Oppenheimer, J Robert

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares169 Views

    How Much Say Should Families Have in Biopics?

    by

    The Oscars slate this year is packed with films rooted in historical events and biographies. How much influence should the subjects have?When Walter Naegle was first approached over a decade ago by producers who wanted to make a feature about his late partner, the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Naegle needed to be talked into it.Rustin, who had been the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington — and an openly gay public figure at a time when few were — had already been the subject of the nonfiction “Brother Outsider” (2003). Naegle remembers saying to the producers, “What do I need you guys for? We have a very good documentary.”But Naegle was persuaded, in part by knowing that a vast audience could be reached with a fictionalized feature, and he gave his blessing, starting a yearslong process of consultation with filmmakers that culminated in “Rustin,” directed by George C. Wolfe and starring Colman Domingo, who has been nominated for an Oscar for his performance.When Naegle saw the film for the first time, he felt overwhelming relief. “Colman’s performance had really captured this person who I cared about,” he said.At Sunday’s Academy Awards, Rustin is one of several historical figures who are the focus of nominated films. Other real-life subjects include the father of the atomic bomb, a lauded American conductor and the victims and perpetrators of the Reign of Terror in the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma.JaNae Collins, left, Lily Gladstone, Cara Jade Myers and Jillian Dion in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which was refocused after a meeting with relatives of the real-life Osage subjects.Melinda Sue Gordon/Apple Original FilmsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Television

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

      by

      “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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Who’s Who in ‘Oppenheimer’: A Guide to the Real People

