Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Between Rock and a Hard Place.
Just to start briefly: So today is the big day, as my latest film, “The Atomic Bowl,” started streaming this morning over PBS.org and all PBS apps (AppleTV, Roku, Android devices, iPhone, Vizio, Amazon Fire, Google TV,Samsung Smart TV and more). It will roll out over PBS stations during the next few weeks. That’s the 30-second trailer at top but here is the link to the PBS.org page where you can watch now or via the apps. Narrated by Peter Coyote. And one more time: the companion e-book, which was covered by the Washington Post yesterday.
If you watch the film (53 minutes) or read the book, let me know in comments or in an email.
Go here for full responses to the film so far (and more). Below, you’ll find a few of them. Thank you to “the team”: producer Lyn Goldfarb, editor Rob Burgos, composer John E. Low, associate producers Bill Geerhart and Barbara Bedway, researcher Tim Goldsmith, advisor Markus Nornes.
Re: “The Atomic Bowl”
- “Today’s nuclear tensions make Mitchell’s storytelling more timely than ever.” — Will Bunch, The Philadelphia Inquirer
- “A master storyteller and an urgent reminder of the terrors of nuclear war.” — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire
- “Fascinating. Poor Nagasaki got lost because it was the second bombing.” –Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winner for “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”
- “A great movie–a hidden chapter in atomic history revealed.” — Jayne Loader, co-director of “The Atomic Cafe” (now in the National Film Registry)
- “Excellent work–and very moving.”– Rick Perlstein, best-selling author of “Nixonland,” “Reaganland,” and other books
- “This is superb and elicits very strong emotions. And also quite timely.”– Sarah Kernochan, two-time Academy Award-winning documentary director
- “The story is riveting, and really fantastic archival film-making.” — Ben Proudfoot, winner of Academy Awards for best short documentaries 2021 and 2024
- “An excellent, much-needed corrective to the general lack of coverage Nagasaki. ” — Glenn Silber, director of Academy Award nominee “The War at Home”
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent award-winning The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years. He writes often at Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.
