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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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About This Book
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.
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Reviews
"Regarding the former: The creation of the atomic bomb is an extremely dense subject that's intrinsically difficult to dramatize for a mass audience, as was proved in 1989 with another unsuccessful movie on the same subject called Fat Man and Little Boy, wherein a padded Paul Newman played Groves and an egregiously miscast Dwight Schultz played Oppenheimer."
"Mitchell remains devoted to examining the U.S.'s moral defense for its deadly actions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he never misses a chance to expose the comedy provided by his book's many theatrically outsize characters."
"Mitchell uses his sharp investigative reporting skills to unearth this detailed, behind-the-scenes story about Hollywood's first movie on the atomic bomb ..."
"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."
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