on our screens, it’s worth remembering: For some, this is spectacular fantasy; but for others, the horror is entirely too real.Source photographs for above: Toho Co. Ltd./Prod DB/Alamy Stock Photo.Robert Rubsam is a freelance writer and critic. More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Will Be Released in Japan After Earlier Backlash

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      Critics said the film’s cross-promotion with “Barbie” trivialized the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan during World War II, but the biopic will be released in 2024.The box office blockbuster “Oppenheimer” will be released in Japan in 2024, a local distributor announced on Thursday, quashing speculation over the film’s rollout there following criticism of its promotion online.Bitters End, a Japanese film distributor, did not give an exact date for the Universal Pictures film’s opening in Japan, but said it would happen next year.The simultaneous release this summer of “Oppenheimer,” the brooding biopic about the creation of the atomic bomb, and “Barbie,” a fantastic-plastic tale of a doll’s awakening, was a discordant mash-up that delighted film fans. The “Barbenheimer” moment generated fan-made merchandise, memes and plentiful cross-promotion of the two features.But many in Japan took offense, with critics saying that the Barbenheimer meme trivialized the horrors of the U.S. military’s nuclear attacks, which killed hundreds of thousands of mostly civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hashtag #NoBarbenheimer spread widely on social media, and some vowed to boycott watching “Barbie,” which was released in Japan in August.The backlash even spurred conflict among the films’ distributors after the official “Barbie” movie account on social media responded playfully to fan-made Barbenheimer creations — including a photoshopped image of a Barbie with an atomic bomb bouffant.In an unusual rebuke, a Japanese subsidiary of Warner Bros called the headquarters’ endorsement of the meme “highly regrettable.” Warner Bros. later apologized for “insensitive social media” engagement and deleted its responses to the memes.The decision to release “Oppenheimer” in Japan came after “various discussions and considerations,” Bitters End said in a statement on Thursday, according to local media. The distributor said that it was aware that the film’s “subject matter has a very important and special meaning for us Japanese people,” and said it believed that the film should be seen in cinemas. Bitters End did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Foreign films are often released in Japan far later than their initial distribution, sometimes by years, but when its promoters there did not initially set a release date, the marketing backlash caused speculation over “Oppenheimer” not being released at all. It has grossed nearly $1 billion in box office sales worldwide.“Barbie,” the top-grossing Warner. Bros. film of all time at nearly $1.5 billion, debuted in Japan just weeks after its initial release. But its reception in Japanese theaters was modest, and some local commentators speculated that the Barbenheimer controversy had cast a shadow on the film. More

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      ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Asteroid City’ and the Meaning of the Mushroom Cloud

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      From the Trinity test to “Oppenheimer” and “Asteroid City,” the symbol of nuclear destruction has held multiple but equally disturbing meanings.Witnesses to the Trinity test, the inaugural atomic bomb experiment in 1945 portrayed in “Oppenheimer,” described the billowing blast in various ways. It was said to resemble a chimney, a parasol, a raspberry and — shades of science fiction — a “convoluting brain.” The physicist Enrico Fermi and others likened the furiously rising cloud in the New Mexico desert to a mushroom, and that became the shape now inextricably associated with nuclear explosions.The enduring shorthand of the mushroom cloud has taken on different meanings over the decades, reflecting fantasies and fears as it boomed and bloomed across American culture, including, most recently, onscreen in “Oppenheimer” and “Asteroid City.” A multiplicity of meanings is appropriate for a weapon that was partly conceived as a symbolic demonstration in the first place, meant to cow Japan into surrender in World War II.Once the cloud appeared, it quickly stood in for that watershed moment in history. By the beginning of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946 — meant to measure the effects of such blasts on warships — one reporter referred to the mushroom as “the common symbol of the atomic age.” At a reception to celebrate the first round of tests, the commander of the operation, Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, even cut a cake shaped like a mushroom blast.From Armageddon to dessert decoration in a little over a year: The rapid progression captures the wonder-horror duality that the bomb elicited. On the one hand, the looming form fed easily into a military and jingoistic pride. What other instrument of war essentially left a trademark in the sky? On the other, it provoked sheer terror with its vision of godlike destruction funneled straight up to the heavens. The co-pilot of the Enola Gay bomber put it more succinctly: “My God, what have we done?,” words that Oppenheimer echoed with his momentous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”David Lynch depicted the Trinity test in a hallucinogenic scene in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”ShowtimeAnd