About this item
One of Vanity Fairs 21 Best Books of 2020Winner, 2020 Richard Wall Memorial Award Special Jury Prize, Theatre Library AssociationThe shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production. Soon after atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, MGM set out to make a movie studio chief Louis B. Mayer called "the most important story" he would ever film: a big budget dramatization of the Manhattan Project and the invention and use of the revolutionary new weapon. Over at Paramount, Hal B. Wallis was ramping up his own film version. His screenwriter: the novelist Ayn Rand, who saw in physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer the model for a character she was sketching for Atlas Shrugged. Greg Mitchells The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military - for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood) . Mitchell has found his way into the lofty rooms, from Washington to California, where it happened, unearthing hundreds of letters and dozens of scripts that show how wise intentions were compromised in favor of defending the use of the bomb and the imperatives of postwar politics. As in his acclaimed Cold War true-life thriller The Tunnels, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.
About the Author
Greg Mitchell is the author of dozen non-fiction books. His latest, with an October 2016 pub date, is "THE TUNNELS: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill" (Crown) . His other books include: "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas" (a New York Times Notable Book) ; "The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair's Race for Governor and the Birth of Media Politics" (winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize) ; "So Wrong for So Long," on Iraq and the media; and two books with Robert Jay Lifton, "Hiroshima in America" and "Who Owns Death? "Mitchell won numerous national awards as the editor of Editor & Publisher from 2001 to 2009. He began his magazine career as Senior Editor of the legendary Crawdaddy for most of the 1970s and helped create the first major article about Bruce Springsteen (and later was presented with a gold record for "Born to Run") . He co-produced the recent film, "Following the Ninth," about the cultural and political impact of Beethoven's Ninth symphony around the world in recent years, and has served as adviser to other acclaimed documentaries. His articles have appeared in dozens of national magazines and leading newspapers such as The New York Times and Washington Post. He lives in the New York City area.
