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Generaal Geregistreerd op: 22-2-2005 Berichten: 775 Woonplaats: Gullegem

The Making of Fat Man and Little Boy

IMET Dwight Schultz at the Williamstown Theater Festival in 1978. Even then, we all knew, you'd need a turnpike truck scale to weigh his talent off. Dwight had what, in anthropology, they call contagious magic. His readings were cerebral and yet instinctive. His emotional life was intense to the point of nervous exhaustion (on stage and off). His dramatic choices were provocative, quick, unusually easy, and humane. Dwight was also such a perplexing natural mimic that he could vanish in front of you at dinner.

His New York stage career has been extensive: David Mamet's The Water Engine, Crucifer of Blood (with Glenn Close), Night and Day (with Maggie Smith), all on Broadway. He is a powerful interpreter of Ionesco and Ibsen. But stage acting can chapter-11 you. In 1983 he left for L.A. to visit a lady friend (actress Wendy Fulton, now his wife). "I'm coming home soon," he told me over the phone. "I've just got to audition for an implausible TV pilot." That pilot was The A Team. It turned NBC's fortunes around. Dwight, as Howling Mad Murdock, brought distinction to an otherwise shallow, if profitable, four-year enterprise.

Last autumn Roland Joffe cast Dwight (J. Robert Oppenheimer) opposite Paul Newman (Major General Leslie Groves) in Fat Man and Little Boy. Joffe, who "dramatized" Cambodian genocide with The Killing Fields (he was writer/director), had now set out to do as much for Los Alamos--which Paramount rebuilt at considerable expense near Durango, Mexico. In September the script--I have read drafts four and five of several more--had a noticeable leftward, anti-bomb bias. Ironically, Dwight, who has been known to read NR, was playing liberal Oppenheimer against Paul Newman as militarist Major General Groves. Newman even drives his race car to the left. Between Dwight and Newman (who thought much of the leftist shading was unbelievable) there grew up a strange-bedfellow alliance that, in time, nudged Fat Man and Little Boy toward ideological balance. Joffe, it must be said, gave them room to maneuver.

One resonant plot line, in particular, disturbed Dwight. Schoenfield, the young military doctor at Los Alamos, is sent on assignment to Oak Ridge. By chance he comes across Experiment P: old or mentally irregular men and women are being given radioactive polonium by injection and without their knowledge. As the fifth draft has it, "The anorexic girl looks at Schoenfield for a moment with unfocused eyes. Then, still immobile, she throws up." Strong and, well, compassionate material. (Dr. Robert Gale, a consultant on the film, told Joffe that polonium would not induce such theatrical effects. Joffe later upped the dose to plutonium.) Indeed, there is evidence that army doctors were performing an experiment of that sort--but no one at Los Alamos could have known it. Nonetheless Joffe shot Schoenfield in a dramatic confrontation with Oppenheimer over Experiment P. Oppenheimer replied lamely in draft five, "Look, we got technical problems to solve. That involves risk." This exchange, Dwight felt with good reason, extinguished whatever credibility as a human being Oppenheimer may have had. (Groves, Newman saw, didn't come off looking like Mother Teresa either.) That tendentious subplot was finally cut--though a vestigial--and quite opaque--reference remains in one scene.
History in our Visual Age is being asked to accommodate the strict prerequisites of a 120-minute entertainment medium: regular climax, unnatural succinctness, simplistic moral and emotional import. In Fat Man, for instance, Michael Merriman is exposed to radiation through an accident of heroism. He dies grotesquely. Most of the pathos in Fat Man is loaded on Merriman. This incident did occur--but, unaware of its responsibility to cinematic structure, it occurred a full month after the bomb went off, not in medias res. Truth is: we no longer suspend disbelief willingly. In TV, film--even stage--we prefer exaggerated half-truth to imaginative invention. Understandable enough: news is presented as entertainment on Tv. (News "stories" we call them--and, in Dan Rather's case evidently, they can be more story than news.) No wonder then that truth tends to be fictionalized after it has been taken from The Eleven O'Clock News and recast in teleplay format. It is already half fiction. But this habit, I think, must eventually damage our perception of what has been or might be "real." Since literature can no longer hold attention with a more leisurely, reasoned POV, it is probable that your standard historical text in A.D. 2010 will be on video. But video writers are, oh, 93 per cent liberal. Their revisionism is predictable. We face a future in which American institutions will be distorted as cavalierly (and as effectively) as Shakespeare distorted the character of Richard III.

