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