Theoretical Physics, Hollywood and Hawking : With a little help from Steven Spielberg, the physicist’s best-selling ‘A Brief History of Time’ is being brought to the screen

Silent and apparently inert, Stephen W. Hawking sits in the wheelchair to which he is confined, as members of a film crew buzz around him on a sound stage, shooting him from almost every conceivable angle.

However you look at it, Hawking is not your average leading man. Yet here he sits, up on a pedestal in front of a blue screen, as the cameras bestow upon him all the attention usually reserved for a Redford, Eastwood or Costner.

Hawking, of course, is a leading theoretical physicist, probably the world’s best-known scientific mind since Einstein--a man who, through his exploration of big bangs and black holes, has embarked upon a search for no less than the underlying order of the universe.

The quest has brought him fame. His book “A Brief History of Time,” in which he explains his theories in terms comprehensible to intelligent laymen, is an international best seller. It tackles the big questions: Why do we and the universe exist? Did the universe have a beginning? If so, what happened before then?

And now his fame has brought him to Elstree, where a 90-minute nonfiction film based on “A Brief History of Time” is being made, produced among others by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, and intended for theatrical release, then a prime-time slot on NBC.

Hawking goes Hollywood.

Even though the controversial, uncompromising documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) has been brought in to direct, and even though the buzz on the set is that the film will have an “anti-naturalistic” sensibility, it’s clear no one here is planning to make a movie about the more arcane points of quantum mechanics or general relativity.

Instead, the film will concentrate on Hawking’s own story, and will show (with supporting evidence from colleagues and friends who are being interviewed on screen like witnesses) how he developed his remarkable theories about the universe’s scope, its nature and mysteries. Says Errol Morris: “I describe this as a kind of detective story, in which the people involved are ultimate detectives, trying to ask a number of ultimate questions about the world around us.”

Hawking is a good story, of course. Now in his late 40s, he was diagnosed 27 years ago when he was a young research student as suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the disabling condition better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only two years to live, but has instead survived under daunting conditions. Though his brain remains fiercely active, he has bodily control only in his left hand, and he needs 24-hour nursing care.

Until 1985, Hawking could speak, though his words were only intelligible to those close to him. In that year, he contracted pneumonia, and a tracheotomy put an end to his ability to talk. Paradoxically, this made him a far better communicator. On his wheelchair is a computer, into which he now inputs conversation, using a small mouse-like device in his left hand; his words are then heard on a voice synthesizer. Despite his apparent inertia in front of the blue screen, Hawking was actually clicking away at his mouse to answer questions put to him by Errol Morris about his early life.

For three consecutive days, Hawking was driven from Cambridge University (where he is Lucasian professor of mathematics) to these studios, some 12 miles northwest of London, in a specially adapted Volkswagen van.

He was filmed at length on set in an extraordinary recreation of his Cambridge office, complete with textbooks, a computer, filing cabinets. There’s a picture of him with the late Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov from 1986, and poster-sized photographs by Milton Greene and Philippe Halsman of Hawking’s favorite pin-up, Marilyn Monroe, along with other Marilyn memorabilia.

“I very much enjoyed the film ‘Some Like It Hot,’ so word got around that I admired Marilyn Monroe,” says Hawking, who answered written questions with printed-out responses from his computer. “My daughter and secretary gave me posters of her, my son gave me a Marilyn bag and my wife a Marilyn towel. I suppose you could say she was a model of the universe.”

When Hawking appeared for shooting, an almost reverent hush fell over the set. On this day, Errol Morris was not even shooting for sound--yet crew members still tiptoed around tentatively. Said one on-set observer: “It’s as though they feel Stephen can’t speak, so they shouldn’t either.”

The behavior also testified to the remarkable force of Hawking’s personality. Watching him from across a room, it is hard not to ponder the cliche of an extraordinary mind trapped in a barely functioning body. But as the film’s English producer David Hickman says: “You wouldn’t expect it from a man so severely disabled, but he has a very powerful presence--which might have something to do with his success. He’s determined to ignore his condition, and carry on his work without reference to his disease. He makes no compromises.” (He has made 30 trips to the United States alone.)

Hawking said he was enjoying his filming stint, and was astonished by the attention paid to detail. “I’m amazed at how accurately they have recreated my office in this studio,” he said. “I’m surprised they went to all that trouble, because most people wouldn’t have known if it had been different. But it is flattering in a way.”

But the film’s producers may have judged correctly the enormous public interest in Hawking’s life, even down to its minutiae. Certainly the book sales of “A Brief History of Time” confirm its status as a publishing phenomenon.

Anthony Chase, who handles foreign rights for Hawking’s New York-based agency, Writers’ House, estimates worldwide sales of 3 million and U.S. sales of 1.2 million for the book, which has been translated into 22 languages. Since its 1988 publication, it has remained on nonfiction best-seller lists all over the world.

