Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic

(Film documentary)

Director and writer: Jon Else
Composor: John Adams
Narrator: Eric Owens
Featuring:
Peter Sellars
John Adams
Gerald Finley
Freeman Dyson
Ian Robertson
Tom Randle
Kris Jepson
Donald Runnicles
Richard Rhodes
Eric Owens
Thomas Glenn
Donata Cabrera
Label: A Jon Else/Actual Films/Independent Television Service co-production in association with PBS.

Film clip

http://www.actualfilms.net/wonders_film_clip.htm

Wonders Are Many tells the story of making a grand opera about the atomic bomb.  This behind-the-scenes documentary follows composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars over the course of a year as they work to forge the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer into a music drama like no other: the strange and beautiful Doctor Atomic. As Sellars and Adams struggle to make high art from the most savage weapon in history, the film explores the spectacular and unnerving 60 year history of nuclear weapons.  It shows the real events behind the drama on stage, and the unintended consequences of actions (and inactions) of men working on the first nuclear device.

Weaving together the intense and sometimes hilarious process of making an opera with striking newly declassified historical film of Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project and nuclear testing, Wonders Are Many focuses on the 48 hours leading up to the Trinity atomic test in July of 1945.

The film unfolds in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, and in the back stage frenzy at the San Francisco Opera.  At the center of a swirling vortex of singers, scenery, physicists, stagehands and bombs stand the indomitable Sellers and Adams.

This film is the culmination of work that director Jon Else began in 1979 with Day After Trinity, his biographical film of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and in 2000 with Sing Faster: The Stagehands Ring Cycle.

Wonders Are Many is a movie about an opera about nuclear weapons.  When a group of American scientists set out in secret in 1941 to make an atomic bomb, no one was sure whether it would work; and when John Adams and Peter Sellars set out in 2005 to create an opera about that first nuclear weapon, they had no idea whether their music drama would succeed.  This is the story of those two creations 60 years apart.

Back in 1980, Jon Else directed The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb, winner of the first ever prize for documentary at Sundance.  Now, a quarter century later, he has gone behind the scenes to follow composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars for a year as they struggle with that same story, working to create the first opera about weapons of mass destruction.

……..

This extraordinary documentary weaves together the frenetic back stage action at the opera house with the real World War II events which lie behind the drama on stage.   Spectacular recently declassified footage of nuclear testing, the breathtaking beauty of John Adams’ music, and the antics of a 250 person opera company racing toward opening night under Peter Sellars’ masterful direction all come together to make a documentary like none other.

Looming at the center of both the opera and the film is the enigmatic and irresistible figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer—the frail aesthete who could curse and womanize and ride the high country in New Mexico with the best of the Alpha-males, the romantic recluse who created the most potent military weapon in history, the great lion of American science, culture hound who hated opera.  His life spanned most of the scientific and ethical history of the 20th Century, and he, more than any other scientist, grew weary under the burden and frustration of forbidden knowledge he helped unleash but could no longer control.

The film begins with an astonishing display of nuclear savagery—blast after blast in the desert, under the ocean, in space—and then suddenly cuts to the first rehearsal of Doctor Atomic: breathtakingly beautiful lines from baritone Gerald Finley, singing the part of Oppenheimer.  Physicist Freeman Dyson explains, “I’m not surprised that you make an Opera out of Oppenheimer, because he was such an operatic figure. He loved to be mysterious, loved to strut around on stage rather than just walk.” Now Peter Sellars begins rehearsing the chorus, “…I want you to feel this is the split second before you witness a disaster.”  John opens a Manhattan project report which he has set to music, “the end of June 1944 finds us expecting from day to day the first explosion of an atomic bomb devised by man…”   As the opera company Prop Master shops for bomb parts at a junk shop, we learn the early history of nuclear fission, which leads us to the prospect in World War II that Hitler was building an atomic bomb of his own.   Young professor Oppenheimer predicts that some day a few pounds of uranium could destroy Manhattan, and joins the secret bomb project.

