| 1890 | Fritz Lang, film director (Metropolis, M). | |||
| 1901 | Walt Disney, animator and creator of an entertainment empire. | |||
| 1932 | Richard Wayne Penniman [Little Richard], singer, musician; important influence on rock ‘n’ roll. | |||
| 1969 | Morgan J. Freeman, film director; his Hurricane Streets (1997) was the first narrative film to win three awards at the Sundance Film Festival; produced MTV reality shows (16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom). |
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2015 Jan 27; 112(4): 939.
Published online 2015 Jan 27. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421546111
PMCID: PMC4313818
Science and Culture: Science on-screen and behind the scenes
In
2009, a team of Hollywood producers from Marvel Studios approached The
Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program of the National Academy
of Sciences (NAS), for advice on using good science to make the movie Thor.
The filmmakers, aware of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim that “any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,”
wanted a strong science backbone for the magic they were planning for
the big screen. (Natalie Portman’s character, Jane Foster, even
paraphrases the quotation on-screen.)
Scientists and filmmakers engage in a panel discussion about the 2010 movie Tron: Legacy
at Disney’s El Capitan Theater. Left to right: Sean M. Carroll
(California Institute of Technology), John Dick (Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, California Institute ...
Among
other details, the producer’s wanted to explain how the hammer-wielding
superhero travels so quickly between Earth and his home realm of
Valhalla. The Exchange, based in Los Angeles, brought in theoretical
physicist Sean M. Carroll from the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, CA. Carroll suggested that Thor travel by wormhole. “But [the
writers] thought wormholes were too 90s,” says Rick Loverd, who directs
the program. Carroll then suggested that Foster, the on-screen
scientist, instead use the “Einstein–Rosen bridge,” a lesser-known
synonym for wormhole. That’s what ended up in the film. The filmmakers
also wanted Jane Foster, a nurse in the comics, to be a scientist.
Carroll suggested she become an experimental physicist; in the final
version, Foster was an astrophysicist.
The successful collaboration didn't stop there, Loverd says. In 2013, on the release of the sequel to Thor,
the filmmakers and the Exchange held a competition for high-school
girls to produce videos of themselves interviewing female scientists.
The creators of the 10 best videos were flown to Hollywood to meet movie
stars and visit studios.
Thor is no outlier.
Every year, the number of filmmakers—representing multiple genres—who
consult with the Exchange grows, says Loverd. Since its launch in
November 2008, the Exchange has connected researchers to more than 850
movies and television shows, including blockbuster films such as Prometheus, The Avengers, and The Amazing Spider-Man, medical dramas such as House, political dramas such as The Good Wife, and the comedy The Big Bang Theory. Filmmakers and producers want to know about everything from bullet ballistics (for The Good Wife) to the atmospheres of exoplanets (Prometheus) to plausible diagnoses of rare diseases (House).
In
the last six years the “phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” Loverd says.
Producers call looking for expert consultants and scientists call to
volunteer their services. The Exchange acts like a matchmaker. The
program doesn’t advertise or measure its success, Loverd says, but the
number of consults has increased every year, reflecting a growing
interest in science in Hollywood.
Filmmakers who work
with scientists are not generally trying to educate the public. They’re
looking to “make a better, more dynamic, and more interesting project,”
says writer, producer, and director Jerry Zucker, well known for his
work on dozens of movies, including Ghost and Airplane!
Zucker says he first became passionate about science when his daughter
Katie was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in the late 1980s. He and
producer Janet Zucker, his wife, worked on efforts to advocate for stem
cell research.
A serendipitous encounter with NAS
President Ralph J. Cicerone helped get the Exchange off the ground by
virtue of a $1.1 million NAS grant. Since then, the Exchange has
received financial support from a variety of donors, including the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Google, the Walt Disney Company, the
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Audiences
are more savvy now than they were 10 years ago in terms of what they're
willing to believe, says Loverd. “They feel like they live in the
future,” he says, “and it’s in the interest of storytellers to always be
forward-looking as they create their worlds.” Scientists can give the
writers ideas about technology that will be plausible in a few years,
says Loverd. Scientists can also inspire the creative forces behind
television and film: Zucker, who has used the Exchange multiple times,
says that as a result of his collaborations he’s working on a comedy
that takes place at the Large Hadron Collider. “There’s no way we could
do that without talking to scientists,” Zucker says.
However,
Loverd notes that a scientific consultation doesn’t mean that a story
will be wholly accurate in its final form, and the Exchange tries to
give researchers appropriate expectations. “Our philosophy has to be
about inspiring better science and not being the accuracy police,” he
says. “That philosophy gives us the opportunity to have the kinds of
wins [in getting science in movies] that we had in movies like Thor.”
Articles from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America are provided here courtesy of National Academy of Sciences
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Friday, 4 December 2015
Born on December 5