      by

      Christopher Nolan’s complex drama depicts the development of the nuclear bomb and midcentury political machinations. Here’s the back story.The premise of “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic, is straightforward: tell the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist known as the “father of the atomic bomb.” But, as with the director’s other movies, the execution is far from simple. The film skips between time periods, and it features a dizzying array of scientists, politicians and possible Communist agents amid a series of government hearings.Here’s a guide to help you keep track of the real-life characters and events of the movie.J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy)The American theoretical physicist (played by Cillian Murphy) spearheaded the development of the atomic bomb through the Manhattan Project.Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer spent his undergraduate years at Harvard before moving to Cambridge, England, for graduate work in physics. There, he grew frustrated with his tutor’s insistence that he focus on lab work instead of theory and is reported to have given the man, Patrick Blackett, a poisoned apple. The tutor never ate the apple, but university officials placed him on probation. That said, the episode is the subject of conflicting stories.After receiving his doctorate in physics at a German university, Oppenheimer accepted professorships at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, helping to pioneer work in an American school of theoretical physics.With World War II well underway, Oppenheimer was appointed director of Los Alamos, part of the mammoth effort to develop the bomb. Having fallen in love with New Mexico when he was sent there as a boy to recover from dysentery, he established a secret lab in the desert of Los Alamos, N.M., coordinating efforts by top physicists and engineers that culminated in the first nuclear explosion, at Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, known as the Trinity test.He later directed the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent center for theoretical research, in Princeton, N.J., and became chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission.Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr.)Robert Downey Jr. plays the man who campaigned to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressOppenheimer’s primary antagonist in the film, Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and a leader of the campaign to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance.Born in West Virginia, he worked variously as a traveling shoe salesman, an investment bank partner and a bureaucrat helping the future president Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration during World War I. After World War II, President Harry S. Truman appointed Strauss to the Atomic Energy Commission and he became its chairman, pushing for the development of the hydrogen bomb. Strauss later served as acting secretary of commerce under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but his nomination was rejected by the Senate, in part because of the scientific community’s outrage over his treatment of Oppenheimer.Jean Tatlock (played by Florence Pugh)An active member of the Bay Area’s Communist Party, Tatlock (Florence Pugh) was a graduate student at Stanford Medical School when she began dating Oppenheimer in 1936. She helped introduce him to Communist activists, fueling his left-leaning sympathies. She ended her relationship with Oppenheimer in 1939, even as he continued to visit her. Their last meeting, in June 1943, was surveilled by F.B.I. agents. In 1944, the 29-year-old Tatlock was found dead in her bathroom. Most historians conclude she died by suicide.William Borden (played by David Dastmalchian)Born in 1920 in Washington, D.C., Borden (David Dastmalchian) had degrees from Yale and Yale Law. He eventually worked as legislative secretary for a Connecticut senator, Brien McMahon, and became staff director of the congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1949.In 1953, most likely with the encouragement of Strauss, he sent a letter to the F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover, suggesting that “more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” This was the catalyst for a closed-door hearing about Oppenheimer’s Communist ties — depicted in the film — and the eventual revocation of his security clearance.Ernest Lawrence (played by Josh Hartnett)A Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) was born in 1901 in South Dakota. He earned a doctorate in physics from Yale and became a professor of physics at U.C. Berkeley, where he invented the cyclotron, a particle accelerator that was instrumental to the development of the atomic bomb. It was Lawrence who helped introduce Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project. After the war, he advocated for the development of hydrogen nuclear weapons.Edward Teller (played by Benny Safdie)Benny Safdie as the physicist Edward Teller, who testified against Oppenheimer.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressBorn in Budapest, Teller (Benny Safdie) earned his physics doctorate in Germany and was later offered a professorship at George Washington University, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1941. Known for his research into nuclear energy, he joined Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos, where he worked in the theoretical physics division.Teller was obsessed with hydrogen energy and the development of a hydrogen bomb, which led him to butt heads with other members of the Manhattan Project. After the Soviet Union tested an atomic weapon in 1949, Teller became a primary proponent of developing hydrogen bombs to gain leverage in the Cold War.He later testified against Oppenheimer in the closed-door hearing, saying, “I feel I would prefer to see the vital interests of this country in hands that I understand better and therefore trust more.”Did Oppenheimer really meet Einstein?Yes, they were colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study. “Though I knew Einstein for two or three decades, it was only in the last decade of his life that we were close colleagues and something of friends,” Oppenheimer wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1966.However, Nolan has admitted that he made up a key scene between the two: At one point, Oppenheimer goes to the taciturn Einstein for advice on calculations by the Los Alamos team, which showed that the Trinity test could be contained and wouldn’t blow up the world.“It wasn’t Einstein who Oppenheimer went to consult about it,” Nolan said in a recent interview. “It was Arthur Compton, who directed an outpost of the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago. But I shifted that to Einstein.”What are the two hearings featured in the film?Cillian Murphy, center, as Oppenheimer. Black-and-white scenes follow 1959 Senate hearings on the nomination of Lewis Strauss for commerce secretary. Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal PicturesThe film revolves around two committee hearings — one, in 1954, depicted in color and the other, in 1959, in black and white.The first was a four-week secret meeting in which the Atomic Energy Commission deliberated on whether to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Amid a scare about Soviet technological advances, Oppenheimer’s possible links to left-wing causes had come under scrutiny, and Borden’s letter to Hoover provided the tipping point. When the commission chairman, Strauss, informed Oppenheimer that his security clearance had been suspended, Oppenheimer refused to resign and demanded a hearing from the commission’s Personnel Security Board.That hearing was one-sided from the beginning, with Oppenheimer’s lawyers barred from accessing confidential materials, while the commission’s prosecuting attorney had access to hundreds of wiretap recordings. Ultimately, the three-person board decided that Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen but that his security clearance should be rescinded.In 1959, the Senate held a hearing on Strauss’s nomination for commerce secretary, a heated process that Time magazine called “U.S. history’s bitterest battle over confirmation of a presidential nomination.” The nomination was rejected, in a 49-to-46 vote.What ultimately happened to Oppenheimer?After losing his security clearance, Oppenheimer continued to teach and conduct research with the support of many in the scientific community, who saw him as a martyr. In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson granted him the Enrico Fermi Award, which honors lifetime achievements in energy science.In 1966, he retired from the Institute for Advanced Study and died from throat cancer the next year.In December 2022, a few days after a trailer for “Oppenheimer” was released, Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm nullified the 1954 decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance. She cited a “flawed process” that violated the Atomic Energy Commission’s own regulations.“More evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to,” Granholm said, “while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

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

      by

      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