by Holly Van Leuven

Speaking at a UNESCO Colloquium in 1965, at the 10th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s death, J. Robert Oppenheimer spoke of how the collected works of Einstein had not yet been published because of errors that still needed to be teased out of his “paralyzingly beautiful” early papers, saying, “A man whose errors can take that long to correct is quite a man.” On July 21, 2023, a biopic of Oppenheimer will be released after 18 years in development, three failed scripts, a small gaggle of producers’ ministrations, and two major Hollywood directors’ involvement. A man whose biopic takes that long to get to the screen is quite a man, indeed.

The process began in 2005, shortly after the publication of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Before the book earned the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, it was optioned for film by British director Sam Mendes, who had a script written and was shopping it around Hollywood. At the time, Mendes had a strong partnership with Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks Studios. A major movie seemed imminent. But then the rolling momentum came to a standstill. Bird, who is a member of BIO’s Board of Directors and the executive director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at CUNY, explained, “DreamWorks was sort of falling apart and our understanding is that they passed on it. Then we saw the script and we could understand why they passed on it.” Bird explained that the script encompassed Oppenheimer’s whole life, and its breadth left little space for depth due to the confines of film. It failed to capture someone as complex as Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” and head of the Manhattan Project, who infamously recalled that a quote from the Bhagavad Gita ran through his mind as he watched the first successful nuclear weapons test in the desert of New Mexico: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” After four years, director Mendes had no serious bites on the script, and he let the option lapse.

Bird described another party that came along and optioned the Oppenheimer biography for four more years, but they too failed to attract a big star or studio to the project. By now it was 2014. After a third party picked up the rights for four additional years and failed to get traction in Hollywood, Sherwin and Bird gave up hopes of a successful Hollywood adaptation. “It was thought to be too historically complicated” to get picked up for a major motion picture, Bird said.

But when the pandemic hit in 2020, the film industry’s priorities changed rapidly. With film sets shut down all around the world due to the coronavirus, executives and producers working from home focused on acquiring projects, writing scripts, and cutting deals until the cameras could get rolling again. It was in this period, Bird said, that two businessmen picked up the option for the book. They got a new screenwriter to write the third script adapted from American Prometheus. But optimism again was short-lived, as Bird recalled: “We were appalled. It was just awful. . . . Marty [Sherwin] and I wrote a memo listing the 108 historical falsehoods in this script, a long detailed memo. We gave it to the two businessmen, and we had some phone conversations, and they agreed to kill that script.” At this juncture, one of the two businessmen bowed out. The one who remained, though, J. David Wargo, had a compelling reason to want to see the project through. He had a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT, as well as a master’s degree in nuclear engineering. Bird recalled, “In 2020, he announced to us he was determined to make this happen and he was flying out to Hollywood in the midst of the pandemic and he had a lot of meetings and he hoped to get this going. Then we didn’t hear anything for a long time.”

The biopic blip fell off Sherwin and Bird’s radar until September 2021, when Bird said a friend sent them both a clipping from Variety magazine, which mentioned director Christopher Nolan was working on a film about Oppenheimer. Bird said, “We thought, ‘Well, oh dear. You know, he obviously hasn’t been in touch with us, so maybe he’s doing his own film not based on our book.’ Oppenheimer is a public figure, an icon, he wouldn’t have to have the option based on our book—he could say he was doing it on public records.”

That seemed to be the end of it until one day, while driving around Washington, D.C., Bird received a cell phone call from a stranger, Charles Roven. “He called and said, ‘I just want to reassure you that Christopher Nolan is working on Oppenheimer and it is based on the film option you guys sold to Dave Wargo and Nolan would like to talk to you,’” Bird explained. He admits he had heard the name Christopher Nolan before, but his wife had to clue him in as to just how big of a deal the director was before the two spoke on the phone: “Christopher explained that he had read the book and loved it and decided that he was going to spend the summer on spec to write a script. So he wrote the script, the whole script, by himself . . . it was heavily based on the book. In September [2021] he says, ‘I work confidentially, so I am not prepared to share the script with you, but I am going to be in New York in the next week and I’d like to meet with you in New York if you could come up.’”

