Scientists as Screenwriters

by Kevin Ahearn

If more scientists wrote science fiction novels and screenplays, and portrayed scientists as heroes, would more young people want to become scientists?

According to the New York Times “At a cost of roughly $25,000 in Pentagon research grants, the American Film Institute is cramming this eclectic group of midcareer researchers, engineers, chemists and physicists full of pointers on how to find their way in a world that can be a lot lonelier than the loneliest laboratory: the wilderness of story arcs, plot points, pitching and the special circle of hell better known as development.”

Yes, fellow American taxpayers, fifteen scientists are being taught how to write and sell screenplays. “And no primer on Hollywood would be complete without at least three hours on ‘Agents & Managers’.”

Further in the New York Times article: “Officials at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research spell out a straightforward syllogism: Fewer and fewer students are pursuing science and engineering. While immigrants are taking up the slack in many areas, defense laboratories and industries generally require American citizenship or permanent residency. So a crisis is looming, unless careers in science and engineering suddenly become hugely popular, said Robert J. Barker, an Air Force program manager who approved the grant. And what better way to get a lot of young people interested in science than by producing movies and television shows that depict scientists in flattering ways?

“...What began as a weekend seminar last summer and was expanded to five days this year. The Air Force is providing $100,000 annually for three years; the Army Research Office has added $50,000 this year.” Biophysicist Valerie Weiss, a participant in the 2004 workshop said the notion that scientists could make good screenwriters stood the test of reason. “They’re inherently creative, and willing to take more risks than other people,” she said. “They’re searching for the unknown, they’re compensated very minimally, they’re going on blind faith that what they’re searching for is going to pay off. And filmmaking is exactly the same way.”

Hello, Pentagon! What were you thinking? Imagine Mary Shelley or Robert Louis Stevenson in this anointed group. The heroic Dr. Frankenstein would have come up with a cure for the common cold and Dr. Jekyll would have concocted Valium and had no Mr. Hyde.

In the latter half of the 20th Century, the most influential scientist in the United States was Werner von Braun, the father of the Saturn V and the Apollo Program which took men to the Moon and inspired thousands of Americans to science degrees. Von Braun would later write a book called I Aim for the Stars. A critic would suggest the tagline “And sometimes I hit London” because von Braun had been a crucial cog in Hitler’s V-2 terror campaign which killed thousands.

Do “heroic scientists” make for better science fiction? In 1951, Sam Jaffe’s portrayal of an Einstein-like scientist in The Day the Earth Stood Still added intelligence and heart to a terrific story. “It’s not faith that makes good science, Klaatu,” he said, “but curiosity!”

That same year in The Thing from Another World, Robert Cornwaite played an arrogant egomaniac spouting, “There are no enemies in science. Our duty is to learn, to find out, even to die!”

Good scientist and bad, both films remain classics to this day. Screenplays and novels, whether they are written by scientists or steelworkers, Jews or Gentiles, homosexuals or hedonists, Native Americans or African Americans, firefighters or flight surgeons, nuclear physicists or nobodies, begin with an individual with an idea and the passion and the pride and the courage and conviction to see it through. Should science fiction become a group effort sponsored by the Defense Department, Huxley and Orwell will no longer be recognized as writers, but as prophets.