When movie director Roland Joffé set out to chronicle the dawn of the Atomic Age, he sent out an unusual casting call. Rather than use actors to portray most of the Los Alamos physicists of the 1940s, he decided that only real scientists would do. So he and his crew passed around the word at several universities, and he soon recruited 50 scientists, engineers, and physicians. Actors have the leading roles - Paul Newman is Major General Leslie Groves and Dwight Schultz plays J.Robert Oppenheimer - but the real scientists figure prominently. Caltech professor of theoretical physics, David Politzer, for example, portrays physicist Robert Serber, Oppenheimer's young protegee.
The film, named "Fat Man and Little Boy" after the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is scheduled to be released this fall. But the experience of acting in it is unlikely to convince any of the scientists to leave their labs. ...