yet something so novel and dazzling couldn’t help but make its way into popular culture. If the Bikini test could inspire the name of a swimsuit, then of course the mushroom cloud would be picked up as a titillating marketing gimmick. A few beauty queens were deployed as “Miss Atomic Bomb” and the like, wearing mushroom-shaped headgear or swimwear, part of a general fad for atomic-themed kitsch (as memorably chronicled in the documentary “The Atomic Cafe”). The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce offered calendars with detonation times for watching the mushroom clouds from desert tests. In Wes Anderson’s desert-set “Asteroid City,” characters also observe an atomic test on the horizon, trooping out of a diner to watch with nonchalance.But a golden era of sci-fi movies in the 1950s ensured that the deadly possibilities of the atomic age were also explored in vivid visual fashion. These mushroom clouds directly addressed new sources of anxiety: the arms race (set off after the Soviets’ 1949 atomic test), the effects of radiation, and the hydrogen bomb and its even bigger boom. Monster and alien movies (and sci-fi book covers) featured the cloud as a modern Pandora’s box, a foolish unleashing of unknown forces.From early on, it could signify the unthinkable — the erasure of civilization — as in Arch Oboler’s movie “Five” (1951), which opens with explosions and a montage of historical monuments. The cloud could represent the beginning or the end (to echo the title of a 1947 docudrama about Oppenheimer). It might be the prelude to a plot about surviving the aftermath of a nuclear blast, or the doomsday finale to a story that has gone very, very wrong. Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” from 1964, falls into the second category, concluding with a montage using footage from explosions (including the Trinity test).But Kubrick alters our understanding of the mushroom clouds with the ironic usage of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again,” originally a British World War II standard. Viewed silently, the explosions might have induced the usual dread, an emotion that in a way also fed back into awe and fear of military prowess. Kubrick’s peerless satire redirects our focus toward those in power, the absurd-sounding game-theory strategies at work, and the self-serving vanities involved — including the image of Slim Pickens riding the bomb, bronco-style, American soldier as cowboy.All of which undercut the mushroom cloud as totemic image that ends all discussion. It wouldn’t last long: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign ad “Daisy” distilled the nuclear menace in just under two minutes. This is the cloud as the eternal “or else” of the protecting patriarch. The stakes are too high to ignore, Johnson intones in voice-over, as a girl counts the petals on a flower; the audio segues into a countdown toward an explosion that fills the screen. So, you know, get out and vote!The horrors of the mushroom cloud approached new levels in the 1980s thanks to realistic depictions of global nuclear war. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a fevered pitch during the Reagan administration (as if fulfilling the fears of “no nukes” protesters), “The Day After” (1983) broke television ratings records portraying explosions from incoming missiles and the ensuing graphic suffering in Kansas. In Britain, “Threads” (1984) did much the same, while in Japan, Shohei Imamura’s 1989 “Black Rain” dramatized the Hiroshima bombings anew. These films reconnected the near-cliché of the mushroom cloud with its human context of death, destruction and chaos.But in the ensuing decades, the mushroom cloud became the ultimate special effect for blockbusters. James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) faithfully replicated the fiery annihilation of a bomb blast, hauntingly explicit but still part of a science-fiction thriller with robots. Three years later, a nuclear explosion was just the icing on the action-adventure cake in Cameron’s “True Lies.” Call it the decadent era of nukes onscreen: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis embrace after the umpteenth thrilling escape, with a warhead’s mushroom cloud for a romantic backdrop.Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in “True Lies,” which uses a mushroom cloud as a romantic backdrop.Lightstorm EntertainmentThe entertainment value of disaster briefly lost its appeal in the wake of Sept. 11 (when a number of films were postponed or altered). But atomic devices were useful plot devices with increasing prominence in 2010s blockbusters, deploying the shock of the mushroom cloud whenever useful, as in the jaw-dropping World War II-set opening of “The Wolverine” (2013). When Nagasaki is bombed by the United States, Logan (Hugh Jackman), prisoner of war, shields a Japanese soldier from the blast, thereby rendering the cataclysm as simply part of the X-Men back story.Will the mushroom cloud reacquire the same foreboding quality it had at the height of the Cold War? David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017) demonstrated one possibility in its genuinely destabilizing Episode 8, drawing out the full uncanny horror of the atomic age and the possibility of evil. The Trinity test is depicted with a hallucinogenic slow camera movement into the cloud from far away, and in one of the ensuing surreal sequences, a mutant creature hatches on the bomb site years later. Oppenheimer said that his scientists had “known sin,” and Lynch, a voyager into the American unconscious, restores some sense of the atomic blast as locus of a 20th-century original sin.“Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan, presents the latest entry in the iconography of the mushroom cloud with its chronicle of the Manhattan Project’s explosive results. We do see the traditional rising plume, but at a certain point, this turns into an IMAX-size wall of flame, blotting out the landscape. It’s a fearsome sight, yet the reaction shots of the observers are just as important. Cillian Murphy’s title character — who is more or less haunted by subatomic particles even in his dreams as a student years earlier — looks briefly disarmed or stricken by the infernal sight of the blast. We hear the famous words from the Bhagavad Gita, but in Nolan’s telling, they’ve been previously uttered in a wildly different context that suggests the atomic bomb as the ultimate psychosexual release.It’s a depiction that manages to fulfill and tweak expectations at the same time. Nolan returns the nuclear explosion from the realm of symbolism to a primal zone of fears and urges — a cataclysm created by other human beings like us. More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Fans Are Rediscovering a 40-Year-Old Documentary

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      “The Day After Trinity,” made available without a subscription until August, shot to the top of the Criterion Channel’s most-watched films.One morning in the 1950s, Jon H. Else’s father pointed toward Nevada from their home in Sacramento. “There was this orange glow that suddenly rose up in the sky, and then shrank back down,” Else recalled.It was, hundreds of miles away, an atomic weapon test: a symbol of the world that was created when a team of Americans led by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer exploded the first nuclear bomb a decade earlier on July 16, 1945.Growing up in the nuclear age left an impression on Else, now 78.He was later a series producer of the award-winning “Eyes on the Prize,” a program on the civil rights movement, and directed documentaries about the Great Depression and Wagner’s “Ring” cycle. But before all that, in 1981, he made a documentary about Oppenheimer, the scientist whose bony visage graced the covers of midcentury magazines, and the bomb. It was called “The Day After Trinity,” a reference to that inaugural detonation.Decades later, viewers are flocking to Else’s film, a nominee for the Academy Award for best documentary feature, as a companion to Christopher Nolan’s biopic “Oppenheimer,” which grossed more than $100 million domestically in its opening week this month.After the Criterion Channel made “The Day After Trinity” available without a subscription until August, it shot to the top of the streaming service’s most-watched films this month, alongside movies directed by Martin Scorsese, Paul Verhoeven, Michael Mann and other typically Letterboxdcore filmmakers.“We have seen a huge increase in views,” Criterion said in a statement, “and we’re very happy with the success of the strategy as a way to make sure this film found its rightful place in the conversation around ‘Oppenheimer.’”In a phone interview from California last week, Else, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, praised Nolan’s film, which he saw last weekend in San Francisco. (A spokeswoman for Nolan said he was not available to comment.)“These stories have to be retold every generation,” Else said, “and they have to be told by new storytellers.”Nolan’s three-hour opus, a Universal release shot on IMAX film with a lavish cast of brand-name Hollywood actors, shares much with “The Day After Trinity,” an 88-minute documentary financed by the public television station in San Jose, Calif., and various grants.The Oppenheimer of “Oppenheimer” (based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “American Prometheus”), and the Oppenheimer of “The Day After Trinity” are the same brilliant, sensitive, haunted soul. “This man who was apparently a completely nonviolent fellow was the architect of the most savage weapon in history,” Else said.The movies feature some of the same characters from the life of Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, including his brother, Frank (played in “Oppenheimer” by Dylan Arnold), his friend Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) and the physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz). Both films build to Trinity and then document the conflict between some of its inventors’ hope that the bomb would never be used in war and its deployment in Japan, the invention of the more devastating hydrogen bomb and the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.A central plot point in each movie is a closed hearing in 1954 at which Oppenheimer was stripped of his government security clearance, partly because of past left-wing associations. David Webb Peoples, a co-editor and co-writer of “The Day After Trinity” — whose later screenwriting credits include “Blade Runner,” “Unforgiven” and “12 Monkeys” — even proposed structuring the film around the hearing, as Nolan did with “Oppenheimer.”“The closest he ever came to an autobiography is his personal statement at the beginning of the hearing,” said Else, who focused on interviews with firsthand witnesses, old footage and still photographs rather than trying to recreate the hearing.“It’s also a courtroom drama,” Else added, “and who is not going to pay attention to a courtroom drama?”One place “The Day After Trinity” goes that “Oppenheimer” does not is Hiroshima. In the documentary, Manhattan Project physicists recount wandering the wrecked Japanese city. The narrator explains that the Allies had not bombed it beforehand to preserve a place to demonstrate the new weapon.Else returned to the topic in his 2007 documentary, “Wonders Are Many: The Making of ‘Doctor Atomic,’” which chronicles the composer John Adams’s opera about Oppenheimer. Else is currently working on a book about nuclear testing. And in 1982, he made a one-hour episode of the public-television series “Nova” about the Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum that was founded in 1969 by none other than Frank Oppenheimer.“Making ‘The Day After Trinity’ was a pretty rugged ride — it’s pretty rugged subject matter,” Else said. “After I finished it, it was such a joy to spend a year with Robert Oppenheimer’s younger brother, Frank, and celebrate the joy of science.” More

