THE BEGINNING OR THE END

What happens when the military gets involved in an arts project.

Mitchell, the former editor of Nuclear Times and Editor & Publisher, uses his sharp investigative reporting skills to unearth this detailed, behind-the-scenes story about Hollywood’s first movie on the atomic bomb. It begins innocuously enough in October 1945, two months after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, with a letter to actress Donna Reed from Ed Tompkins, her former high school chemistry teacher who moved on to become a scientist at Oak Ridge. He asked if she thought a “movie could be planned and produced to successfully impress upon the public the horrors of atomic warfare.” Mitchell sets his tale up as a series of battles. The primary one was between the scientists, including Tompkins and Robert Oppenheimer, who were desperate to control nuclear proliferation and the deployment of nuclear weapons, and the military, led by Gen. Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan project. Reed’s husband, talent agent Tony Owen, helped pitch the idea to MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, who showed a keen interest in the project. Paramount’s Hal B. Wallis had a similar idea, with “controversial novelist Ayn Rand” writing the screenplay. MGM lined up Bob Considine, author of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, to write theirs. MGM talked to President Harry Truman, who was on board, even coming up with an apocalyptic title: “We are either at the beginning or the end.” Wallis’ less dramatic title was Top Secret. In mid-December 1945, the New York Times published a story about the “Hollywood Atom Sweepstakes.” Wallis eventually dropped out of the race. Excellent research and rich dialogue give Mitchell’s book a novelistic flair as he recounts the battles between MGM and the military over actor choices, deletions, revisions, and retakes concerning fact vs. fiction, with the military and the White House usually winning. The Beginning of the End opened with a notice indicating that it was “basically a true story.”

Reel film meets real history in this scintillating tale.