The Real Scientists of Hollywood

You can write a movie about a gravity-defying superhero or a time-traveling zombie, and if you make that movie in Hollywood, you’re probably going to hire a science adviser. No scenario is too far out for someone with a PhD to add a real bit of jargon and a sheen of plausibility. 

“You are grounding the story in the natural world,” explains Kevin Grazier, a science advisor who logged many years as a planetary physicist, “to prevent your audience from lapsing into the ‘oh, please’ moments. That’s when you get something wrong you don’t have to get wrong, and instead of being immersed in your narrative, they sit back and say ‘oh, please.’”

The National Academy of Sciences even sponsors the Science and Entertainment Exchange, which makes working scientists available to filmmakers and TV producers. The science advisor’s role may be filling in small suggestions to the scriptwriters (somebody has to tell Natalie Portman how the Einstein-Rosen bridge leads to Asgard) or it can be integral to plot development. Kevin Grazier worked on Syfy’s series Eureka, about a town where people live on the cutting edge of science. “Before every season I would do a Powerpoint presentation of promising new technology we might be able to craft a story from,” Grazier explains. 

His involvement didn’t end there. “I got calls from Vancouver, where we filmed, saying ‘We need five whiteboards full of equations, can you do that?’ Sure. In two instances, I had to write partial chapters of books, because we film in high definition. When a character opens a book, if you zoom in, you can read it — and you know somebody’s going to do that! They needed a chapter of a book that is not copyrighted and makes sense for what’s going on.”   

Jessica Cail teaches at Pepperdine University and specializes in biological psychology, so she tends to consult on thrillers and addiction scenarios, and researched the Hulk’s brain for Marvel’s exhibit on The Avengers. That’s not her most far-fetched project. For a forthcoming film called The Hunted, she came up with a scientific explanation for vampires (victims of a virus analogous to rabies) and also a scientific weapon against them. The filmmaker said, “It has to be something really goofy and so common, like apple juice. And I thought, ‘What else in the world lives forever? Twinkies!’ What if, like bread mold becomes penicillin, you could grow mold on a Twinkie? Because anything that could kill a Twinkie could obviously kill an immortal.”

As silly as some of their work in Hollywood is, these two science advisors take a high-minded view. “If you’re a working scientist, you’re always at the edge of what’s known, and ‘what if’ is a big portion of your life,” says Grazier. “You entertain a lot of ‘what if’ ideas, most of which aren’t going to be correct. That is not significantly different than the job of a science advisor.”

“A lot of science today started out as science fiction,” notes Cail. “One of the new smart phones out there right now does your blood oxygen levels by holding your finger over the flash — completely based on tricorders from Star Trek, and completely fictional until someone said ‘I think I can do that in real life.’ I consider my job to make it plausible, and maybe somebody will make it actual someday.”  

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