We see Los Alamos Lab in 1944, shrouded in secrecy atop a mesa in northern New Mexico, and the young scientists whom Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves gathered from all around the world. Peter Sellars, cutting and pasting the libretto in his Los Angeles studio, reminds us that “This subject matter is so clichéd; we’ve heard it all before. But in art our job is to take something you look at everyday but never see, and say ‘look again;”  Now John Adams is at the keyboard in his Berkeley studio,  experimenting with chord clusters for the lines Peter has pasted together in creating the “Plutonium Chorus,”  musing “it’s not quite like ‘The Marriage Of Figaro’ with people getting caught in the bedroom and hiding in the closet.”    Baritone Gerald Finley belts out “We are bedeviled by faulty detonators!”  as we move into footage of appallingly violent fighting in Europe, leading to the fall ofGermany.  With the Nazis defeated, a fierce debate rears its head within the bomb project, as young scientists fear they might be starting a nuclear arms race, that the bomb would now be used on a Japanese city, and someday even turned against the United States.  The clarion young tenor Tom Randle sings “This is a petition to the President of the United States….,”  to which Finley (Oppenheimer) replies, “The nation’s fate should be left in the hands of the best men in Washington.”

Meanwhile, the air war against Japan continues: massive nighttime raids. 140,000 people burn to death in a single raid on Tokyo, and historian Richard Rhodes explains that,  “in that context the thing which set Hiroshima apart was not the numbers killed, but radiation.”  Back in the rehearsal hall, Adams and tenor Tom Randle work on lines taken from an interview with the late physicist Robert Wilson, “I have a certain amount of respect for this atomic bomb, being right next to it.”  And now the real Robert Wilson, in an archive interview, picks up the story, “Lightening was striking all around…” as he and the singer trade phrases across decades of history, leading to archive of Robert Oppenheimer himself: “There are no secrets in the world of nature.  There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. Sometimes they are secret because a man doesn’t like to know what he’s up to if he can avoid it.”

Stagehands work frantically to install the Los Alamos set, then the Trinity Test Site set, and now Adamsand Sellars work with the chorus, singing “We surround the plutonium core from 32 points….pentagons, hexagons, dodechahedrons…” Freeman Dyson explains how a “wandering neutron in a lump of Plutonium” will trigger a massive chain reaction.  Then suddenly, it is Sept. 11, 2001, and Dyson continues, “…my first thought was: we’re so damned lucky it wasn’t plutonium…that time.”

In the rehearsal hall, Adams leads Soprano Kristine Jepson through the beautiful erotic aria “Am I in your Light.”  Back in the shop at the San Francisco Opera, carpenters and painters put the finishing touches on the bomb.  On the back of a flat bed truck it moves through the streets of San Francisco, into the opera house, and then, to the throbbing choral voices of the “Vishnu Chorus,” makes its debut on stage, with lightening striking all around.  “At the sight of this, your shape stupendous, with mouths agape and flame eyes staring….!”

But making grand art is not easy: Peter decides to replace Tenor Tom Randle with a younger singer a few days before opening night, and Adams is having trouble getting the chorus to sing the opening line, “matter can be neither created nor destroyed,” with proper phrasing.  In newly declassified footage, we see final preparations for the Trinity Test, with Oppenheimer hovering over the bomb on the eve of the test.  The war in Asia rages on, napalm, Kamakazies, saturation bombing.  And now, as waves of ghastly light roll over singers on stage, Maestro Donald Runnicles leads his orchestra through the final unbearably intense final minute of the final countdown.

Robert Oppenheimer, ghostly in archive footage, says, “….I only get frightened, and it happens very rarely…by the sense of terror when I think of something new.”  Fade out.

What the critics say

Duane Byrge, Hollywood Reporter, 26 January 2007

Bottom Line: Brainy glimpse into the nature of both science and art.

