The Beginning or the End
How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
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3.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production.
Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon.
Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for Atlas Shrugged.
Greg Mitchell’s The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military—for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood).
Mitchell has found his way into the lofty rooms, from Washington to California, where it happened, unearthing hundreds of letters and dozens of scripts that show how wise intentions were compromised in favor of defending the use of the bomb and the imperatives of postwar politics. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MGM's little-seen 1947 docudrama about the creation of the atomic bomb, The Beginning or the End, provides the unlikely but fascinating subject for this rich look at the early nuclear age from journalist Mitchell (The Tunnels). He gives a full account of the film's genesis, beginning with the film pitch that star Donna Reed received from her high school chemistry teacher, and continuing with Ayn Rand's early involvement in the project as a screenwriter and the studio's difficulties in obtaining approval from Oppenheimer, Einstein, and other scientists for their on-screen depictions. He also details Army general Leslie Groves's extensive participation in shaping the script, which became a battleground between scientists, who wanted the film to show the true horror of nuclear war, and the military, which wanted to justify the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and undermine calls to place nuclear weapons under international control. Mitchell shows how this desire to control the narrative around the atomic attacks fed into the U.S.'s continued insistence on its right to launch a nuclear first strike. While the film bombed at the box office, Mitchell's rich account of its making and larger implications should draw both history buffs and those concerned with the continuing issues around nuclear weapons.
