Keeping in mind that a movie set entirely in a lab would be boring as shit, what scientist would make the most compelling biopic?
Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagleor Alfred Russel Wallace’s island adventures could make a great adventure movie that even an ID nut would like.
Marie Curie had a movie about her shortly after she died and I think it’s time for another one. Unlike the first one, I think that this should focus not on her relationship with her husband, but her daughters. Single mom, world class scientist. A chick flick, perhaps?
Linus Pauling I picture a movie set from shortly before he won his first Nobel to shortly after he won his second. Or maybe a movie about his Vitamin C crusade.
Stephen HawkingMy Left Foot for scientists
Nicholai Tesla,but especially his feud with Edison. The book Empires of Light could serve as the source.
Albert Einstein was simply a character.
Richard Feynman especially his teaching career.
J. Robert Oppenheimer has already had a play based on his trial. A movie adaptation is a gimme.
I’m going to go with a guy that pretty much nobody outside of my line of work have heard of–Hans Hellmann.
Long story short: Brilliant scientist at a preposterously young age. Proves crucially important theorem. Dismissed from his university job in Nazi Germany because he’s married to a Jewish wife. Decides to flee Hitler’s Germany to some place safer… except he chooses Stalin’s Russia. Takes a university position there only to be executed during the Great Purge. He was only 34 when he died and already developed several theories that were literally decades ahead of their time. He was honestly a genius and I truly believe the current state of quantum physics/chemistry research would be quite a good deal more advanced now had he survived.
The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Dude lost part of his nose in a duel and ended up wearing a prosthetic made of gold and silver. Born ca. 1550 and died around 1600.
I would consider Benjamin Franklin a scientist and few had more interesting or important lives in as many areas.
Tesla would be very interesting. He was a character and it would verge on science fiction. Might as well go for the Sci-Fi aspects of his works and play up his lightning experiments, the Wardenclyffe Tower and his death-rays and remote control torpedoes. The fights with Edison and his work with George Westinghouse. His friendship with Mark Twain only adds more color and his descent into near madness could be compelling.
Jack Parsons. Groundbreaking rocket scientist by day (whose work arguably ultimately went toward creating space travel), Occultist by night. Student of Alisteir Crowley, participant in crazy sex magick rituals, may have begun the end of the world or opened a portal to another dimension that let UFO’s through in the forties. L. Ron Hubbard makes a cameo (as someone who rips Parsons off) - Parsons magickally summons a hurricane in retribution. And the story gets weirder from there.
They already made a book about the inner workings of Tesla’s mind they could adapt into the movie, it was called House of Leaves or something I think.
Seriously though, Tesla would make a great choice.
I’d love to see a movie adapting The Double Helix. It’s a great story, this young scientist bumming around Europe trying to scam up some grant money, chancing on a partnership with a brilliant colleague and racing the clock to beat other teams to figure out the structure of DNA. And for God’s sake, roll credits 45 years before the author tries his hand at ethnic humor in range of a microphone…
Great ideas (I especially like Tesla and Leonardo). The only one I have to add is Archimedes. I was reading about him recently and about the terrifying anti-siege engines he built to defend Syracuse.
For a slightly different angle E. J. Corey. Specifically, the dynamics in his group at Harvard would be interesting. That guy was known as a slave driver even at U of Illinois. He should be played by Hugh Laurie.
I think group dynamics would make a great film for any researcher. You could seriously do a soap opera on it.
Andrei Sakharov was the USSR’s best designer of atomic bombs, and his fifty megaton bomb is the largest bomb ever exploded. His fusion reactor designs are still being followed.
Then he switched gears and became a political activist. He was instrumental in the Partial Test Ban Treaty and wrote about human rights and intellectual freedom. He was kicked out of military research, but he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 and eventually led the political party that opposed the Soviet Union.
Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur fossils in the Gobi Desert, back when that was “here be dragons” territory. One of the inspirations for Indiana Jones.
Sylvanus Griswold Morley was an archeologist who worked on the first big excavation at Chichen Itza. Also worked as a spy for U.S. Naval Intelligence during World War One.
I’d like to see movies made about all of these people, especially Tesla. Maybe the pro-science bent of the incoming administration will make scientists cool again, and we’ll get a bunch.
Why’d you have to go and add those last few words? Can’t a movie be made about a fascinating and important scientist, who happens to be female, without it being a “chick flick” (which to me is a ghettoized kiss of death)?