This is a masterful distillation of science, art, psychology and humanity.

Creation, whether in science or art, is wondrous. That’s the main thrust of “Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic,” filmmaker Jon Else’s inspired documentary about the cataclysmic 48 hours before the test of the first atomic bomb, as refracted through the rehearsal of an opera conceived by Peter Sellars and composed by John Adams.
With a sobering and enlightening leitmotif of historical footage and clips of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his scientific team, Else focuses on the splendidly grandiose attempt of theater guru Sellars and his artistic team’s attempt to distill the enormity of the creation of the A-bomb. Even for those of us who find it most wondrous that Sellars is able to secure funding even from the cultural elite for his grandiose piffles, “Wonders” is a complex and illuminating glimpse into human creativity.

Many will be surprised to learn that Oppenheimer had a poet’s sensibility, read John Dunne, mastered many languages and grappled with philosophical complexities. In Oppenheimer, the scientific mind fused with the poet’s sensibility. The fact that such a Renaissance man was the visionary for the most devastating weapon ever conceived by mankind at the time is one of the paradoxes, ironies and other complexities that Else has explored in this compelling documentary.
Tightly layered with uncanny insights and profound illuminations, “Wonders” is a masterful distillation of explosive elements: science, art, psychology and humanity.

Robert Koehler, Variety, 22 January 2007

Art and science form a combustible fusion in Jon Else’s elegant and wide-ranging “Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic.” A dazzling case of the right filmmaker attached to the right subject, Else comprehensively captures the making of the 2005 San Francisco Opera world premiere of composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars’ opera, “Doctor Atomic,” on J. Robert Oppenheimer and the creation of the first atomic bomb. Though funded by and set to air next year on public television, the film is best seen in cinemas, where it seems certain to capture select auds in top-flight fests and in release Stateside and abroad.

Since Oppenheimer never left behind diaries or an autobiography, his life remains an open book for interpreters, which Adams and Sellars eagerly would like to be. Originally intended to span Oppenheimer’s entire career involving the bomb, which covered a number of year, Adams explains that the dramatic need to compress dictated that the narrative concentrate on the final two days in Los Alamos, New Mexico, leading to the 1945 test.

Given that Else has explored this exact topic before (and also lensed in the same opera establishment for his 2000 pic, “Sing Faster”), he risked repeating himself as a filmmaker. But with so much excess archival material not used in “Trinity” and with the chance to observe how artists re-imagine and stage actual events, an extremely different — though similarly majestic — documentary results.

Else’s camera is allowed into Sellars’ and Adams’ separate, sun-drenched, homey work spaces, as they go about building a libretto from bits and pieces of text taken from sources as disparate as a work on the military uses of atomic energy to “The Bhaghavadgita” (cited by the highly cultured Oppenheimer after the test). The intent, says Adams, is to find “faux verse” that can be sung.

Since the underlying intent of “Wonders Are Many” is to erase distinctions between science and art, inclusion of engrossing physicist and Oppenheimer colleague Freeman Dyson is enormously helpful to the film’s overall substance and sense of humanity. The urge to want to see what happens when the atom is split is, as Dyson says, citing early atomic pioneer Lord Rutherford, in our child-like nature: “We want to take the watch apart to see how it works.”

Docu’s triumph is to implicitly suggest how this same tinkering operates in the making of opera, and Else fills the screen with a host of elegant correlations between the Trinity project and the production. Most striking of these is matched footage of the bomb itself with the bomb set piece, built from scratch in the opera workshop following archival photos and drawings.

Fans of Adams and Sellars will be in hog heaven, since their working methods have never been so intimately and thoroughly viewed. Sellars is as enthusiastic with his cast and chorus as he is privately or publicly. Close observers of his work will note that in this staging, he dispenses with his wilder stagecraft imaginings, creating stage pictures that closely adhere to the buildings and objects of the Trinity experiment.