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      Behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ a Prizewinning Biography 25 Years in the Making

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      Martin Sherwin struck the deal and dove into the research. But it was only when Kai Bird joined as a collaborator that “American Prometheus” came to be.Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted.So on March 13, 1980, Sherwin signed a $70,000 contract with Knopf for the project. Paid half to get started, he expected to finish it in five years.In the end, the book took 25 years to write — and Sherwin didn’t do it alone.When Christopher Nolan’s film “Oppenheimer” is released on July 21, it will be the first time many younger Americans encounter the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer. But that film stands on the shoulders of the exhaustive and exhilarating 721-page Pulitzer Prize-winning biography called “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” co-written by Sherwin and Kai Bird.Knopf published this masterwork in 2005. But it was only thanks to a rare collaboration between two indefatigable writers — and a deep friendship, built around a shared dedication to the art of biography as a life’s work — that “American Prometheus” got done at all.Cillian Murphy, center, as the title character in “Oppenheimer,” which was written and directed by Christopher Nolan.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressOPPENHEIMER would have been a daunting subject for any biographer.A public intellectual with a flair for the dramatic, he directed the top-secret lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking the atomic bomb from theoretical possibility to terrifying reality in an impossibly short timeline. Later he emerged as a kind of philosopher king of the postwar nuclear era, publicly opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb and becoming a symbol both of America’s technological genius and of its conscience.That stance made Oppenheimer a target in the McCarthy era, spurring his enemies to paint him as a Communist sympathizer. He was stripped of his security clearance during a 1954 hearing convened by the Atomic Energy Commission. He lived the rest of his life diminished, and died at 62 in 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey.When Sherwin began interviewing people there who had known him, he was taken aback by the intensity of their feelings. Physicists, and the widows of physicists, were still angry for the casual neglect Oppenheimer had shown to his family.Yet after Sherwin moved his own family to Boston for a job at Tufts University, he and his wife Susan met Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, who admitted with embarrassment that their years working under Oppenheimer on the bomb were some of the happiest of their lives.Among the scores of people Sherwin also interviewed were Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer’s onetime best friend whose Communist ties in part formed the basis of the inquisition against him, and Edward Teller, whose testimony at the 1954 hearing helped end his career.Published in 2005, the book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for biography.Naum Kazhdan/The New York TimesOppenheimer’s son Peter refused a formal interview, so Sherwin brought his family to the Pecos Wilderness near Santa Fe, saddled up a horse and rode to the Oppenheimers’ rustic cabin, wrangling a chance to talk to the scientist’s son as the two men built a fence. “Marty never thought he was a great interviewer,” said Susan Sherwin, who accompanied him on many research trips, and survives him. But he had a knack for connecting with people.Sherwin’s deadline came and went. His editor retired, and he did his best to avoid his new one. There was always another person to interview, or another document to read.The unfinished book became a running joke in the Sherwin household.“We had this New Yorker cartoon on our refrigerator my entire childhood,” his son Alex remembered. “It’s a guy at a typewriter, and he’s surrounded by stacks of papers. His wife is in the distance, in the threshold of the door to his office. And he says, ‘Finish it? Why would I want to finish it?’”KAI BIRD, A FORMER associate editor at The Nation, needed a job. It was 1999, and while Bird had written a couple of modestly successful biographies, as a 48-year-old historian without a Ph.D. he was underqualified for a tenure-track university position and overqualified for nearly everything else. His wife, Susan Goldmark, who held a lucrative job at the World Bank, was getting tired of being the main breadwinner.Bird was unsuccessfully applying for jobs at newspapers when he heard from an old friend. Sherwin took Bird out to dinner, and suggested they join forces on Oppenheimer.They had known each other for years, and their friendship had solidified in the mid-1990s, when Bird included Sherwin’s essays in a volume about the controversy surrounding a planned Smithsonian exhibit of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb.A 1957 photo of Oppenheimer at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study.John Rooney/Associated PressBut there was one complication. “My first book started out as a collaboration with my best friend,” the writer Max Holland, Bird said, “and eight years later ended in divorce.” Things broke down, in part, over disagreements about how much research was enough.The episode had been painful. Never again, his wife reminded him.