The Greatest Movie Never Made?

But at last it's: apocalypse, now. Decades after film-makers were denied a chance, my doc debuts today. Plus, nuclear warnings from The Byrds, Bob Dylan, CSN &Y, The Clash, and Steely Dan.

As I warned last weekend, I will be sending/posting this newsletter just one day on the weekend from now on, alternating another career "profile in music" with an extract from my memoir-in-progress. While that book will focus on my 1970s Crawdaddy years, what follows will fit into that as an epilogue, though it has special timing now: The first film I have written and directed, Atomic Cover-up, premieres today at the Cinequest Film Festival, and runs through March 30. Since, like other fests this year, it is virtual (rather than in San Jose), anyone interested can “attend” online for a mere $3.99 for a ticket that is good for any day for the rest of the month. So after the usual editorial cartoon, I recount how this story began for me over 38 years ago (ouch). Then a selection of “nuclear” songs at the bottom….and feel free to subscribe, it’s free!

Going Nuclear: The Reel Story

What a great film, and original concept. It isn't just brilliantly done, with images that have been suppressed for decades. An absolutely crucial way to understanding all wars. Don't be surprised if this documentary is a player at next year's Oscars. --Rod Lurie (director of The Outpost, The Contender, and other movies)

Let’s begin with my film in a nutshell, then we’ll explain how it got rolling.

Atomic Cover-up is the first documentary to explore the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 from the unique perspective, words and startling images of the brave cameramen and directors who risked their lives filming in the irradiated aftermath. It reveals how this historic footage, created by a Japanese newsreel crew and then an elite U.S. Army team (who shot the only color reels), was seized, classified top secret, and then buried by American officials for decades to hide the full human costs of the bombings as a dangerous nuclear arms race raged. All the while, the producers of the footage made heroic efforts to find and expose their shocking film, to reveal truths of the atomic bombings that might halt nuclear proliferation. Atomic Cover-up represents, at least in part, the film they were not allowed to make, as well as a tribute to documentarians everywhere.

Now, how did I “get that story”?

It began for me back in June,1982, a little more than three years after I helped close the door on what remained of Crawdaddy after eight years of almost steady work. That day also set me on the path to spending four weeks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon after, and subsequently writing three books on the subject, hundreds of articles, and the film premiering today.

That spring, the grassroots antinuclear movement in the U.S. (and much of the world) was cresting.  The June 12th march and rally in New York City would draw well over half a million protesters, perhaps the largest such gathering in the country's history.  Many new films with nuclear themes suddenly appeared, including the popular Atomic Cafe.

As someone who came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, I had experienced the terror of the most dangerous years of the nuclear arms race, and Dr. Strangelove was my favorite movie. But I had never attended an "anti-bomb" rally, as I was more interested in protesting the Vietnam war, various environmental hazards and, after Three Mile Island, nuclear power.  My knowledge about the dropping of two atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 was only skin-deep. 

But one day in June 1982, I took notice when my wife spotted an item in The New York Times revealing that the Japan Society in New York would be screening the first movie drawing on film footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by an elite American military team, then suppressed for decades.  One of the officers who was a key component of that team would discuss this for the first time.  I was a member of the Japan Society--they had even arranged my recent interview with Akira Kurosawa--and always loved a good "U.S. cover-up."  So we decided to attend the event a few days later.

The film, produced in Japan, was called Prophecy.  That former Army lieutenant, who went on to a long career as a producer/director in the emerging television industry, was named Herbert Sussan.   He described being recruited near the end of 1945 to join a major U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey project to shoot the first and only color footage documenting the destruction of Japanese cities from the air during the war.   It seemed like a free, triumphant, travelogue for the young man until they arrived by train at their first stop, Nagasaki.  He would be haunted by what he saw there, and then in Hiroshima, for the rest of his life.

I suppose, no doubt to a lesser degree, I could say that I would be haunted by his words, and the film we would soon see, for the rest of my life.

Sussan described filming, in blazing color--rarely used by documentarians at the time--the badly injured, burned or sick-from-radiation patients in hospitals.  (The cameraman, amazingly, was often Akira "Harry" Mimura, a Hollywood veteran who had also shot Kurosawa's first film.)   Sussan realized that Americans back home, to this point, had only been allowed to see grainy, black and white images of rubble in the atomic cities, not the victims, who were mainly women and children.   When he returned to New York, he was determined to show the world what he experienced, feeling that this might halt the building of bigger weapons and prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race with the Russians.

Instead, he found that all of the footage had been classified top secret and buried by the U.S. military, and none of it could be shown to the public.   The color images were just too revealing, not only exposing unfathomable physical destruction but the long-lasting damage to human bodies (overwhelmingly civilians). Seized by the U.S. and hidden at the same time was all of the searing black and white footage shot earlier by the leading Japanese newsreel company, Nippon Eiga Sha.  

