Scientists Say Movie Image Not a Pretty Picture

Alan McGowan is a mad scientist.

No, he’s not toiling away somewhere in a laboratory, his hair tousled and face twitching like Dr. Strangelove. In fact, that’s the very stereotype that is making him so angry.

Scientists and engineers are “real people,” said McGowan, who runs programs to improve the public’s understanding of science for the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in Washington. “They play baseball. They go fishing. They have families. They do things that ordinary people do. Some of them are pretty good-looking. Some of them are women.”

But McGowan and other scientists don’t see themselves portrayed that way on the big screen or on television.

“You see the soulless person who is portrayed almost as a robot, with a straightforward dedication to doing something without moral constraints of any kind,” said Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and director emeritus of the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. “Or you see the silly nerds. Or you see the horror guys.”

The unlikely solution Lederman and his fellow scientists are pursuing is to train their considerable brainpower on the source of the problem: Hollywood.

With the help of a $2-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, they are hoping to encourage students in the country’s top film schools to write scripts on what they see as more accurate and realistic portrayals of scientists and engineers.

“For many students, the entire basis on which they form opinions on science came from the movies they’ve seen,” said Richard Weinberg, a research associate professor who directs the computer animation laboratory at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, one of the schools involved in the program.

The New York philanthropic institution known for its support of science and technology has been spearheading a program to introduce film students to real-life scientists and engineers. Participating schools are USC, UCLA and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, plus New York University, Columbia University and Carnegie Mellon University.

That way, screenwriters will be exposed to story lines about science and engineering in the formative stage of their careers. And by the time they make it big in Hollywood, they will be able to devise plots involving electrical engineers or brain researchers as easily as stories about detectives and doctors, said Doron Weber, a former screenwriter who runs the Sloan Foundation’s program to enhance public understanding of science and technology.

“Hollywood is always dying for new material, and that’s why I think there’s tremendous opportunity here,” he said. “The effort is not to say every scientist and engineer is a hero or a great person or even admirable, because that’s not even true. But if you’re going to make them bad, try to make them convincingly and realistically bad.”

So what’s the payoff for the students who tag along with the scientists and try to find a way to turn “L.A. Law” into “L.A. Lab,” or “NYPD Blue” into “MIT Blue”?

A substantial pot of prize money--from $7,500 to $25,000--if they win a script-writing competition.

Either the money or the subject matter has turned some aspiring screenwriters into science groupies.

“This is a great time of transition in terms of technology, so I am surprised there aren’t more films about science,” said Anna Hall, a Columbia film student who participated in the program and is shopping around her script about an 18th-century European scientist.

“With the new millennium coming up, people are definitely talking about it,” Hall said.

If other students turn out to be less enthusiastic, Weber said he is willing to take that chance.

“We don’t expect every scientist and engineer to fascinate film students, just as we wouldn’t expect every doctor or lawyer, teacher or journalist to fascinate film students,” he said. “But we do know that there are wonderful, diverse characters and great stories here, and the proof is that we’ve been getting wonderful scripts.”

Films made from the program’s prize-winning scripts include “The Shy and the Naked,” a romance from USC featuring a mathematician and his artist roommate who vie for the same woman. “Joliana,” a winner from AFI, tells of a girl who suffers a tragic death due to the consequences of a sleep disorder.

Not exactly the romance of “Titanic” or the drama of “Independence Day.” But Hollywood has had some success with a handful of movies such as “Good Will Hunting” and “Contact” that revolve around dramatic characters who just happen to be a mathematician and an astronomer. (Of course, it doesn’t hurt to have Matt Damon’s or Jodie Foster’s name on the bill.)

For his part, retired physicist Lederman is pushing his own TV drama, “L.A. Science.” The concept revolves around an administrator at a research institute who doesn’t know much about science but is responsible for doling out research funds.

Each episode would feature a plain-spoken pitch from a different researcher--a high-energy physicist one week, a computer scientist another week--that turns into an exciting scientific story.

“We’d have the usual sex and drama and car chases,” he says. “But the hero would be a scientist.”

And the American Institute of Engineers, whose mission is to improve the image of engineers, scientists and mathematicians, is pushing another TV series with the working title “L.A. Engineer.”

The Sloan Foundation also is one of several groups pushing for a TV series about scientists and engineers. “NYPD Blue” Executive Producer David Milch has received a Sloan grant to develop a pilot episode for an hourlong drama, Weber said.

And this spring, the Fox network will premiere “Killer App,” an hourlong comedy about a Silicon Valley start-up from “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau and filmmaker Robert Altman.

Who knows? Perhaps next season’s Ally McBeal or Drew Carey will be a rocket scientist.