Genie in a Bottle Unleashed

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Genie in a Bottle Unleashed

• Movie link http//archive.org/details/Genie20050
  810
• (This movie may be downloaded legally for free.)

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Genie in a Bottle Unleashed

• 1. What are the name of the two boy filmmakers?
• 2. After receiving letter from Einstein, what
  top secret plan was carried out by President
  Roosevelt?
• 3. Who appears in a wheelchair racing against
  Hitler in the film?
• 4. What is the Japanese legend referred to in
  the movie?
• 5. What is the name of the artist who created
  The Doomsday Clock?
• 6. What was the cost of The Manhattan Project?
• 7. How many people who died instantly at
  Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
• 8. True or False Vice President Truman did not
  know about the top secret project until after he
  became president.

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• Kids Film the Darndest Things (This article is
  supplementary. Several of the answers to the
  questions are found within the article, but not
  all of them.)
•  
• Tweener filmmakers contemplate the atomic genie,
  documentary filmmaking, and the challenge of
  finding kids who look like Hitler and FDR
• By Bill Forman
• It's unusual enough that two Chicago-area
  sixth-graders set out to make a documentary about
  the development and dropping of the atomic bomb,
  events that occurred some half-century before
  they were born.
• But what elevates Genie in a Bottle Unleashed
  from novelty to milestone is the lengths to which
  Stephen Sotor and Trace Gaynor went to make it
  tracking down and interviewing an original
  Manhattan Project scientist, the artist who
  created the famed Doomsday Clock, the mayor of
  Nagasaki and, in a bit of artistic
  license-taking, the atomic genie that was long
  ago let out of his bottle (said genie currently
  resides, according to the film, at 860 Lake Shore
  Drive). The resulting short-form documentary
  earned a standing ovation last year at the United
  Nations, where it proved so popular that a second
  screening was immediately scheduled.

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• "If we were older--if we were like 25 or
  something--I don't think it would have made it
  this far or sent the same message," says Trace in
  a phone interview from his friend Stephen's home
  in Elmhurst, Ill. "Because of our age, it shows
  that our generation actually cares about our
  future."
• So how exactly did Trace and Stephen start off on
  this filmmaking career? "OK, well, one summer we
  were kind of bored and we didn't have anything to
  do," recalls Trace, who conducts interviews and
  composes background music while Stephen does the
  shooting and editing. "Mrs. Sotor told us that
  there was a film festival, the Chicago Children's
  International Film Festival. We had a camera and
  computer, so we started fooling around and coming
  up with ideas."
• Collaborating with another schoolmate, the duo
  quickly filmed A Tween's Life, whose subjects
  range from a boy with a rare genetic disease to a
  girl who tells how her dog once ate her glass
  eye. Screening at a half-dozen film festivals,
  the film reached as far as Melbourne, Australia.
• "We love entering festivals," wrote Stephen in
  his Santa Cruz Film Festival entry letter,
  wherein he also proclaims the duo's status as
  indie filmmakers "Our film is not a school
  project," he declared, "we do our films on our
  own."

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• Trace says the breakthrough for this latest film
  came when they interviewed the artist Martyl. The
  widow of Manhattan Project physicist Alex
  Langsdorf, she became legendary for her creation
  of the Doomsday Clock, the powerful symbol
  through which the Bulletin of the Atomic
  Scientists each year announces how close the
  world is coming to nuclear annihilation. It was
  through Martyl that Trace and Stephen gained
  access to a number of their film's other
  subjects, including Al Wattenberg, a former
  Manhattan Project scientist who worked with
  Enrico Fermi on the first nuclear reaction Leon
  Lederman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and
  former director of Fermi Labs and Bulletin of
  Atomic Scientists executive director Stephen
  Schwartz.
• "Once we said that Martyl was in it, they all
  jumped in," says Trace, beginning to sound like a
  seasoned Hollywood dealmaker.
• While Trace was racking up interviews, his cohort
  Stephen was scheming up ideas on how to dramatize
  what, in lesser hands, might have come across as
  a dry subject. A comment about Hitler and
  Roosevelt being engaged in a technological race
  sparked one such moment of filmmaking genius.

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• "We were brainstorming about what kind of clips
  we could use,' explains Stephen, after Trace
  hands over the phone. "We heard Martyl say it was
  a race, and I just thought it would be funny to
  dress up my friend Brett--we kind of tease him
  about looking like Hitler, because he has that
  hair. And my grandpa had an old wheelchair, and
  so we put my friend Brook in it, even though he
  doesn't really look like Roosevelt."
• The result scene, in which Hitler and FDR go
  barreling down a track with the word
  "re-creation" appearing at the bottom of the
  screen, may well be the strangest image in the
  history of tweener cinema.
• As for the idea of dramatizing the metaphor of
  the split atom as an unleashed genie, Stephen
  mumbles a bit before taking credit. "I don't want
  to toot my own horn, but that was my idea," he
  says. So all the weird ideas are his? "Yeah,
  kinda," he laughs. "I don't know, I guess I just
  have more of an abstract mind."
• Stephen says his personal influences include the
  mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap as well as
  American Movie, the hard-to-believe-it's-really-a-
  documentary tale of aspiring but clueless
  Wisconsin filmmaker Mark Bouchard. "We actually
  went on his website and ordered his Coven movie,
  and it came in the mail," he says. "It's really
  kind of weird."

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• Asked their advice for grade-school directors
  who'd like to follow in their footsteps, Stephen
  says, "Just pick up a camera and see what you can
  do. Young minds are so creative, they can think
  of all different things with influences like
  video games and TV. Like, if you think about it,
  from the amount of TV kids watch, think of how
  many camera angles and shots they see. So you
  say, 'Oh, I saw that on TV and maybe we can try
  it.' Just be creative, take some editing classes
  and see what you can do."
• Trace concurs with his cohort "Just look around
  and see what you find interesting. Then just
  research it a little bit, see who's in your
  neighborhood that you could talk to that knows
  anything about your topic. Just start and see
  where it leads you."
• As for their next feature, the duo has already
  interviewed former astronaut/senator John Glenn
  and Center for Defense Information director
  Theresa Hitchens. "It's about weapons in outer
  space," says Trace, "which, unlike the atomic
  bomb, can be prevented if people learn about it.
  Which I think is better. Because the atomic bomb
  already happened, we were just informing people
  about what happened. But with this film, it can
  actually prevent something before it even
  starts."
• The SCFF screening of Genie in a Bottle Unleashed
  takes place Tuesday, May 9, at 630pm at the
  Attic.