Adams: Documentary on Doctor Atomic Opens in New York and Los Angeles
(May 2008)
Jon Else’s documentary on the making of Doctor Atomic opens in select theatres this Friday (May 30) in New York and Los Angeles.Wonders Are Many, which premiered at 2007’s Sundance Festival, follows John Adams and director Peter Sellars over the course of a year as they work to forge the tale of J. Robert Oppenheimer into a music drama like no other: the strange and beautiful “Doctor Atomic.” As creation of the opera unfolds, Sellars and Adams struggle to make high art from the most savage weapon in history. The film explores the unnerving 60 year history of nuclear weapons, showing the real events behind the drama on stage, and the unintended consequences of actions of men working on the first nuclear device. Weaving together the intense and sometimes hilarious process of making an opera with r declassified historical film, Wonders Are Many focuses on the 48 hours leading up to the Trinity atomic test in July of 1945.
The film unfolds in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, and on stage at the San Francisco Opera, amid physicists, opera singers, stagehands, soldiers and poets, with Adams and Sellars at the center of the vortex.
Implicit throughout the film, against a present day background of terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and counter-proliferation is the question: “How can art make history relevant to current affairs?” The film makes a powerful assertion that, as the Greeks understood so well, public art is essential to the public good.
“Art and science form a combustible fusion in Jon Else's elegant and wide-ranging Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic. A dazzling case of the right filmmaker attached to the right subjects”
Variety
“Tightly layered with uncanny insights and profound illuminations, Wonders is a masterful distillation of explosive elements: science, art, psychology and humanity.”
The Hollywood Reporter
For more information or to purchase tickets, visit http://www.wondersaremany.com/
> Further information on Work: Doctor Atomic
Photo: Terrence McCarthy
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