TWO CINEMATIC VERSIONS OF HORROR: 1 HUMANITARIAN, 1 COMEDIC : BUILDING A BIT OF FUN IN A BOMB FILM

After Three Mile Island, the Challenger accident and now the meltdown at Chernobyl, it’s becoming increasingly clear that as far as the high technology is concerned, nobody’s really in charge, nobody has all the answers. The lesson is--always has been--don’t trust the experts.

--Marshall Brickman

“The Manhattan Project,” a forthcoming film about a 17-year-old boy who builds a nuclear bomb, was intended as entertainment rather than an important message film about the terrorizing possibilities it poses, said its director, Marshall Brickman.

“Frankly, anytime I hear about an ‘important’ film, I run in the opposite direction, toward something that won’t feel so much like homework,” said Brickman, “but it’s not a light-hearted jaunt through Plutoniumland, either.”

The film, scheduled for release June 13 at 800 theaters nationwide, stars John Lithgow as a nuclear weapons designer who unintentionally provides a precocious young friend with access to the plutonium he needs to complete the bomb for entry into a science fair. Also unintended are a series of somewhat madcap events that lead to the activation of the bomb and attempts to defuse it before it goes off.

“I’d like to think that (the film) tells the audience what it needs to hear, rather than what (the audience) thinks it wants to hear,” said Brickman in describing his comedic approach to a sobering subject. By using a light touch, he said, he hopes “the audience may be distanced just enough to tap into this fascinating and troublesome area in a palatable and hopefully enjoyable way.

“It’s like some nursery rhymes which, if you actually consider the content, are full of violence, death and mutilation. . . . It’s a nuclear fairy tale.”

Brickman, who as a writer collaborated with Woody Allen on several films, including “Annie Hall,” and who has also directed two films, “Simon” and “Lovesick,” said he began the script for “The Manhattan Project” more than a year ago (with co-writer Thomas Baum). He said he wanted to develop as a director, “beyond comedy,” and that his own longtime interest in technology and the dawning of the Atomic Age provided a direction.

Surrounded by some of the staples of the new technology, such as his word processor, Brickman, 45, reflected on his continuing interest in the bomb. “I’ve always thought the invention of it marked our last chance as a civilization to remain innocent, depending on whether or not we used it.

“Certainly, it’s a subject that’s overripe for popular entertainment,” he went on, noting his own increasing sensitivity to the psychological fallout from the age.

“Whether it’s thinking about (nuclear) power plants, detente with a bomb itself, this is something that’s on everybody’s mind, consciously or subconsciously. Also, if you’re a parent, you do start to worry about your children.

“My initial concept for the story was to parallel the experience of a 17-year-old (a character played in the film by Christopher Collet) who builds the bomb with the experiences of some of the scientists who worked on the original Manhattan Project in the early 1940s,” Brickman said. “As I researched more into the subject, what struck me about the young scientists working at Los Alamos was how apolitical they were--interested only in whether they could solve the scientific problems, not in the consequences.”

The average age of the scientists, he noted, was 27. “Like the boy in the film, the scientists came to grips with the consequences of their actions only through experience.”

Brickman said he also wanted to try to “demythologize” the bomb for movie audiences. “It’s my feeling that the bomb exists in most people’s minds as just a concept--a word, a phrase: ‘The Bomb.’ It lacks, in the public mind, tangible specificity.

“I thought if the audience saw the bomb being built before their eyes, they might gain a better understanding of it, and also see that it could be taken apart just as easily as it was put together,” he continued, pointing out that most of the parts used to make the bomb in the film are familiar on “the contemporary consumer landscape” and are available for purchase at most electronics stores.

“In a culture of gadget lovers like ours, the bomb is, after all, the ultimate gadget--the gadget to end all gadgets,” Brickman observed wryly.

“I wanted to contrast the two worlds that co-exist in America these days: one, the world of school, adolescence, growing sexual awareness, the normal problems of growing to manhood . . . and the other world, of the high-tech, sinister and seductive environment of the weapons designers and their laboratories,” said Brickman, who spoke humorously of the nuclear Establishment. “It’s my way of blowing off the anxiety,” he said of humor.

“Lithgow’s character (in the film) is a member of an elite: the high priesthood of nuclear weapons design,” he said. “They follow their own rules, speak only among themselves, possess secret information know one else can know. They have made the ultimate Faustian bargain, and sold their souls in exchange for knowledge and power.

“One scientist told me the appeal of the work was that something you thought up in your head, something you invented with your mind could be built into a gadget which, if it worked, could create temperatures and pressures on Earth that exist only in the sun, or that existed during the creation of the universe,” he recalled. “So, for a millionth of a second, you get to play God. I guess it takes a person of rare character to turn down that kind of part.

“Even if they destroy themselves and the entire civilization in the process, they can’t help themselves,” said Brickman of the scientist he manages to take a serious and yet humorous look at in the film. “It’s too exciting, too special, too sexy.”