From Page to Screen: Launching ‘Oppenheimer”

Lucky me! Just a few months after Oppenheimer picked up seven Oscars—including Best Picture—at the Academy Awards ceremony, I heard Kai Bird explain in depth how it all came to be. Bird, who donned a tux to attend the flashy ceremony at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre, is the co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. This massive 2005 biography of the theoretical physicist who during World Wart II led the Manhattan Project, resulting in the world’s first atomic weapons, became the source material for Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film. (The research leading to the completed book was begun by Bird’s friend and co-author Martin J. Sherwin, an historian who passed away in 2021.)

 Though Bird and Sherwin won the Pulitzer Prize and other major honors for their 721-page opus, the motion picture industry didn’t immediately get on board.  Like most Hollywood stories, this one took its time in moving from page to screen. That was one big takeaway from this year’s 14^th annual Biographers International Organization, a New York gathering of old pros and biography newbies all of whom love the idea of accurately and compellingly putting a life into words. The session at which Bird appeared was titled “From Book to Film: Selling Options, Scripting, Producing.” The speakers, in addition to Bird, were biographers A’lelia Bundles and Jack El-Hai, both of whom had their own Hollywood stories to tell.

 Needless to say, cynicism abounded at this gathering. Someone called up an old Hemingway story about how, when you sell your work to Hollywood, you stand at the California state line and toss in a bag containing your magnum opus. In exchange, the Hollywood moguls toss back to you a sack full of money. Today the writer/producer dynamic is much more complicated, though, and the money is generally less. Happily, sometimes things work out.

 Longtime journalist Jack El-Hai has had two biographical works optioned by Hollywood. The Lobotomist, his in-depth story of the doctor who invented the questionable procedure, has never quite made it to the screen. But The Nazi and the Psychiatrist –after several false starts—was recently filmed in Europe with a cast headed by Russell Crowe and Rami Malek. Having watched the filming in progress, Jack is thrilled that the project, now titled Nuremberg, will be out by the end of this year. Meanwhile, A’Lelia Bundles’ award-winning work on the life of her own great-great-grandmother, Black cosmetics and hair care entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, was transformed into Self-Made, a Netflix miniseries starring Octavia Spencer. Bundles has high praise for Spencer, but not for the execs who garbled the true story of her ancestor, adding cat fights and other material she deemed offensive but was powerless to reject. (Her contract gave her script review, not script approval, a very big difference.)

 As for Oppenheimer, the material was originally optioned by Sam Mendes. He was coming off his Oscar wins for American Beauty, but couldn’t land the financing he needed. Several additional options followed: one produced a script filled with 108 different historical inaccuracies, like Oppy maliciously poisoning rival physicist Edward Teller at a cocktail party, leading to a dramatic (but wholly bogus) death scene. At long last, a billionaire with a physics background came aboard, then approached Nolan, who cranked out a brilliant 200 -page script retaining virtually all the complexity of Bird’s and Sherwin’s scholarly study. When Bird pointed out a few small issues involving historical accuracy, his words were respected and corrections made. That’s why Bird calls himself today “the luckiest biographer in the history of the planet.”  

 

“Oppenheimer”: The Ecstasy and the Agony of an American Prometheus

There’s no question that Oppenheimer is not as colorful as its “Barbenheimer” mate. There’s simply no place in this story of the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb for the cheery pastels and peppy musical numbers that help make Barbie such a crowd-pleaser. (Oppenheimer’s soundtrack is loud, atonal, and jarring. And at key moments the film shifts away from color cinematography into somber black-and-white.)  It’s instructive to remember, though, that at some point Barbie’s and Oppy’s stories overlap in time. The climactic congressional hearing around which Christopher Nolan’s complicated film is structured took place in 1959, the same year that Mattel’s Ruth Handler introduced her plastic fashion queen to little girls everywhere. What a mixed-up world we live in!

 As a biographer myself, I’m a loyal member of Biographers International Organization. At annual BIO conferences we discuss the implications of biography, and compare techniques for conveying the essence of a life. BIO is where I’ve interacted with Kai Bird, who with the late Martin J. Sherwin wrote the 2005 Oppenheimer biography that became the main source for Christopher Nolan’s film. Their book is massive. In its more than 750 pages it contains a huge amount of information, all of it dedicated to bringing to life a brilliant but highly tormented individual, one whose contributions to science and to the winning of World War II were balanced by a deep-rooted sense of moral culpability. No wonder their work is called American Prometheus, reflecting (in a way the erudite Oppenheimer would surely have appreciated) the tortured Greek hero who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind.

After seeing Oppenheimer, I’ve been reflecting on the very different ways that biography and film serve their subject. Though Oppenheimer crams many historical details into its three-hour running time, I found it hard to connect the vivid faces surrounding the lead character with their role in his orbit. Which were good guys? Which were not? Any spies among them? The action moved much too quickly for me to be sure. And there simply wasn’t time to fill in the family details that a reader of biography craves. Like: how was Oppy raised? What was the source of the family wealth? What exactly did his brother mean to him? And. also, what became of Oppenheimer after the events the film uncovers? What about his children, following a mysterious scene in which Oppy seems to be giving away his hysterically crying little boy to someone better suited to parenthood? Nolan’s work has certainly aroused my curiosity, and I suspect it will drive plenty of new readers to American Prometheus.

 By the same token, film can far outdo a prose biography when it comes to giving us an emotional jolt. The high point of Nolan’s work is of course the Trinity Test, the simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying moment when Oppenheimer and his team witness the successful detonation of an atom bomb in the New Mexico desert. It’s a moment when Nolan pulls out all the stops with every cinematic trick at his disposal, using both sight and sound to bring us the blast that led Oppenheimer to mutter words he himself had translated from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Nolan also relies on bursts of unexpected surrealism when handling Oppy’s extra-marital dalliance with Jean Tatlock, injecting nudity in a very surprising way. And I’ll not soon forget the lead performance of Cillian Murphy, who’s charged with holding together the portrayal of a man simultaneously otherworldly and all too down to earth.