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The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--And America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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$13.99
Used
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Hardcover
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9781620975732
Overview
Overview
The dark and absurd story of Hollywood's attempt to make "the most important story ever" about the Manhattan Project
Almost as soon as bombs had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, MGM Studios had sewn up the rights to make the picture Louis B. Mayer would call "the most important story" he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention of the atomic bomb.
Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was at the same time ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in protagonist J. Robert Oppenheimer the embodiment of her first individualist man-hero-visionary, Howard Roark.
In the tradition of Mark Harris's Five Came Back, Greg Mitchell's The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of the American culture industry to process the Atomic Age. What began as a faithful cautionary tale with major stars that could have set a responsible path of respect for fearsome technology was drained of all blood by thousands of cuts. Concessions to Truman, the military, and the scientists for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood) turned this important story into a government-sponsored megaphone touting the irreproachable myth of American right and might.
Mitchell has found his way into the rooms where it happened, unearthing and using letters and studio cables that show how conscientious intentions were compromised by the imperatives of the Cold War. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American story-making mechanisms distort our history.
- Format: Hardcover
- Author: Mitchell, Greg
- ISBN: 9781620975732
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 8.60 x 1.00
- Number Of Pages: 272
- Publication Year: 2020