“Make your film, gentlemen,” he told them. As they went to leave, Truman stopped them at the door. They managed to get a 15-minute meeting with Truman in the Oval Office where he granted them permission to go ahead. Owen and Marx eventually convinced nearly all the interested parties, including Enrico Fermi, Oppenheimer and Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves (played by Matt Damon in Nolan’s film). That meant getting the approval not just of Tompkins’ old colleagues from Los Alamos but from the military and government, including President Truman. Rules in place at the time demanded that real people had to give their permission if they were to be portrayed in a film. Reed’s husband and agent Tony Owen and MGM producer Sam Marx were keen, but there were a lot of obstacles. “Would you be willing to help sell this idea to MGM?”
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“A hundred long-range rockets carrying atomic explosives could wipe out our civilisation in a matter of minutes,” he wrote.īut he had an idea: “Do you think a movie could be planned and produced to successfully impress upon the public the horrors of atomic warfare?” The scientific community would help make sure it was an accurate picture of how America built the bomb, he said, and wanted to warn the world. There was, Tompkins said, “NO possibility” of America keeping atomic secrets to itself.
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The letter, as shown in Greg Mitchell’s history of the making of the movie The Beginning or the End, was full of doom. And when Tompkins finally wrote back, he had an idea. She had wondered why, until she spotted a newspaper story which said he’d been involved in the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Now she was a movie star at MGM, and had just landed the role of Mary Bailey opposite Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life.īut out of the blue some years previously, Tompkins had stopped replying to her letters.
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He was fun and interesting, and he’d given Reed a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People which did wonders for her confidence.
She remembered Tompkins well – he had been her high school chemistry teacher in Denison, Iowa, and had loved his classes. On Octoa letter from Dr Ed Tompkins arrived at Donna Reed’s home in Santa Monica. The Beginning or the End was supposed to be a warning it turned into an attempt to get America to stop worrying and love the bomb. The first time Hollywood made an Oppenheimer movie, it began with a single scientist trying to sound alarms about what danger a world with nuclear weapons would be in, and turned into a piece of early Cold War propaganda in which nearly everyone with a claim on the Manhattan Project story – the scientists, the armed forces, the American government, even President Harry Truman himself – meddled. But the Manhattan Project has made it to the big screen before. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer tells the story of how J Robert Oppenheimer led a team of scientists lured from across the world to a freshly constructed, self-contained town in the New Mexico desert where they worked frantically to build the first atomic bomb.
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