Scientists entertain Hollywood queries

Jim Kakalios got stars in his eyes when the National Academy of Sciences asked if he’d like to consult for the makers of a movie based on the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen. “There was the fan-boy aspect of my personality. ‘Oh my God, they are making a Watchmen movie. That will be so cool!’” says the University of Minnesota physics professor, author of The Physics of Superheroes (Gotham Books, 2005). The matching of Kakalios with the movie’s production designer was a test case, made well before NAS and its Hollywood partners officially launched the Science and Entertainment Exchange with a symposium on 19 November.

“We are looking to foster creative collaborations,” says Exchange director Jennifer Ouellette. “We don’t want to do just fact-checking—we don’t want to come in after the fact and clean up. We want people to talk early on in projects.”

Ouellette is responsible for “sussing out what kind of scientist” will best address inquiries from the entertainment industry. The service is free, although collaborations may develop into paid consulting gigs, she says. After the kick-off symposium, she adds, “I started getting e-mails immediately from entertainment people needing everything from a grad student to look over a draft script to an epidemiologist to consult for a new TV series, all the way to a guy who is doing a major blockbuster movie and wants to assemble a think tank of scientists beforehand to help him toss around ideas and come up with new interesting things for his plot.”

Eventually, says producer Janet Zucker, one of the Exchange’s founders, “I want to expand into an ongoing series of mini salons”—informal discussion groups. “One outcome I’d like to see is more accurate science because I think it will make the story better. People will see that what is actually happening is stranger and more interesting than what they dream up.”

Zucker and her husband, director Jerry Zucker, have a daughter who was diagnosed with diabetes at age 11. The Exchange, she says, “was an outgrowth of our efforts on stem cell research. We got very involved with taking a look at potential avenues for research and cures”—and with California’s Proposition 71, which was passed to direct state funding to stem cell research in the wake of the Bush administration’s funding restrictions. They met NAS president Ralph Cicerone a few years ago and, he says, “I was so impressed with some of the films they produced, not only for fun but the public service announcement they had produced on behalf of medical research, that we just decided to stay in touch.” About a year ago, Cicerone says, the Zuckers “thought there was enough interest in Hollywood among writers, directors, and producers that if we could provide a service—to be kind of like a 1-800-scientist phone line—they said there was a lot of demand. So, that’s how [the Exchange] got started. We were responding to expressed interest in Hollywood for access to science information and to scientists.”

In the case of Watchmen, says Kakalios, “One thing I’ll never forget: [the production designer Alex McDowell] got very excited when I showed them a picture of a blackboard in a theoretical physicist’s office. It looked real—not like in a typical Hollywood movie with a random collection of equations. They wanted to know the grounding of things. It enables them to do a better job of creating an alternate reality.” The movie is to be released in March. “I have no idea how much of what I contributed will show up on screen,” Kakalios says.

“I would love to see [Hollywood] do stuff on climate change with a story line,” says Steven Chu, who, as a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, head of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and now President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for energy secretary (see the story on page 22), was one of the many big names from both science and the entertainment industry to attend the symposium. But while scientists may be attracted to seeing accurate science portrayed in films, Cicerone says, “We are not going into this thinking we are going to get everything right. They’re telling us there is interest in reality and verisimilitude. I think that will happen.”

The real aim, Cicerone adds, “is to try to make science more accessible to the general public through entertainment. I remember when Leon Lederman got the Nobel Prize in Physics. He got a bunch of us together to discuss how to increase public awareness of science. He had a lot of friends in the press, and they all said that the only way to get to the public is through entertainment. It’s not a message we wanted to hear, but it registered.”