NR: What was your initial reaction on reading the script? And how did Roland Joffe respond to that reaction?
SCHULTZ: Actually I think it was because I was slightly critical of the first script that Roland was interested in me. He had promised me "a good read." And, indeed, it was. From the standpoint of a film script it was very taut--and it was very melodramatic. But, at the moment of moral revelation in the script, Oppenheimer had these puny words. I said that the author [Joffe, with Bruce Robinson] seemed afraid to express Oppenheimer's point of view. I had read Richard Rhodes's book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and there was a line that always rang in my head--Niels Bohr, when he first came to Los Alamos in 1943, said, "Is it going to be big enough? That's the real question." The implication was that the bomb could end all war forever. I told Roland, "That's what you need in the confrontation scene with Schoenfield. Unless you express something like that you're cheating yourself and the film." And he rolled his eyes back in his head. He said, "Well, basically, I hadn't really finished this part of the screenplay. You've smelled something out. I just inserted dialogue that had originally been General Groves's dialogue there." It was weak, very weak.

NR: What's Joffe like?
SCHULTZ: Roland is a very complex fellow. Very cerebral on the outside. But when we would sit and talk, he became extremely emotional and had a very hard time holding back tears. He obviously had a great feeling for the people involved in this. He, as I, saw Oppenheimer as a victim of the period--from both the right and the left politically. He wanted to examine the dilemma--that's the way he put it to me. The human dilemma.

NR: Roughly how many drafts were there between the script you auditioned with and the final cut?

SCHULTZ: I think there were four or five. The script always changed. Roland was making three films. Every time we did a scene there were three possibilities that we could end up with. Over a period of four months that's a lot of permutations. Roland said, "You don't know what kind of movie you're making until you're making it."

NR: Three different movies?
SCHULTZ: One was very intellectual, devoid of emotion. There was one that was a soap opera--which was very interesting--when you started to delve into the history of the characters. You were mind-boggled that these were the people who built the atomic bomb. And then there was another film--which was about human beings, who are very fallible, called upon to do the impossible. This was the in-between version.

NR: You talk about how "we" did the rewriting. Who were the main rewriters?

SCHULTZ: I met with Paul Newman in his New York apartment the day after I had been cast. There he was with his script all over the floor. He was rewriting. I didn't know I had permission to go ahead and rewrite Joffe's script. But Paul had done it. So I assumed immediately that this was something Roland was amenable to. So Paul and I sat down and hashed it out. In Mexico it was a round table, scene by scene, we'd sit there and argue. I was certainly low man on the totem pole. But I was on the totem pole. And I was never treated with disrespect.

NR: Is that a good way for an actor to work?
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SCHULTZ: I was scared to death. You're suddenly thrust into a room with Paul Newman and Roland Joffe and you're . . . scared. This was my first feature film. I hadn't been given time to relax with the role. It was a baptism of fire.

NR: This is perhaps the most "unsympathetic" role that Newman has ever played. Why do you think he chose to do it?

SCHULTZ: Well, on more than one occasion he said, "Oh, my God, what're my liberal friends going to say?" When we would argue about Groves's position--he would come up with the good arguments for Groves. And we would laugh. He really is a good fellow. Politically he baited me on many occasions. Once, in a restaurant, we got a little heated--he sort of assumed I believed certain things because I was one of "those" kind of people. And I took him to task for it--and he apologized for what he said. But he was very dedicated to preserving the integrity of the people who fought World War II. He was on board ship, not far from Japan, when they dropped the weapon. He was one of many who didn't have to give up their lives because of the bomb.

NR: Tell us more about Experiment P.

SCHULTZ: When Paul read the script he was quite flabbergasted at this. He didn't believe it. Neither did I. Paul had a direct line to the political hierarchies of this country. He was calling people, Senate committees. He was friendly with Richard Rhodes and commissioned him to find out about it. Experiment P did happen. The Markey Committee has it on record. But if it had stayed in the film, you could have understood it to mean that this was government policy, which made us look like bedpartners to the Nazis. Paul and I were very distressed about this. Roland was not, however. He felt it was something to be explored. But, in the context of the movie, it would've had a disproportionate effect. And no one at Los Alamos knew about it. Certainly not Oppenheimer. But it's not in the film now. I'm grateful for that. And I respect Roland for taking it out. [At the time this interview took place, Dwight had not yet seen Fat Man in final cut. He thought--since his confrontation with Schoenfield was due for dubbing anyhow because of poor sound quality--that "plutonium" at least would be lip synced to "polonium." A simple matter. Yet, with total disregard for fact, and gratuitously, it would appear (the vomit scene had been cut after all), Joffe let "plutonium" stand.]

