# The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--And America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Hardcover

by **Greg Mitchell** (Author)

**One of** _**Vanity Fair**_**'s 21 Best Books of 2020**  
**Winner, 2020 Richard Wall Memorial Award Special Jury Prize, Theatre Library Association  
****The shocking and significant story of how the White House and Pentagon scuttled an epic Hollywood production.**

  

Soon 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.

  

Over 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 _Atlas Shrugged_.

  

Greg Mitchell's _The Beginning or the End_ 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 _was_ Hollywood).

  

Mitchell 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 _The Tunnels_, he exposes how our implacable American myth-making mechanisms distort our history.

### Author Biography

**Greg Mitchell's** books include _The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb_ (The New Press) as well as _The Tunnels_; _The Campaign of the Century_, winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize and finalist for the _Los Angeles Times_ Book Prize; _Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady_, a _New York Times_ Notable Book; _So Wrong for So Long_; and, with Robert Jay Lifton, _Hiroshima in America_ and _Who Owns Death?_ He lives in the New York City area.

**Number of Pages:** 272

**Dimensions:** 1 x 8.6 x 5.7 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** July 07, 2020

## Details

- **Price:** 27.99 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
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- The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--And America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Hardcover
- The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood--And America--Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb - Hardcover

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