The History of the History

History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange, and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

In this episode, we're going to be looking at what happens when history shaping events happen.

In this case, it's the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

What the first drafts of history look like, and how those drafts are quickly written and rewritten until a narrative takes hold that makes sense for a country.

And how it's hard to dislodge those narratives.

After the bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the film studio MGM set out to make a movie that the studio chief, Louis B. Meyer, called the most important story he would ever film.

It was going to be a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the atomic bomb.

At Paramount Studios, Halby Wallace was ramping up his own film version.

His screenwriter was a novelist, Ayn Rand, who saw in the physicist, Robert Openheimer, who's a principal member of the Manhattan Project, as a model for a character she was sketching out for Atlas Shrugged.

Today, I'm speaking with Greg Mitchell, author of the book The Beginning or the End, How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

He looks at the first efforts of Hollywood to process the atomic age.

The movie, The Beginning or the End, that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists who created a huge weapon but also scared about its implications and a warning against a nuclear arms race, was changed due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman in the military,

to turn it into a simple love story and a simple triumph of good over evil and almost a celebration of the atomic bombs.

And this eventually gets hearted into the self-censorship that Hollywood faced during the McCarthy era.

On one hand, this is a story about a specific event in history, but on the other hand, it's a story that has been going on for thousands of years of how cultures understand their own history, how they craft a narrative to explain their own history, and the challenges of pushing back against those narratives.

A lot's unpack here, and I hope you enjoyed this discussion with Greg Mitchell. Greg, welcome to the show.

I'm very happy to be here, thank you.

I'm looking forward to this because I've covered film a lot in this podcast, especially films from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

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