Sussan tried for thirty years to find and make use of his footage--Americans still had not been exposed to color images of any kind from Hiroshima and Nagasaki--but got nowhere, even after personally approaching everyone from famed newsman Edward R. Murrow to former President Harry S. Truman.

Finally, he would, almost by accident, play a central role in the footage becoming known to the world.   Around 1979 he attended an exhibit of photos from the atomic cities at the United Nations near his apartment.  To his dismay, he spotted several color enlargements of frames from the footage his team had shot in early 1946.   He said to a Japanese man, Tsotumu Iwakura, who had helped arrange the exhibit,  something to the effect, "I shot the footage this photo is taken from.”  Imagine Iwakura's surprise.   Iwakura did some digging at the National Archives in Washington and discovered that the color footage had been declassified, very quietly, a few years earlier.   If no one knew about this, it was just the same as still being classified.

Iwakura went back to Japan and launched what became as the "10 Feet Movement," a grassroots project whereby people (including school kids) could raise and contribute funds to buy back copies of all of the color footage in increments of ten feet.  When they reached their goal, he made it available to Japanese filmmakers, who soon completed two documentaries with more in the works.   The creators of the film that I saw, Prophecy, were able to track down some of the survivors shown in the 1946 footage and then contrasted the often horrid images of them then with current footage and interviews.   Soon Americans started making use of the color footage--although only in brief passages--in their own films.

Sussan was gravely ill (one of his doctors told him it was possible that his lymphoma stemmed from radiation exposure in 1946), and the antinuclear movement began to fade.  But my own interest had been sparked.   Later in 1982, when I became the editor of the leading American magazine for that movement, Nuclear Times, the first feature I assigned was on Herbert Sussan.  I would join in the interview, and become a friend. 

I would also track down in California and interview the man who led that filming project, Lt. Col. Daniel A. McGovern, who sent me many unclassified documents (some appearing in my film for the first time).  On why the footage was suppressed, McGovern informed me that officials and the military “were fearful because of the horror it contained. …because it showed effects on men, women and children…They didn’t want that material out because they were working on new nuclear weapons.”  I would also talk with Erik Barnouw, the legendary writer on documentary films who in 1970 had created the first film to make use of the long-suppressed black and white Nippon Eiga Sha footage, Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945.    

Aiming to gain a firsthand experience, I secured a journalism grant to spend a month in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, meeting some who had been filmed by Sussan and McGovern.  Then I wrote articles on various aspects of that trip for The New York Times, Washington Post, and Mother Jones, among others.   I would even interview Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay which deposited the bomb over Hiroshima, and meet his counterpart on the Nagasaki mission, Charles Sweeney. 

A decade later I included a small section on the color footage in my acclaimed book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America.   My writings on that would spark the making of the award-winning film Original Child Bomb in 2004. As a consultant for that film, I was able to finally view (via VHS copies) all of the color footage.  A few years later, I wrote my book about the saga of the footage, Atomic Cover-up.

Finally, two years ago, I set out to finally fulfill the vision I had, decades ago, of paying tribute to those who shot both the Japanese newsreel and U.S. military footage in 1945-1946.    I arranged for the first 4K film transfers of the Japanese footage and the same for several reels of the color footage from the National Archives.  I also obtained the relevant portions of books by or about several of the cameramen and producers of the Japanese footage, and the memoir of Harry Mimura, and had key sections translated from the Japanese.  Some of the footage in my film has never been aired before, and evetything is in 4K.

And the result begins airing today. In case you fear that these 52 minutes may be a bit “rough” to view—I believe it is more subtle and artful than unduly graphic. I hope you’ll check it out. Here, again, is the page on the festival site and my own web site for the film. It has been hailed by everyone from David Corn to Oliver Stone, and here is one more “blurb” below, and the trailer for the film. Then (inevitably for me), on to the tunes.

An important work, one that’s essential education for a generation with less and less familiarity with the horror of nuclear weapons. A major contribution to our collective memory. — Daniel M. Gold, longtime film critic, The New York Times

Song Picks of the Day

The Byrds may have lost Gene Clark at this time but somehow they managed to latch on to a Nazim Hikmet poem that explicitly relates to the Hiroshima bombing—not a great song by any means but still the most “explicit” by a major group on this subject.

Now we get into a few songs that are more broadly about a post-nuclear apocalypse, such as early Dan “King of the World” here.

“Wooden Ships” received prominent versions from both Jefferson Airplane and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (which they performed at Woodstock).

Well, from in our modern, post’60s era, it was the Bobster who real got things (and his career) going with his “Hard Rain,” here live from 1963 or 1964.

And these Clash guys, of course, much later, with an almost “fun” early “Atom Tan.”

Greg Mitchell’s film, Atomic Cover-up, will have its American premiere at the Cinequest Film festival March 20-30. Go here to read more, watch trailer, buy tix. He is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.