[ RadSafe ] Lights, camera, armageddon

[Gerry Blackwood]

Lights, camera, armageddon
When Hollywood speaks, the public listens. But what happens when filmmakers fudge the facts in favor of special effects and cheap thrills? 

By Josh Schollmeyer
May/June 2005  pp. 42-50 (vol. 61, no. 03) © 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

hen the filmmakers of Thirteen Days told Graham Allison that they intended to transform President John F. Kennedy's appointments secretary, Kenny O'Donnell, into a major player during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he objected. Immediately.

"That's stupid," Allison, author of Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, remembers telling them. "I don't relate to it."

"But how many people read your book?" they responded. 

So begins the quandary: Experts get it right; Hollywood delivers the crowds. A happy marriage of the two qualifies as an exception. For every Thirteen Days--a film hailed by historians and critics alike--there are countless potboiler thrillers that twist and distort reality, all in the name of popcorn purchases and ticket sales.

Experts like Allison can see past the showbiz gloss--the omissions, distortions, and casual disregard for even the most basic laws of physics. On planet Hollywood, nuclear power plants melt down with the push of a button, and nuclear warheads can be disarmed with the snip of a wire. But what goes through the minds of moviegoers when Ben Affleck struts unharmed along the fringes of a nuclear explosion in The Sum of All Fears? Such scenarios linger in the public's collective consciousness. Popular culture resonates. Allison recognizes it at Harvard University, where he teaches. 

"Why did the CIA murder Kennedy?" students often ask him.

"Where did you get this idea?" a befuddled Allison responds.

"I saw it in JFK," they inform him. 

Superficially, many policy wonks and activists dismiss films like The Sum of All Fears as vapid Hollywood entertainment, claiming their influence lands at the margins. But they intuitively understand popular culture's pull; that the size of The Peacemaker's audience is of a significantly higher order of magnitude than that of C-Span. They see in the entertainment industry an opportunity to inform the public and to advance their agendas. Yet, as they inevitably learn, Hollywood has an agenda all its own.
A pox upon TV viewers
British director Daniel Percival wanted Smallpox to be educational. He researched the virus extensively before writing and filming the BBC2 faux-documentary about a major bioterror attack on a Western city. (The film was released in Britain in 2002, but due to post-9/11 sensitivities it did not air in the United States until January 2, 2005.)

His mission was twofold: He wanted to alert the public to the consequences of a bioterror event and to create an engaging film that would be "an emotional as well as intellectual journey." 

Unfortunately, Smallpox was neither. The film played more like a training video for the World Health Organization (WHO) and for emergency responders--Percival alleges that the film is used for this exact purpose--than a riveting docudrama. And despite Percival's prolific research, Smallpox contained inaccuracies. In the film, a lone terrorist of unknown origin and affiliation infects himself with smallpox and then saunters around the city streets spreading the virus. 

"I got a copy of it not long before it was going to air [in Britain], and I exploded," says D. A. Henderson, who led the WHO's global smallpox eradication campaign. "I said, 'No, this is wrong!'" 

http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj05schollmeyer



"Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality."