Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which drops July 21, chronicles the Manhattan Project and Trinity, or the creation and detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb. The Manhattan Project (1986) also chronicles the making of a nuclear weapon — but this one is whipped up from green goo and built in a teenager’s bedroom.
The film, from writer-director Marshall Brickman — best known for being Woody Allen’s screenwriting partner (they share an Oscar for Annie Hall) — is about a scientist (John Lithgow) secretly refining plutonium at a government lab in Ithaca, New York. A brilliant local student named Paul (Christopher Collet) and his aspiring journalist girlfriend (Cynthia Nixon, already a stage and screen veteran at 19) discover the plot. Paul decides to steal the plutonium to make a bomb of his own, which he then attempts to enter into the National Science Fair in New York City.
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To consult on the film, Bran Ferren, an MIT prodigy and former head of Walt Disney Imagineering, was brought on. “Evidently, my homemade bomb was a working design,” recalls Collet, now 55, of Ferren’s creation. Brickman also gave his cast “a bunch of books that talked about the development of the atomic bomb.”
The film climaxes with a scene in which the bomb’s clock is activated, and Lithgow and Collet try to stop it as a dozen military officials (including the late John Mahoney) watch in terror.
Says Collet: “The tension that you feel in that scene? We were all sort of actually experiencing that.” When six wires are cut simultaneously to defuse the weapon, the countdown clock stops at 07:16:45 — the date of the Trinity test. Released June 13, 1986 — just six weeks after the Chernobyl disaster — The Manhattan Project bombed at the box office, earning only $3.9 million.
This story first appeared in the July 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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