The Atomic Cafe - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Atomic Cafe or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Atomic Cafe

[mathew]

The doc featured then previously unreleased footage of an interview with Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the plane the "Enola Gay" which dropped the first ever atom bomb (code-named "Little Boy") on Hiroshima. The film opens with footage of the first atomic bombs being dropped on Japan by the USA, first at Hiroshima in 1945 and at then at Nagasaki, with the ensuing aftermath of the bombings shown as well.

[sophie]

The filmmakers, according to one of them, Jayne Loader, describe this documentary as a "..."compilation vérité" - a compilation film with no 'Voice of God' narration and no new footage created by us, the filmmakers". Loader said: "Emile de Antonio, Bruce Conner, Philippe Mora were some of the filmmakers that influenced us during the production process. The entire cinema vérité movement influenced us, as did novelists like Robert Coover and theorists like Herbert Schiller and Gerry Mander".

[albert]

Footage was sourced from three main repositories. They were the National Archives of the USA, the American Library of Congress and Pennsylvania's Tobyhama Army Base.

[kristina]

The filmmakers received pressure from their financiers to have supplementary modern update footage or narration in the film but they relented and presented the film with no narration. However, the documentary has a soundtrack that includes songs and music with nuclear-inspired lyrics from the 1950s cold war period designed to underscore the movie's anti-atomic theme. One of these is a Bill Haley fantasy musical number where the only survivors of an atomic bomb are himself and thirteen women.

[leo]

The archival footage seen in the film is from 1940s and 1950s.

[cameron]

"Millions and millions of feet of film" were discovered in a warehouse at Tobyhanna Army Base in Pennsylvania according to producer-director Pierce Rafferty. The filmmakers literally viewed thousands of items for the picture. However, there were "hundreds of cans of outtakes that didn't make it into the movie", according to producer-director Jayne Loader.

[kenzi]

The clips seen in the film represent a variety of forms and sources. These include: propaganda films, TV programs, army and military training films, advertisements, film strips, newsreels, cartoons, government archival film, documentaries, civil defense films, anti-nuclear footage, public service announcements, educational films, commercial stock footage, and various other sources.

[alyssa]

The segment "Duck and Cover" showed how school children were reassured by "Bert the Turtle" that they would survive a nuclear bomb by simply forming a huddle together by the wall of the school-house. "The Atomic Cafe" has been attributed to raising public consciousness of the short film "Duck and Cover" and introducing it to a whole a new generation.

[beth]

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore wrote on Twitter in 2018, "This is the movie that told me that a documentary about a deadly serious subject could be very funny. Then I asked the people who made it to teach me how to do it. They did. That movie became my first - Roger & Me (1989)."

[fred]

The documentary took five years to make. Work on the movie began in 1977 with the film being first released in 1982.

[terry]

Jayne Loader regrets "not being able to use more of the U.S. Army training films, which were made to prepare the troops for nuclear war, like 'Manual Damage Assessment' and 'The Management of Mass Casualties' which dealt with triage after a nuclear war. And 'Memorial Activities' - which pertained to burying radioactive bodies".

[kyle]

The film had three directors. They were all children of the 1950s.

[wallace]

In one segment, an American army chaplain describes the detonation of the A-bomb as "a wonderful sight to behold" and "one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man".

[wallace]

Approximately three quarters of the documentary is comprised of "public domain" material from government productions. The other quarter was comprised of newsreels and commercial stock footage.

[ethel]

Director John G. Avildsen offered to get comedian John Belushi to narrate the film. Avildsen and Belushi had just made Neighbors (1981) for Columbia.

[janice]

The film was compared with Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) whilst critics called the movie a nuclear "Reefer Madness" [Reefer Madness (1936)].

[frederick]

The ratio of materials viewed to materials used in the film "was maybe 10,000 to one" according to producer-director Pierce Rafferty.

[kristina]

Inspired Mad Max Beyond Thunderome, according to an interview by George Miller.

[francisco]

The documentary was originally conceived to be a film about propaganda but the filmmakers then narrowed their scope to make a movie about the birth of the atomic age.