“I told Marty, ‘No, I can’t. I like you too much,’ ” Bird said.So began a yearlong charm campaign to convince Bird, but especially Goldmark, that this time would be different. “I was watching very carefully, looking at them interacting and finishing each other’s sentences the way couples sometimes do,” she recalled. “They were both so cute.”Finally, with everyone on board, Gail Ross, Bird’s agent, negotiated a new contract with Knopf, which agreed to pay the pair an additional $290,000 to finish the book.Sherwin cautioned Bird that there were gaps in his research. But soon “untold numbers of boxes” started showing up at Bird’s home, according to his wife. As Bird began to sift through everything, he recognized how painstakingly detailed and dizzyingly broad Sherwin’s research was. “There were no gaps,” Bird remembered.It was time to write. Bird started at the beginning.“I wrote a draft of the early childhood years,” he said, “and Marty took it and rewrote it.” Sherwin sent the revision back to Bird, who was impressed. “He knew exactly what was missing in the anecdotes,” Bird said.Kai Bird, left, and Martin J. Sherwin in 2006, showing off a copy of their long-in-the-making book “American Prometheus.”Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressTheir process took shape: Bird would pore over the research, synthesize it, and produce a draft which he’d send to Sherwin, who would recognize what was missing, edit and rewrite, and return the copy to Bird. Soon Sherwin was drafting as well. “We wrote furiously for four years,” Bird said.Sherwin always knew that the hearing that stripped Oppenheimer of his clearance would be the “epicenter” of the biography, Bird said. They argued about what the evidence might suggest, but never about style, process, or the shape of the book itself. “It became,” Susan Sherwin said, “almost a magical thing.”By fall 2004, nearly 25 years after Knopf committed to the project, the manuscript was almost ready. Bird and Sherwin’s editor Ann Close vetoed “Oppie,” the pair’s working title. A scramble ensued, until something came to Goldmark late at night: “Prometheus … fire … the bomb is this fire. And you could put ‘American’ there.’ ”Bird dismissed “American Prometheus” as too obscure, until Sherwin called the next morning to tell him that a friend, the biographer Ronald Steel, had suggested the same title over dinner the night before. “I’m in big trouble,” said Bird. His wife felt vindicated.Bird said that his collaborator would have been pleased by “Oppenheimer.” Michael Avedon/AugustOn April 5, 2005, Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” was published to enormous acclaim. The Boston Globe raved that it “stands as an Everest among the mountains of books on the bomb project and Oppenheimer, and is an achievement not likely to be surpassed or equaled.”Among its numerous accolades was the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Bird always thought the book had an outside shot at the prize, but Sherwin had been skeptical. “He always thought I was an incorrigible optimist. So he was genuinely astonished,” Bird would later say. “He was, in fact, sweetly elated.”BY THE TIME the collaborators learned in September 2021 that Christopher Nolan planned to turn “American Prometheus” into a film, Marty Sherwin was dying of cancer.The pair had read several unmade scripts based on their book over the years, so Sherwin was doubtful of its chances in Hollywood. He was too sick to join, but Bird and Goldmark met Nolan at a boutique hotel in Greenwich Village. Bird reported to Sherwin in person afterward that, with Nolan as writer and director, their work was in good hands.“Oppenheimer’s story is one of the most dramatic and complex that I’ve ever encountered,” Nolan said recently. “I don’t think I ever would have taken this on without Kai and Martin’s book.” (Anticipation for the movie has put the biography on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction paperbacks.)A still from the movie shows Murphy at Los Alamos, where one of the authors got to visit the set.Universal PicturesOn Oct. 6, 2021, Bird received word that his friend had died at the age of 84.Sherwin “would have been deeply pleased,” by the film’s accuracy, Bird said after seeing the film for the first time. “I think he would have appreciated what an artistic achievement it is.”He recalled the day he and his wife spent a few hours on the film’s set in Los Alamos. The crew was filming in Oppenheimer’s original cabin, now painstakingly restored. Bird watched Cillian Murphy do take after take as Oppenheimer, astonished at the actor’s resemblance to the subject he’d spent years studying.Finally, there was a break in filming, and Murphy walked over to introduce himself. As the actor approached — dressed in Oppenheimer’s brown, baggy 1940s-era suit and wide tie — Bird couldn’t help himself.“Dr. Oppenheimer!” he shouted. “I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!”Bird said Murphy just laughed. “We’ve all been reading your book,” the actor told him. “It’s mandatory reading around here.” More