{"product_id":"the-beginning-or-the-end-9781620975749","title":"The Beginning or the End","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production. \n\u003c\/b\u003e\n\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eSoon 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eOver 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 \u003cem\u003eAtlas Shrugged\u003c\/em\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eGreg Mitchell’s \u003cem\u003eThe Beginning or the End\u003c\/em\u003e 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 \u003cem\u003ewas\u003c\/em\u003e Hollywood).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eMitchell 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 \u003cem\u003eThe Tunnels\u003c\/em\u003e, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Greg Mitchell","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48283848311035,"sku":"9781620975749","price":27.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/CoreSourceHub_e00970fd-f119-4980-ba66-fe4a97f19ca8.jpg?v=1771415122","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/the-beginning-or-the-end-9781620975749","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}