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A history fit for Hollywood

J. Weston PhippenCommunications specialist

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Los Alamos National Laboratory employees played crucial roles in bringing the movie Oppenheimer to life.

July 19, 2023

From January to March 2022, the normally staid town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, bubbled with excitement. Residents spotted Matt Damon dining at the local Blue Window Bistro. Sightings of Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Emily Blunt passed between friends and colleagues on social media. The historic Fuller Lodge teemed with camera crews.

One of Hollywood’s biggest directors, Christopher Nolan, had arrived in the small town atop the Pajarito Plateau, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, to shoot a biopic about one of Los Alamos’ most famous residents: J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The film, titled Oppenheimer, was written by Nolan and is based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. The film stars Murphy as Oppenheimer and, based on early trailers, recreates the physicist’s quest to build the world’s first atomic bombs at a secret laboratory in Los Alamos. Murphy’s portrayal not only captures the grueling work of the time, but also the moral implications of developing such destructive weapons.

“I know of no more dramatic tale with higher stakes, more extraordinary twists and turns,” Nolan said of Oppenheimer’s story at CinemaCon. “J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world we live in, for better or for worse.”

Los Alamos National Laboratory—as Oppenheimer’s wartime laboratory is now known—played no official role in making the film, which is set to premiere July 21—five days after the 78th anniversary of the Trinity test, during which Los Alamos scientists detonated the world’s first nuclear device in the New Mexico desert. But the Lab and its employees did help with the film in many ways, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera, and they left an indelible impact on the film, even if this participation is lost on many moviegoers.

“We were in the real Los Alamos,” Nolan said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “and we had a lot of real scientists as extras … You’ve been on sets where you’ve got a lot of extras around and they’re more or less thinking about lunch. These guys were thinking about the geopolitical implications of nuclear arms and knew a lot about it. It actually was a great reminder every day of: We have to be really on our game, we have to be faithful to the history here and really know what we’re up to.”

Meeting the director

Before news of the movie spread across social media and through the Los Alamos grapevine, Jonathan Creel received a call in his office.

In the winter of 2021, Creel was the Lab’s public engagement specialist for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Creel’s job was to, in conjunction with other experts from the Lab and the National Park Service, offer the most accurate possible interpretation of the Manhattan Project—right down to the shade of green paint used on buildings of the era. For a film director wanting to recreate the Manhattan Project, Creel was the perfect contact.

“At the time, I was helping the Los Alamos Historical Society create an interpretive plan for the Oppenheimer house here in town, so I was already in full Oppie mode,” Creel says. “When the film team came to me with a bunch of questions, I said I could probably help. Next thing I know, they wanted to fly out here for a visit.”

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Creel helped guide the location scouts on an initial tour down Bathtub Row, the Los Alamos street so named because the houses there (including Oppenheimer’s) were the only houses in town with bathtubs during the Manhattan Project. The location scouts photographed and measured historic buildings, such as a women’s dormitory and Fuller Lodge, which served as a dining and meeting hall for scientists. Creel also led the location scouts around the Bradbury Science Museum, which houses about 2,000 artifacts from the Manhattan Project, including 1940s-era dosimeters used to detect radiation and a replica Fat Man bomb, the implosion-type weapon detonated above Japan.

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Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan visited Pond Cabin, which was used during the Manhattan Project by physicist Emilio Segrè.

The location scouts made tentative plans to return a few weeks later. Before they left, Creel added, “If you give us a heads up, we could probably get you all out to Technical Area 18”—part of the Laboratory where several buildings used during the Manhattan Project are not accessible to the general public, except for three scheduled tours per year.

When Creel next heard from the location scouts, they told him Nolan, the director, wanted to come out to Los Alamos. Creel was shocked. Nolan was one of his favorite directors, and he had assumed that the five-time Academy Award nominee wouldn’t be interested in touring dusty, historic buildings—especially if he couldn’t film in and around them (photography and videography are typically not allowed on Lab property). But several weeks later, Creel was shaking Nolan’s hand in downtown Los Alamos. “Nolan pulled up with an entourage,” remembers Creel, adding that Nolan wore a large trench coat on that chilly winter day. “He was very nice, very fun and down to earth.”

Before driving to Technical Area 18, in accordance with procedure, Creel checked everyone’s identification, even Nolan’s. “It was like yep, okay, you’re Christopher Nolan,” Creel chuckles. Creel then went through a security and safety talk, reminding people they’d need to leave their cell phones behind. Nolan’s production designer grew frazzled, Creel remembers, and she furiously typed out a few last-minute emails. But Nolan, with a shrug, pulled a flip phone from his pocket and tossed it several feet away into the open car door. “He kind of just threw it four feet through the air,” Creel says.

