Movie Physics

Scientists Make it in the Movies

by David Bradley

Occasionally, I get a call from a TV researcher, 'You're a science expert, right?' they might flatteringly enquire, and before I can deny everything they're asking, '...so, can time travel ever work?', 'what about a cure for cancer?', 'does acid dissolve glass?,' 'is there a pill we can give our lead character to stifle a voracious libido that's ruining the plot?' Plot? We're talking never-ending soap operas here. Sometimes, I can answer, sometimes I point them to a real scientist who might be able to help with the script's scientific accuracy.

I am still awaiting 'that' call from Spielberg, of course, but there are many scientists who provide advice on the technological and scientific continuity of TV shows and movies. Most do it informally; others make a career of it. But, the real reward is in ensuring that the science is credible, while still allowing us to suspend our disbelief.

There are many movies, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Apollo 13 where attention to detail is very high. For instance, the sound inside the spacesuits in 2001, or the free-fall behaviour of objects in the spaceship. 'You can tell someone (probably Clarke) was paying close attention to such details,' says Software developer and science-fiction movie fan Steve DeGroof of Raleigh, North Carolina; of course Director Stanley Kubrick was also well known for his mathematic ability and incisive knowledge of physics! It is easy to label those who notice seemingly minor details as nit-picking pedants, but, we expect to see accuracy in other walks of life depicted in the cinema and on TV, so why not scientific aspects too?

One of four 'Comet Advisors' for the movie Deep Impact helping maintain accuracy was Joshua Colwell, an astronomer at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Colwell initially provided some informal advice to the producers for free through his brother, who happened to be First Assistant Director on the movie. 'My brother had questions about some aspects of the script,' he explains, 'asked me for my scientific opinion, and relayed that to the producers.' Eventually the producers realized they needed astronomy consultants in addition to the NASA consultants they already had and hired Colwell and three other scientists to serve as "Comet Advisors". Colwell reckons his broad knowledge of the field and a willingness to come up with innovative yet plausible ideas helped make the movie more realistic than it might otherwise have been. 'It is, after all, their movie, and I believe the consultant's role is to find a way to make their movie as accurate and plausible as possible,' he told Beagle.

Colwell describes how the consultative process ranged from eradicating minor errors, such as correcting star names, to ensuring the comet took a realistic timeline on its earthbound journey. 'I was sent every revision of the script and I would provide corrections and comments to each revision,' Colwell explains. As to any glossing of the script at the expense of science, he calculated that there was certainly a possibility of being blown off the comet by a 'jet', but that this would happen 'nowhere near as quickly as is shown in the movie.'

It is not just space movies where accuracy is important. Wright University's John Fortman specialises in rifling through the cinematic test-tubes. Two films he cites as having been well advised are The Man in the White Suit starring Alec Guinness (1952) and It Happens Every Spring starring Ray Milland (also mispelled as Ray Miland, see here for a list of Ray Milland movies) (1949). 'Most newer films,' Fortman adds, 'seem to not care about details.' He agrees with DeGroof that Apollo 13 does a good job, as does Lorenzo's Oil but emphasizes that too many are like Dante's Peak 'full of impossibilities, such as acid water dissolving the aluminum boat and stainless steel propeller.'

Although Fortman is keen on the science in the older movies, Berkeley cinema lecturer Sofia Hussain suggests that, 'In the 1950s the science in sci-fi movies, such as The Fly and Godzilla, was 'handwaved', most movies were pure entertainment and did not try to explain how real something was or how it worked, they just had an old male professor spout out some gibberish,' she explains, 'Some movies still do this today,' she laments. Hussain admits that there are exceptions to the rule. 'Some movies, such as Deep Impact try to get the science right,' she says, 'the figures about the mass of the asteroid, the velocity it was traveling, and even some of the predictions about the impact were good.'