Hawking, as you’d guess, has a theory about the phenomenon: “I think “A Brief History of Time” has been successful for a number of reasons. One is that people want to understand the universe around them, and to know where they come from. But they find many explanations of science difficult because they are phrased in terms of mathematical equations. I therefore wrote “Brief History” without equations, apart from the famous Einstein equation E=mc2, to explain what discoveries science has made about the universe and how it began.”

Still, Hawking doesn’t seem to find it extraordinary that his story makes him a compelling subject for a film. “I fit the part of a disabled genius,” he muses. “At least, I’m disabled--even though I’m not a genius like Einstein.”

The genesis of the film--its big bang, if you like--occurred with Hawking’s agent, Al Zuckerman. He had another client, Gordon Freedman, an ex-ABC News producer who had also produced the miniseries “Baby M” and co-produced a TV movie about the Vietnam Memorial, “To Heal A Nation.” After “A Brief History of Time” was published, Zuckerman told Freedman the book’s film and TV rights were available. “What Al didn’t know,” recalls Freedman, “was that I was a closet physics person, someone who read it for fun.”

He guessed a film of the book would be tough to sell to an American TV network, so instead went into partnership with Anglia, a British commercial TV company with a strong background in documentaries which broadcasts in the east of England, including Cambridge. Anglia’s David Hickman recalls: “Gordon had bought the rights to the book at pretty much the same time I was talking to Anglia about this best seller that seemed to be going on and on.”

Together, they sold the idea to Britain’s Channel 4. Freedman then returned to the United States and tried to interest ABC. Says Freedman: “I thought of Ted Koppel doing a report on the universe, but ABC didn’t go for that.”

Obviously, a trump card was needed to attract a network’s interest, and Freedman had a hunch it would be Steven Spielberg. “I went to Amblin, met with him, and it turned out he was a long-time admirer of Hawking,” says Freedman now. “He said he’d do anything he could to help, and suggested Amblin could get involved with naming a director.”

Spielberg also introduced Freedman to Morris, director of the critically acclaimed 1988 documentary “The Thin Blue Line,” which details the wrongful arrest of Randall Dale Adams for the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer. As Morris tells it, he had already been to Amblin to talk to Spielberg’s associate, Kathleen Kennedy, about a number of projects, including a documentary based on a true story of the theft of Einstein’s brain from an autopsy room at Princeton Hospital.

“They knew I was interested in doing something different with science,” chuckles Morris, who studied the philosophy of science as a graduate student at Princeton and there attended lectures by physicist John Archibald Wheeler--who in 1969 coined the phrase “black holes.”

Spielberg said he would be interested in Amblin participating in “A Brief History of Time” if Morris directed. Word was not out about the project among the networks, and NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff called to claim it.

“We still had the problem that we only wanted to spend between $3 million and $4 million,” says Freedman, who is now the film’s executive producer. (The current budget for the film stands at $3.2 million.) “Even with NBC and Channel 4, we were shy almost a million. But we’d been receiving offers from Japan, where there’s a tremendous interest in Hawking. Finally we went with a TV network, Tokyo Broadcasting.”

But what’s the film going to be like? No one on the set seems quite sure, in part because of Morris’ working methods. “The difference between this kind of movie and a dramatic feature,” says Morris, “is that a feature starts off with a script, whereas the script for this kind of movie comes out of the interviews you get. So there are really two stages of production--acquiring interview material and after that, deciding what to do with the rest of your movie.”

Still, he acknowledges the potential difficulty of a film dealing with such intellectually forbidding material. “There’s a question of how widely the book has been read,” he says. “We know it’s been widely purchased. But people feel a great desire to know about the universe. My desire has always been to personalize this science. If you provide a lecture on the wave equation of the universe, you’ll get a very small share of the American viewing audience. But if you try to make a movie about people and the simple ideas at the heart of their research, you can make a compelling and interesting program.”

It’s clear that “A Brief History of Time” will not look like a traditional documentary (a genre about which Morris is scathing). It’s also known that state-of-the-art computer graphics, supplied by the National Center for Supercomputing at the University of Illinois, will eventually be superimposed on the blue screen behind Hawking to provide a visual clue to how he thinks the universe looks.

“I think I have a sense of where we’re going, but it’s hard to explain,” says Gordon Freedman. “I’ve worked in news for a long time as well, and again you don’t know what you have until you’re done. You’re guided to an extent by your intuition, by the quality of people you put on your team.”

“There’s going to be no commentary in this,” adds David Hickman. “People want to get away from films that tell them what to think. We have the opportunity to surprise, even to shock. But I have no doubt that there’s a terrific film to be had out of it. I’ve never worried that it’s unfilmable. The stories behind the episodes in the book are so intrinsically interesting that that was never a worry.”

Hawking too seems confident of the project’s appeal. “The public wants heroes,” he said. “They made Einstein a hero, and now they are making me a hero. Though with much less justification.”