The Technical Area 18 tour included a stop at Pond Cabin, a log structure where Nobel laureate Emilio Segrè conducted plutonium research during the Manhattan Project. Along with historic buildings expert Jeremy Brunette and park program manager Cheryl Abeyta, Creel gave Nolan the history of Battleship Bunker, where scientists performed explosive lens tests to determine if the plutonium core of the Gadget, the first test device, could be rapidly and symmetrically condensed with high explosives to start a fission chain reaction.

Creel remembers that Nolan asked a lot of great questions, and the two spoke of the pressure Oppenheimer would have been under to complete the world’s first nuclear weapons. “He was curious in an informed way,” Creel says of Nolan, “and very in tune with the Lab’s current mission. He’d clearly done a lot of research.”

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The Army-Navy E Award program (original shown here) was among the artifacts recreated for the Oppenheimer film.

Digging through history

After the tour is when the real work began. The film’s production team wanted photos and measurements of as many things as possible, even seemingly trivial items.

“They bombarded us with questions,” says Wendy Strohmeyer, an artifact collection specialist at the Bradbury, “and so I started to field a lot of those requests.”

For instance, the film’s production team wanted to recreate the E Award flag, presented to Los Alamos by the U.S. Army and Navy after the bombing of Japan. The E Award was presented during a ceremony at Fuller Lodge, and today the original flag hangs inside the Lab’s National Security Sciences Building, a limited access area where photography is not allowed. But Strohmeyer was able to find photos and measurements, taken years earlier when the Lab commissioned repairs on the flag. The film’s production team also wanted to recreate the E Award paper programs, so again Strohmeyer measured, photographed, and emailed copies of the Lab’s two originals from October 1945. 

“They could probably print a run-of-the-mill E Award program, and no one would notice,” Strohmeyer says. “But as someone whose job it is to preserve history, I appreciated that accuracy was as important to them as it is to me. I also gave them some blurry photos of the ceremony, taken by a Lab employee at the time. Later on, when they were filming that scene at Fuller Lodge, I have to say, it looked pretty accurate.”

Researchers from the Laboratory’s classified library and archives, the National Security Research Center (NSRC), dug through troves of historic schematics, photos, and film. The researchers not only passed along hundreds of unclassified images they had at the ready, but they also combed through vault files and turned up historical videos that hadn’t been viewed for decades. One special find included footage of the Trinity site bunkers where Groves and Oppenheimer witnessed the world’s first nuclear blast.

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Many Project Y scientists wore dosimeters, small devices that detect radiation. Lab historians sent pictures and measurements of these early dosimeters to the film crew.

Both the NSRC and the Bradbury are in the process of digitizing parts of their collections, and requests from the film crew expedited locating artifacts that hadn’t been seen for decades. “In a way, this effort helped us, too,” Strohmeyer says, “because that history is important for us to have available.”

All that digging through files, however, meant the Lab’s classification analysts needed to review everything to ensure it was suitable for public release. So atop their already massive daily workload, the analysts worked quickly to review these nearly 80-year-old artifacts.

Employees across these groups handled the extra work with pleasure, many of whom felt a responsibility to help Nolan accurately portray events.

“It was kind of amazing the way everyone pulled together,” Creel says. “This is part of our jobs, to help people understand this moment in time. And this moment was one of the most world-changing events in human history. It’s something people might know about, but that not everyone has a great understanding of—the blood, sweat, tears, and the difficulty that went into the Manhattan Project.”

Scientists playing scientists

In January 2022, a casting agency published a local call for extras. The agency was particularly interested in casting real-life Los Alamos scientists in the film. On a Sunday, a line of hopeful extras stretched for more than a quarter mile around Los Alamos High School. Some people waited more than two hours in 30-degree temperatures before making their way into one of the school’s gymnasiums, where they submitted photos and paperwork to the casting agency. 

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A 1940s-era dosimeter.

“In the announcement, they told us to dress in whatever clothes we had that might match the time period,” says Nora Jones, a technical project manager with the International Threat Reduction group. “It was quite funny to see the line of men in porkpie hats, and I remember thinking, ‘How do so many people own those hats?’”

But not everyone dressed like they were from the 1940s. “I was there on a whim,” says Thomas Mueller, a program manager for the Nuclear Counterterrorism and Nonproliferation group, who was later cast as a member of the military.

Joseph Smidt, part of the Laboratory’s Weapons Physics associate directorate, decided to audition because “there’s not many times in life when you’ll have an opportunity like this. I wrote in the survey comments that I’m a scientist at the Lab. A few days later I got a call back.”

The extras filmed in three primary locations around New Mexico. Some scenes were shot in the town of Los Alamos, for example, at Oppenheimer’s house. But because Los Alamos has changed a bit since the 1940s, the film crew also built a 1940s version of Los Alamos near Abiquiu. The Trinity test, which occurred in what is today White Sands Missile Range, was recreated (without nuclear material) and filmed near Belen, about 30 minutes south of Albuquerque.

