#1551 On the Set of the Oppenheimer Film

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2023

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Clay Jenkinson interviews the actor John Gowans, who portrays Dr. Ward Evans of Northwestern University in the upcoming Robert Oppenheimer film. Gowans tells fascinating stories about being on the set of the film, particularly the 1954 security hearing in Washington, DC., when Oppenheimer was treated like a man of potential treason by the McCarthy-era security establishment. The director Christopher Nolan kept all the actors in a small enclosed space to create the atmosphere of tension and excruciating intimacy of the security hearing, after which Oppenheimer's security clearance was withdrawn by the United States government. Oppenheimer is one of Clay's historical characters.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to listening to
0:04.8	America with Clay Jenkins and I am Clay Jenkins and I had the great good fortune
0:08.9	today to interview John Gowons who plays Dr. Ward Evans in the new
0:14.8	Oppenheimer film that's coming out on July 21st throughout the United States.
0:19.6	It's going to be a major film, Kenneth Brana, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt,
0:24.7	Matt Damon. It's just a star-studded cast about a really great and important
0:31.6	moment in American history. I'm really excited about it. I've been thinking about
0:35.4	it for a couple of years and of course I'm not a Hollywood actor but I would
0:39.2	have loved to have been some minor thirty-second cameo part in this really
0:44.6	important film. So I can't wait to see it. It was filmed in 70 millimeter film
0:48.9	not tape which is very cumbersome, very expensive. You change film
0:53.0	canisters literally every eight minutes. It was also filmed in IMAX and so IMAX
0:57.7	is a almost unbelievably cumbersome technique but I'm going to see it in IMAX
1:03.7	theater at some point. I feel certain I'll go to Seattle or Denver or Minneapolis or
1:09.5	Winnipeg to do that. Anyway this is John Gowons and he played Dr. Ward Evans.
1:15.3	So the Oppenheimer created the atomic bomb brilliantly and it worked on the
1:18.9	first three times. So the test in New Mexico on the 16th of July 1945 and then
1:25.3	Hiroshima August 6 1945 Nagasaki August 9 1945. So the first three uses of it
1:32.3	were all successful if you want to call a weapon of mass destruction successful
1:37.9	on Oppenheimer. We came to kind of a public figure and national hero in
1:42.1	summary specs. He had a very distinctive look. He had a very distinctive
1:46.5	manner. He was a little bit of almost an absent-minded professor but also
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Listening to America, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Listening to America and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.