'Attention to details (of any kind) is just one of the multitude of things that differentiates between a mediocre film and a potentially great one,' says movie fan Jeremy Lichtman, a computer programmer at Cherniak software (Thornhill, Ontario) [[http://www.yucc.yorku.ca/~carbon60]]. Poetic licence is perfectly acceptable though, under certain conditions, according to 'I'm willing to suspend my disbelief with regards to things that are critical to the plotline of a movie,' he says, 'particularly if the movie has a good storyline and acting going for it.' But, poetic licence can only be taken so far and, where laboratories are concerned, the mistakes are sometimes incredible, as Fortman has found. He says it can be laughable at times, in Medicine Man, for example, the functioning of the gas chromatograph is totally implausible providing the scientists with instant baseline resolution, identification of non-volatile ionic inorganics like iron sulfate, and the structure identification of a 'mystery' peak!

On a show like the X-files, where science is often the story, the producers pride themselves on getting it right. University of Maryland virologist Anne Simon is a science advisor for the X-files TV show and movie. She got involved through an old friendship with producer-writer-director Chris Carter. 'Carter likes my knowledge of genetics, molecular biology, virology, and plants,' she explains. But she points out that getting into this kind of consultancy work can be a purely chance event.

The kinds of questions a Director might ask of a consultant would be, 'How can Scully show that she is infected by an alien organism?' or 'How can you make a genetically superior soldier?' Simon offers Carter some ideas and the scripts evolve. She also reads through his scripts and corrects any scientific mistakes. Other script advisors reckon the knowledge level required is often fairly basic. André Bormanis, a physicist by training, and script consultant for the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, describes it as '"first order" knowledge of physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology.' Bormanis took screenwriting classes and was pitching his scripts when his agent found out the TV studio needed an advisor. 'Sometimes I have to do research or call a specialist in a field I'm not familiar with (medicine especially) to provide the writers what they need,' he told Beagle.

It is not all space and aliens in the world of science in the movies though. Biologist Stuart Sumida, of California State University in San Bernardino has worked on a whole raft of movies, from animated features Prince of Egypt and the Lion King to live action George of the Jungle and Hollowman and to the semi-animated Stuart Little (and its in production sequel, the imaginatively named Stuart Little II). He is a paleontologist and comparative anatomist focusing on the evolution and functional morphology of the first terrestrial vertebrates, as such his expertise in the field has been invaluable to animators. 'My comparative anatomical and reconstructive perspectives have "pre-adapted" me to explaining anatomical structure and function to animators, who have to build convincing organismal movement with component parts as well, this time on screen,' he explains.

Sumida, like many other script advisors, snuck into Hollywood through a side door, The first film he worked on was Beauty and the Beast, having been recommended to the producers by respected critic and friend Charles Solomon. 'Since then, something of a "co-evolution" has occurred between the artists (and studios) and myself,' explains Sumida, 'they learning how to tap my expertise as a scientist, and me focusing on their particular needs.' Sumida reckons advisors will be in continual demand, 'I expect that we will continue to do such work, as the standards in both traditional hand-drawn animation and computer graphics are continually rising,' he says, 'especially with photorealistic special effects, Computer artists have an even greater need to understand skeletons than do others, as the skeleton is the model for an underlying wireframe.'

Although film producers have no moral obligation to get the science right, Colwell believes scientific accuracy is extremely important. 'Many people's ideas about what is and what is not realistic and possible are formed almost exclusively by popular culture depictions,' he explains, 'That's not a good thing.' He suggests that being able to tell the same story in an accurate way does the movie and the audience a service. Bormanis also believes that reality checks are vital, 'I always try to ensure our representation of interstellar space - the nature and scale of stars, planets, nebulae, etc. - is consistent with what's been established observationally by the Hubble Space Telescope and other modern instruments,' he explains.