Before each day of filming, male extras received haircuts and a shave—sometimes two shaves on an especially long day. On set, they were constantly reminded to pull up their pants, past their waists to just below their ribs. But the men had it easy. The women were told to sleep in hair curlers the night before filming. “They gave us a hair-setting solution, and the curls would be glued to my head for days,” Jones says. “I wonder if the entirety of 1940s women just never slept well because of those curlers. It certainly gave me an appreciation for what my grandmother went through during that time.”

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Parts of the movie were filmed at Oppenheimer’s Los Alamos home, now owned by the Los Alamos Historical Society. Photo: LosAlamos County

Most extras played soldiers, military police officers, spouses, or townspeople. Smidt played a background scientist, with the first of his scenes at the faux Los Alamos in the desert of Abiquiu. A guard gate had been constructed that, he thought, looked exactly like the old black and white photos he’d seen. The main housing area also seemed straight from the ’40s, although most buildings were modular and could be moved. When a scene called for fewer extras, the director sometimes ordered extras to hide themselves behind the fake buildings. Crouched together out of view, on more than one occasion Damon or Murphy would walk past the extras, flash a smile, and say hello.

The film crews also built replicas of the early technical areas, where scientists ran experiments during the Manhattan Project. “You have these mental images of what it might have been like to participate in Trinity,” Smidt says. “It was neat to be a scientist today and to put myself in the role of a scientist of the past. It took on a very personal meaning for me.”

Benigno Sandoval, with the Lab’s Space Instrument Realization group, played an Army soldier in one scene at the fictional Los Alamos set, then a military police officer in another scene. “A lot of times you have no context for where your scene fits into the movie because you show up and they tell you to walk here, talk with this guy in a truck, or look like you’re inspecting this vehicle, and that’s it,” he says.

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Fuller Lodge, now managed by Los Alamos County, is on the United States National Register of Historic Places. Many Lab extras filmed scenes here. Photo: Los Alamos County

Sandoval had never played a role in a film before, and he was surprised by how many different platforms the crew used to get certain shots—sometimes the camera was attached to a cable that panned smoothly overhead, or the camera was mounted on a moving truck or even on a helicopter. Sandoval wasn’t in a helicopter scene, but Smidt was, and he remembers standing in a group as Nolan directed the helicopter to fly over the fake town at a height that felt uncomfortably low.

“They had this massive, 3D Imax camera hanging from the helicopter,” Smidt says. “As soon as it flew over, a wall of sand and rocks and gravel pelted us from every direction. Then they’d say, ‘All right, let’s shoot it again.’”

The average age of Los Alamos staff during the Manhattan Project was 25. But Peter Sandoval, a retired engineer who is also Benigno Sandoval’s uncle, filled a different demographic in the movie. He was cast as a senator. “My distinguished gray hair must have caught their attention,” he laughs. He sat on the dais at the Santa Fe capitol building, a few chairs from Robert Downey Jr., in a recreation of the closed-door hearings that eventually stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

The elder Sandoval’s first scene entailed a walk down the hallway, turning left, then entering the bathroom. When they called “action,” he did as told, except in his excitement he accidentally walked into the women’s restroom. “I thought I was gonna get fired after my first acting role,” Sandoval jokes. “Everyone gave me a hard time after that.”

By far the most impressive recreation was the Trinity test, which was portrayed with a series of coordinated live explosions—nonnuclear, of course. On set, the film crew built a replica of the tower that held the device, all of it illuminated from below by lights. At night in the desert, surrounded by vintage cars and trucks and actors in period clothing, many of the extras found this set particularly powerful.

“It was a little eerie,” says Creel, who beyond supplying historical information was also an extra, which required that he shave his beard for the first time in 16 years. “It was really a moment of, it was just fascinating as a historian. I have goosebumps thinking of it now.”

A scene that called for a great number of extras was filmed in downtown Los Alamos, inside Fuller Lodge. Murphy, playing Oppenheimer, gave a speech after the successful bombing of Japan. As the speech ended and Murphy walked from the dais to the exit, a crowd of cheering extras slapped his shoulders in congratulations. Outside Fuller Lodge, the film crew projected apocalyptic colors through the windows to create a scene meant to reflect Oppenheimer’s internal struggle with creating such a destructive weapon.

Connecting with the past

The Oppenheimer movie will introduce many people around the world to what’s now Los Alamos National Laboratory. But how the movie will portray the Lab and its most famous resident, no one will know until the film premieres.

However the movie unfolds, being part of its creation has had a profound impact on the employees who participated. “It gave me a deeper context in terms of the history of this career field we find ourselves working in,” Jones says. “We’re the caretakers of all the good work started by people like Oppenheimer.”

Smidt agrees. “What Oppenheimer did, and what the Manhattan Project accomplished, is one of the most influential moments in human history. That has echoed in my mind since filming. In many ways, we at the Lab need to feel that connection today more than ever, that we are part of this history and that our work now is still changing the world.” ★

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