By then, however, Sherwin had been suffering with small-cell lung cancer for two years and was doing poorly. He was too sick to travel, but he understood that the book at last had a real chance to be made into a film. Bird went to New York: “We had a meeting for two-and-a-half or three hours. . . . Nolan is very charming. He was clear he was not sharing the script, but he was happy to answer questions about what was in the script and what was not. He had done some original research. He had found some transcripts I had never seen and added to the script a bit. It was a very reassuring conversation.”

Afterward, Nolan traveled to his Hollywood home, where he invited the heads of four major studios to sit and read the script he had written based on American Prometheus, making it clear they could not remove the document from the premises. Bird explained, “Then there was a bidding war for the script. He got a $100 million budget. He got another $100 million budget for publicity. He is a real big believer in screen, in the theater, not streaming, so he insisted on a studio that would not stream it immediately. And Universal was the studio that he ended up with.” Nolan then secured actor Cillian Murphy, whom he had directed in Batman Begins, Inception, and Dunkirk, to play Oppenheimer. But the long-sought happy ending to the deal was marred by loss. As Bird put it, “Martin Sherwin died on October 6, and two days later they [Universal and Nolan] released the official press release announcing the film.”

“Marty was a very lovable guy, and funny, and kind of a skeptic about Hollywood and everything,” Bird said. He recalled that the story of American Prometheus began in 1980, when Sherwin signed a contract for the book with Knopf, and described how his association with the project came to be: “Marty also did 95 percent of the research for the book. When I came aboard in 2000, there were 50,000 pages of documents he had collected from archives all over the world. He’d done over 200 interviews and neatly transcribed them. It was just an amazing amount of research. But he hadn’t started to write—he’d kind of gotten biographer’s disease. He told me quite seriously he had done a lot of research but there were enormous holes. Every few months he’d find one more cardboard box of documents in his closet or his attic. It was overwhelming. There were really no gaps in the research. I focused on the writing. Marty also started to write and we went back and forth with the chapters, but it still took five years.” He said that Sherwin knew “how hard it was to translate a complicated biography like this into a film,” and it remained to be seen if Nolan could do so successfully.

Bird had been told that filming would begin in late February 2022. Early that month, he got another call from Christopher Nolan with some surprise news: The director had had a change of heart, and he would let Bird read the script before shooting got underway, provided he travel again to New York and read from start to finish in Nolan’s hotel. Concerning the experience, Bird said, “I sit in the hotel room drinking coffee and reading the script. It takes me three to three-and-a-half hours to read it. I’m blown away by it. I think it’s a good script. It’s heavily based on the book and a lot of the dialogue comes from the book and it captures Oppenheimer’s complexity and personal character. I find it quite moving and historically accurate.”

Nolan and his wife, the producer Emma Thomas, even invited Bird and his wife to observe a couple hours of filming in Los Alamos. Bird said, “Nolan assured us we were welcome to come for a couple of hours, but we would see how boring it was. We saw 15 takes of the same exact scene of like two-and-a-half minutes. The actors spoke the same words again and again and again. They were taking different camera angles. But it was interesting and fun.” Filming is now complete, but editing will take another eight to 10 months.

In advance of the July 2023 movie premiere date, Knopf, the publisher of American Prometheus, will release a special commemorative paperback edition as a tie-in to the movie, which Bird hopes will sell well. He is pleased to see the biography he and Sherwin worked so hard on evolve into a new form where new viewers will discover it, even as he is saddened that Sherwin won’t experience the film adaptation for himself.

And though the film industry proved vexing to the co-authors over the years, Bird still appreciates the challenges filmmakers navigate. He said, “Marty and I, in our frustrations, had debated maybe we should try our hands at the script. I look at these scripts, and it’s a very different form of writing. I just don’t think Marty or I could do it. [For the American Prometheus adaptation], you can see three previous attempts were made, three previous scripts. I’ve read all three now and Nolan’s is the fourth and clearly the best. It’s a miracle.”

But, Bird insisted, “I’m not moving to Hollywood.”