Hollywood Star's Wartime Secret Becomes a Screenplay

NY Times (Science Times) ^ | May 4, 2004 | KENNETH CHANG

[Pharmboy]

Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery, London
Hedy Lamarr, the movie star who
is less well known as an inventor.

n 1933, at age 19, she swam in the nude in the notorious Czech film "Ecstasy." Often called the most beautiful woman in the world, she married badly — to a domineering Austrian munitions manufacturer — and escaped by drugging the maid and climbing out a window. She made her way to Hollywood, where she starred in movies with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart.

Then there is the less known chapter of her life. In World War II, she offered her services as an inventor of weapons, coming up with a brainstorm that helped lead to wireless Internet and cellphones.

The Hedy Lamarr story: does it sound like the plot of a movie?

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation thinks so. The foundation, which typically supports science and technology projects like a census of marine life and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to map millions of galaxies, is now making grants for screenplays with science or technology themes. This year, it awarded $48,000 to Gretchen Somerfeld, a Los Angeles writer, to refine her screenplay about Lamarr.

At the TriBeCa Film Festival on Sunday, actors read from Ms. Somerfeld's screenplay "Face Value." Sloan also makes grants at the Sundance and Hamptons film festivals.

"The bottom line in all of this is simply we think there are great opportunities here, great characters, great stories that have been largely unexplored," said Doron Weber, director of the Sloan program for public understanding of science and technology. "And when I speak of opportunities, I don't mean in an educational sense. We're speaking of what we believe are box office opportunities."

On Saturday at the festival, David Baxter, the other winner of a TriBeCa Sloan grant this year, will present background on his screenplay "The Broken Code." It tells of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images of DNA provided the inspiration for James Watson and Francis Crick to deduce its double-helix structure.

Franklin, who died in 1958, never knew that Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick had seen her images, and Mr. Baxter's screenplay traces the efforts of a friend and writer, Anne Sayre, who documented her contributions two decades later.

The Sloan Foundation also aids popular science books and Broadway plays. The goal, Mr. Weber said, is "to create more realistic and compelling and entertaining stories about science and technology and challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular imagination."

Mr. Weber concedes that Hollywood, with its track record of mad-scientist stereotypes and plots that hinge on fallacious science, is a harder nut to crack. Movies are more expensive, take longer to produce and have to appeal to larger audiences who mostly do not care about any underlying physics or biology.

Filmmakers are not antiscience, he said; often, they just do not know any scientists. His program has also offered grants at film schools and has scientists speak to film students.

"The idea is to get more work into the pipeline," he said.

"Broken Code" is one of four projects related to the discovery of the double helix now circulating in Hollywood, and Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory Productions has signed on as executive producer.

Vittorio Luzzati/National Portrait Gallery, London
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray images helped
resolve the structure of DNA,
and Ms. Lamarr are the subjects of two
screenplays that recently won grants.

Ms. Somerfeld confesses that science was her worst subject in school. What attracted her to Lamarr's story was not the technology, but her struggle to be seen as more than a beautiful woman. ("Any girl can be glamorous," Lamarr once said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.")

Ms. Somerfeld called Lamarr "a woman who was out of sync with her time."

"Had she been born in another era," the writer said, "she could have really gone for it and lived up to her potential."

In her marriage to Fritz Mandl, the munitions maker, Lamarr sat in on his business meetings and learned that one of the elusive goals was to control weapons remotely by radio signals, what today would be called smart bombs. But radio signals can be readily jammed.

Lamarr's insight was to realize that continuously and randomly changing the radio frequencies would defy jamming. In early 1940, she and the composer George Antheil devised a system for airplanes to direct torpedoes toward their targets. Inspired by player pianos, Antheil conceived of a pair of paper rolls, one in the airplane, one in the torpedo, to specify the sequence of changing frequencies. "It's the damnedest Rube Goldberg you ever saw," said David Hughes, a retired colonel and a communications expert who will be the scientific consultant to Ms. Somerfeld. "But the seminal idea was there."

Antheil and Lamarr patented their scheme, which they called "frequency hopping," and donated it to the government. The Navy, doubting that the paper-roll devices could be built, declined to try to pursue it but nonetheless classified the idea.

An article in The New York Times on Oct. 1, 1941, briefly noted Lamarr's invention, saying, "So vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its details."

In the late 50's, the frequency-hopping idea began to be used in military computer chips. Lamarr received no recognition, because the patent remained classified until 1985. Since then, the idea has been applied to cellphones, cordless phones and Wi-Fi Internet protocols that allow many people to share the same range of radio frequencies. (If the frequencies continuously change, the chances of one signal's interfering with another drop.)

Lamarr, who lived a reclusive life in her later years, won the Pioneer Award of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997. The award recognizes major achievements in computer communications. She died in 2000.

With the vagaries of filmmaking, "Face Value" is still far from production, but it has a chance, Mr. Weber said.

"The film has buzz," he said. "It's now in the pile of things they're going to look at."

[discostu]

Not sloppy at all, if the chip was used to compute then it was a computer chip. The name comes from the first workers ever displaced by computers: guys that did nasty math for scientists and accountants... computers. Just because they weren't nearly as powerful as what we've got today doesn't mean they weren't computer chips.

[nmh]

I'm not familiar with Jennifer Connelly or her anatomy so I can't comment on her.

[Pharmboy]

You are most welcome...the NY effin Times at its best,

[Sam the Sham]

She won Best Actress for "A Beautiful Mind" last year. She was also in the recent "House of Sand and Fog".

Her anatomy speaks for itself (God forgive me).

[E Rocc]

I'm not familiar with Jennifer Connelly or her anatomy so I can't comment on her.

Easily addressed while maintaining the spirit of certain Free Republic traditions:

-Eric

[I'm ALL Right!]

My first thought as well. She has the same kind of look IMO. Here's some eye candy for you guys...

[Howlin]

Chewing gum on line?

[Argh]

I can't imagine what they'll do about casting that won't be laughable.

[RightWingAtheist]

Now would be a good time to post some Lisa Randall pictures:

And if anyone can get some pics of FR's own Piltdown Woman and Ex-Dem Mom...I'm sure they'll put even Hedy to shame :-)

[Rufusthered]

No, they were not robbed. Every big invention has 1000+ people who "thought of it first". The difference here is someone is using grant money data mining examples of women who did something (ANYTHING!) in science and technology who appear to be discriminated against because they were women. The one place affirmative action hasn't penetrated is the sciences and engineering schools, because you have to give grades based on actual scores rather than biasing it for sacred "minorities". That institution is no under attack for this reason and the above is part of the ammunition.