WONDERS ARE MANY:

THE MAKING OF “DR. ATOMIC”
By
Gil Mansergh

When people hear I am a movie critic, they often ask: “Does that mean you get to see the movies for free?” The short answer is “Yes.” The long answer is a little more complex. For as much as I enjoy films, watching movies is my job, and each year, I regularly screen about three hundred films for my newspaper columns, radio shows and blogs. So when I agreed to be part of the Screening Committee for this year’s Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. I knew in advance that it would involve me seeing over 100 additional films “and in a very short period of time.

Most of them I watched on my TV and computer screens, but a few films I would stop after ten minutes and put in a special stack to watch projected on a big screen with my wife and others at my side.

These were the rare, glittering diamonds which transcended the ordinary in an artistic, cinematic and emotional sense to become an extraordinary documentary.

Through sheer luck, one of these extraordinary documentaries is being released to video the same week that it will be screened at the SDFF. You might think this is counterproductive for the Festival in that it could curtail ticket sales, but I suggest it is a boon to all concerned. For those who are lucky enough to get tickets to see the 7:00 PM Saturday, March 7th screening of “Wonders Are Many: The Making of Dr. Atomic” will not only see a film they will want to rent or buy and share with others, but they will also get a chance to join a Q and A session with the film’s director. Jon Else.

But “What,” you are probably asking yourself, “is this film with the odd name all about?

On the surface, the answer to that question is simple: “Jon Else takes us behind the scenes of the San Francisco Opera Company’s premier performance of an opera based on the final 48 hours before the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Using the words of J. Robert Openheimer and other scientists involved, composer John Adams and theater director Peter Sellars collaborate on a literate and intelligent musical event.”

But what makes this film so special is the genius of it all.

The genius of those who wrote and staged the opera; The genius of the singers and musicians and costume and set designers and sound and lighting engineers who make it all work; The genius of the film director (and editor Deborah Hoffman), who take us into Adams’ and Sellars’ homes and studios and to watch them work under deadlines, and then cut to interviews with dead and living Trinity Project scientists to create a contrapuntal correlation between the making of the opera and the creation of the bomb; And most of all, the genius of the complex, dishonored, and sometimes reviled man called J. Robert Oppenheimer.

We learn from Adams, that the original concept was to relate all of Oppenheimer’s public career as an opera, but eventually, reality and artistry narrowed the time frame to the 48 hours before the blast.

It was a brilliant choice, if for no other reason than the opera now ends not with a whimper, but with a bang. And the constricted time frame, with the detonation time line (announced in advance to the President, and military and congressional leaders who were in the highest echelon), ratcheted up the pressure as the weather proved uncooperative, (with winds potentially blowing radioactive clouds towards Santa Fe), the electrical connections needed to be rewired, and team scientists predicted that there was a strong likelihood that either thing wouldn’t work, or it could start a chain reaction which would eventually destroy the entire planet.

We catch a similar sense of time pressure while watching the seemingly atomic-powered exuberance of Peter Sellars. Spiky-haired, round faced, and wearing artful necklaces, he somehow defies the laws of physics to create pooitive energy wherever he goes. For example, we see him cringe at something during rehearsal and then tell the singers and dancers everything they are doing correctly before kindly suggesting: “but you might try doing this,” and then he physically walks them through the stage directions so they can faithfully produce what Sellars sees in his mind. At one point. Sellars tells Adams his philosophy of working with people: “During rehearsal hours, you know what you are doing, and you do it with precision, and high energy, and high resolve, and incredible positiveness. Your doubts don’t help anyone.” Of course, when necessary for the production, Sellars can fire someone too “even if they are the lead singer.

Before the blast, Oppenheimer used the same positive resolve with the hundreds of people who worked on the Trinity Project, but after the blast, he became more reflective:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita-’Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.” J. Robert Oppenheimer, speaking of the Trinity atomic test at White Sands, NM, July 16, 1945