Adams works in his San Francisco studio on a keyboard and computer set-up, and then later retreats up the coast to a quieter haunt in forested Mendocino. The sight of one of the country’s great composers writing on severe deadline is like peering in on extremely private space.

A last-minute cast change rocks Sellars’ ensemble (particularly lead tenor [sic] Gerald Finley as Oppenheimer), further deepening the film’s connection between science’s inherent risk of experimentation and art’s risk of failure.

HD lensing is clean and sharp, accented by vibrant colors and contrasted by the grainy texture of Trinity footage. Music soundtrack is drenched in Adams’ signature minimalist music, whose mathematical and clock-like precision seems perfectly married to Oppenheimer’s world.

Stephen Holden, New York Times, 30 May 2008

Mixing Art and Science to Get Doomsday

“There is no stable matter, and as in Buddhism, there is no stable anything,” muses the director Peter Sellars, as he reflects on the implications of splitting the atom in Jon Else’s enthralling documentary “Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic.”
The composer John Adams expresses a similar sense of awe when he declares that the purpose of art is to take something you see every day and say, “Look, look again.” The British-born American physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the film’s most articulate talking heads, explains that science and art express the same urge to “take the watch apart to see how it works.”

The film follows the creation of “Doctor Atomic,” the lofty operatic collaboration between Mr. Adams and Mr. Sellars, before its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005. The opera, composed in a postminimalist style, portrays the creation of the atomic bomb as a transcendent and demonic fusion of science and art conceived by the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Dr. Faustus-like leader of the secret Manhattan Project.

This wiry, cultured, multilingual polymath with owl-like eyes, who died in 1967 leaving no memoir, is the ghost in the film’s machine. “Wonders Are Many” is Mr. Else’s second film to examine this fascinating, chilly figure, after his Oscar-nominated 1981 documentary, “The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer & the Atomic Bomb.”

As you watch Mr. Sellars meticulously assemble the libretto from sources that include John Donne, Baudelaire, the Bhagavad-Gita and a book on the military uses of atomic energy whose words are sung in what Mr. Adams calls “faux poetry,” the process suggests the artistic equivalent of splitting the atom. It is fascinating to observe Mr. Sellars demonstrating to cast members the exact phrasing and emotional shading for conveying Mr. Adams’s austere but passionate score, and to watch the final touches being added to a facsimile of the original test weapon.

The third strand of the movie, after “Doctor Atomic” and Oppenheimer, is a history of atomic weaponry and the nuclear arms race between the United States and Germany and, later, the Soviet Union, related in a booming narrative voice-over. Devastating vintage film of German and Japanese cities going up in flames reminds you that even before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, millions of civilians died in saturation firebombing. The numbers of casualties cited are staggering.

The three strands mesh into a profound and sorrowful meditation on warfare, the possibility of nuclear annihilation and how developing a doomsday weapon affected the lives of the scientists building it. Death and birth eerily coincided. Most of the scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project were in their 20s, and the birth rate at the secret Los Alamos community was unusually high.

Originally, Mr. Adams recalls, “Doctor Atomic” was to have followed Oppenheimer’s life well into the 1950s. But as the piece evolved, it became the story of the last 48 hours, through the final countdown, before the first atomic bomb was exploded on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert.

The movie begins with a television interview in which Oppenheimer gives slippery answers to questions from Edward R. Murrow about humanity’s capacity for self-annihilation, something he clearly doesn’t want to take credit for having accelerated. Throughout the film Mr. Dyson, its resident scientific expert, effectively translates principles of nuclear physics into layman’s language. He knew Oppenheimer, whom he describes as “an operatic figure.”

Mr. Dyson recalls how he felt on Sept. 11. The World Trade Center bombing, he says, was a “pinprick” compared with what would have happened in a nuclear explosion. One of his first thoughts was “Thank God that’s not plutonium.”