August 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the use of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Author Greg Mitchell and director Rod Lurie (“The Outpost”) on how the White House and Pentagon scuttled the first movie on the atomic bomb. Join into the discussion — Wed, August 5, 2020 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EDT
“The Beginning or the End”: A Discussion About the New Book and the Bomb
Eventbrite / Join – Watch the Discussion
Wed, August 5, 2020
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM EDT
Not long after the bombs were dropped in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called “the most important story” he would ever film based on warnings by the scientists: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. That movie, The Beginning or the End, began as a cautionary tale would become little more than pro-bomb propaganda due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military—for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood).
Greg Mitchell’s new book The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb chronicles the never-before-told story behind Hollywood’s historic flop, and the secret campaign to silence the scientists who tried to warn the world about a nuclear arms race.
On the eve of the anniversary of the devastation of Hiroshima, Greg Mitchell and Rod Lurie, director of this summer’s #1 new film, The Outpost, discuss the MGM film The Beginning or the End, how it was subverted, and the political and media manipulations of the “Hiroshima narrative” that persist today.
ABOUT:
Greg Mitchell’s other books include The Tunnels; The Campaign of the Century, winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, a New York Times Notable Book; So Wrong for So Long; and, with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America and Who Owns Death?
Rod Lurie is a director, screenwriter, and former film critic (and graduate of West Point). His films include this summer’s The Outpost, Straw Dogs, The Contender, and Nothing But the Truth.