'The more realistically things are portrayed,' adds Colwell, 'the better it is for everyone; producers and public alike. 'The basic premise of Deep Impact is scientifically sound in that life on Earth faces a threat due to comet and asteroid impacts. That threat might be mitigated through observation and destruction or deflection of the object with nuclear bombs. 'The fact that the movie made an effort to portray all this realistically helps convey this message to the public and raise awareness of a real issue,' says Colwell. 'In contrast, Armageddon, while about the same threat, is so completely off base on so many fundamental aspects of reality, that on its own it is dismissed as pure fantasy in its entirety. The reality of the threat of asteroid impact in that movie is completely lost in the clutter of physical nonsense,' Colwell worries.

Others take the view that in the end 'fictional inaccuracy' is an oxymoron. 'In a story like Jurassic Park,' author Michael Crichton says http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/crichton/story.htm, 'to complain of inaccuracy is downright weird. Nobody can make a dinosaur. Therefore the story is a fantasy. How can accuracy have any meaning in a fantasy?' In that movie, the scientific script consultants can at best guess at the colour of a dinosaur's skin, or the sounds it makes, even the position of its nostrils http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/293/5531/779a.

Hussain, however, disagrees, 'Although many movies, like Jurassic Park, should be considered fantasy they still try to bring reality into it by using parts of scientific theory to explain the plot,' she says, 'this can be confusing to inquisitive minds in the audience that <em>want</em> to learn more about science, hear bits of truth they already know, and mix the unknown fiction with the facts.'

The problem stretches to the characters themselves and not just the test-tubes they wield. French Anderson www.frenchanderson.org of the University of Southern California was the scientific consultant on Gattaca. Anderson is a very well-known name in the field, sometimes referred to as the 'Father of Gene Therapy', so he was perhaps an obvious 'name' for the producers to turn to for advice on genetic accuracies. 'Gail Lyon of Jersey Films called and asked me to consult on Gattaca,' he told Beagle, 'they wanted a "reality check" on the science. Andrew Nichols had done a superb job and I had little to contribute except my enthusiastic support of the film and its message.' Anderson believes that the characters can strongly influence viewers though. 'Whether appropriate or not, young people get a lot of their ideas about careers and what "being a [particular person]" would be like from movies and television,' he explains, adding that the likes of 'Dr Kildare and Ben Casey were major draws of young people into medicine a number of years ago, for example.'

Bormanis believes the problem, as it is, lies in the fact that movies and TV are generally interested in dramatic or otherwise extraordinary people. 'From a dramatist's point of view, the priest who's lived decently and honorably all his life is much less interesting than the one who's giving in to the temptation to break his vows. The same kind of thing is true with scientists.' Anderson adds that scientists and doctors are people like everyone else with the same virtues and flaws as everyone else, 'With science requiring team efforts nowadays, the isolated 'scientist' doing something significant either good or bad is highly unlikely,' he says.

'Sci-fi for fun, or sci-fi for education?' asks Hussain, 'The best thing to do is better educate before seeing the movies, so we can all sit back and enjoy the show.

FOOTNOTE

What's the deal?

Sumida reckons on a consulting fee of between $50 and 100 for a half-hour session or long phone call. A few hundred dollars for a presentation and of course expenses for any travel, accommodation, meals, and additional compensation for being away from home and work. He points out, however, that for the amateur advisor there is a potential tripwire that would catch out the unscrupulous, 'All consulting <em>must</em> be secondary to [one's] primary job of teaching, research, and administration at the University; so, much is done over holiday breaks, summers, weekends, and evenings.' We cannot have Professors becoming Hollywood stars on tax dollars, now, can we?

LINKS

The University Film & Video Association http://www.ufva.org

Scitrac is Colwell's site for scientific and technical research consulting http://www.scitrac.com

The Society for Cinema Studies http://www.cinemastudies.org

ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite is run by the film program at the University of Alabama

The Science of Star Trek by David Allen Batchelor http://ssdoo.gsfc.nasa.gov/education/just_for_fun/startrek.html

The Science (and Nonscience) of Jurassic Park - http://www.dinosaur.org/jparticles.htm

A treatise on the film Contact on which the late Carl Sagan was author and overseer - http://www.setileague.org/articles/contact.htm#Science%20Hollywood%20Style