Shining the Spotlight on Science’s Stupendous Stars
For evidence of how serious scientific themes seem to be stealthily making their way into popular entertainment, look no further than this week’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Published April 30, 2006
By Adrienne Burke
From the goofy to the grieving, scientists are major characters in seven new films at the festival this year, including romances, biographies, and documentaries. In the romantic comedy, Kettle of Fish, Gina Gershon stars as a fetching amphibian behaviorist who moves in with an aging playboy (Matthew Modine). A team of international scientists visits the desert to document the solar eclipse in House of Sand. Spanish physicist and photographer Santiago Bergson mourns his work on the Manhattan Project in The Mist in the Palm Trees. And the short film, Chicxulub, weaves a story of a family’s loss of a child around a meteor collision that wiped out 75 percent of life on Earth 65 million years ago.
Three documentaries being screened at the festival are also based on scientific themes: Who Killed the Electric Car?, Flock of Dodos: The Evolution Intelligent Design Circus, and the SciFi Boys, in which three filmmakers recall the childhood memories of Famous Monsters Magazine that influenced their adult cinematic endeavors.
Several of the science-themed films showing were made with the support of New York’s Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which initiated a nationwide program nine years ago to encourage artists in film, theatre, and TV to create more realistic and entertaining depictions of science and scientists. House of Sand, which will make its New York premiere at Tribeca, won a $20,000 award from Sloan at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
Science Screenplays
Earlier this month, Sloan and the Tribeca Film Institute announced that screenwriters Kenneth Lonergan, Dan Zeff and Nicole Perlman have been selected to participate in the Tribeca/Sloan Screenplay Development Program, which encourages the development of scripts with scientific and technological themes or characters. The writers will have the chance to consult with renowned scientists about the scientific content of their scripts, and their respective scripts will be showcased in reading events during the festival.
Perlman’s screenplay, Challenger, examines Richard Feynman’s role in the investigation into the 1986 space shuttle explosion. And Zeff’s screenplay, Project Mustard, is a comic imagining of what would have happened if the British entered into the 1960s race between Russia and the United States for the moon. At a special Sloan event, Judd Hirsch will play the role of Feynman in a dramatic reading of Challenger, and Hugh O’Conor and Aimee Mullins will read from Zeff’s script, followed by a panel discussion with CNN’s Miles O’Brien, former NASA Director Robert Frosch, and NPR’s Science Friday host Ira Flatow.
More Science Screenplays
Lonergan will adapt his play The Starry Messenger for the screen. The play, about a frustrated 43-year-old astronomy teacher who works at a non-research university in New York and teaches night classes to adults at the Hayden Planetarium, is scheduled to debut on Broadway next April.
Matthew Broderick, J. Smith-Cameron, John Gallagher Jr. and Stephanie Cannon will read excerpts from the script during a private reading during the festival. The reading will be followed by a panel discussion, moderated by journalist John Hockenberry, examining the effect the study of the cosmos has had on human culture and consciousness. Panelists include Lonergan and David Pankenier, a professor at Lehigh University and member of INSAP, a forum through which artists, historians, philosophers, and scientists discuss the diversity of astronomical inspiration.
At another Sloan-hosted event, The Biology of King Kong, ABC News correspondent Robert Krulwich moderates as animal behaviorist Roger Fouts and biologist Amy Vedder chat with 2006 Academy Award winning special effects man Joe Letteri about creating realistic animals for the big screen. With King Kong, Letteri rendered one of the most realistic monsters in cinematic history, but just how accurate was that giant gorilla?
This question and more will be answered at the festival.
Also read: The Art of Sci-Fi: 80 Years of Movie Posters