NR: Where was [atom spy] Klaus Fuchs at this time?

SCHULTZ: He was there.

NR: Well, since we're talking about significant omissions, why wasn't Fuchs in the script? Instead of Merriman, for instance, whose death came after Trinity?

SCHULTZ: I felt the same way: I often asked, why aren't we dealing with this? Then you realize you just don't have time to get into it. I certainly would've liked to have seen Oppenheimer much more ferociously in favor of the project.

NR: Tell us about your interpretation of Oppenheimer.
SCHULTZ: One of the sad things about Fat Man is--there are no scenes where Oppenheimer is brilliant. Oppenheimer was involved in the project before he was picked by Groves to lead it. So the film is a little misleading there. But I want you to hear Oppenheimer actually speak. [Puts on a tape--I hear a strangely cadenced voice, a bit prissy and over-precise.] This is Oppenheimer right after Trinity--what I call his "Mr. Rogers" voice. [He imitates Oppenheimer.] He was ed-u-cayted in Yurope andt spoke five dif-fer-ent languages flu-ently. If yew were to per-form on film yusing this voice, yew would prob-ably have gret dy-fi-culty in ac-cess-ing the American pub-lic. Roland rolled his eyes at the thought of me using Oppenheimer's cadences. It was a different world. People then thought him elegant and intellectual. Today they would say he was rather fey. So Roland decided to make him generic. Because this is not a movie about Oppenheimer--to my dismay [laughs]. This is a movie about the dilemma.

NR: Do you think Oppenheimer was dealt with fairly?
SCHULTZ: I do. Because I think he is seen as the victim--and I think he was a victim. The problem is--Roland tried to combine Oppenheimer's past, present, and future in one film. Groves and Oppenheimer were in agreement that the weapon had to be utilized. If people did not see how terrible war was going to be in the future, the effort would've been wasted. Later Oppenheimer came to feel that--the day after Trinity--we should have been on everyone's heels to get this thing under control. But in Fat Man Oppenheimer's feelings after Trinity are anticipated. The more I read, the angrier I became at the scientists. Many of them ran out the back door, some after VE Day, some after Hiroshima. It was Einstein and Szilard and Fermi who were responsible for Roosevelt's using his influence to get the project under way. The military didn't want to get involved--they had a war to fight. Then Oppenheimer was left with the burden. I shouldn't say left with it--because I think he wanted it. But he took the moral responsibility. A lot of people want to talk. Very few want to take responsibility. When you see Oppenheimer later he looks like a victim from Auschwitz. I think he was down to 105 pounds.

NR: What was the political tone on the set?

SCHULTZ: I think it's fair to say that most people were doing the movie because they abhorred the bomb and the whole concept of having developed it. There were very few people who understood what we were dealing with in World War II. Most were totally unaware of the extent of the carnage. Sixty million was just not conceivable to most people. They were sure I was wrong. Roland didn't know. Paul's eyes lowered and he said, "My God, was it that many?" The horror is so great that we minimize it. All these people were imagining a much smaller war. From what I have read there were less than 200,000 killed between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When you factor that into sixty million--or the amount of people who would've been killed in an invasion--the bomb seems almost reasonable. If Churchill and Roosevelt hadn't gone ahead and developed this weapon, God knows what we'd be talking about today. If Stalin was willing to kill thirty million of his own people . . .

NR: And yet, in a human sense, the bomb was never reasonable.

SCHULTZ: No. Robert Cornog was a consultant on the set. He had been one of the chief engineers at Los Alamos. Dr. Robert Gale showed us films and slides of radiation burns. At one point Bob Cornog gasped aloud--it was at a photo of a victim from Hiroshima. And it was very moving. To say that all those people died for the betterment of the rest of us is a futile gesture to someone who was directly responsible for the death of that many men, women, and children. It's one of those things that's best left alone. You can't objectify it away. I saw it there on his face.

COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
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