Medical Breakthroughs: Worth a Major Motion Picture?

I have long felt that medical breakthroughs that have occurred over the past two decades--such as the mapping of the human genome that has led to better understanding of and treatment of diseases or how medical research stopped AIDS from being a death sentence--would be good sources for movies.  

But that hasn’t been happening. The problem has been that in the 1930s and 1940s the scientist/medical researcher was a movie hero, But post-World War II he/she has been a movie villain. A major film was released a few years ago with a medical research premise, but one particular thing about it appeared to harm attendance. I pitched my editor in a previous position on the topic of medical research in the movies, but that didn't happen either.

Maybe such films are on somebody's development list. If not, perhaps a flmmaker or someone with money to fund films will consider this type of movie. The stories described above and others actually happened, and millions are already experiencing their effects.

A few years ago, I interviewed the head of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, and he told me he had been trying to interest filmmakers in medical research stories. He said younger people he had talked to had been excited about crime scene investigation television series, and he didn’t understand why they wouldn’t be interested in stories of curing diseases and helping people live longer.

Hollywood studios used to make movies about such things. The Story of Louis Pasteur (Warners, 1936) was based on the life of the French microbiologist known for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, instrument sterilization,microbial fermentation, and pasteurization. It won Academy Awards for best actor (Paul Muni) and best story and screenplay. The 1938 M-G-M film Yellow Jack was based on the "Walter Reed Boards" of 1898 to 1900 in which Major Walter Reed of the U.S. Army worked to diagnose and treat human fever in Cuba by performing tests on volunteers. Other films followed, including Dr. Ehrich's Magic Bullet (Warners 1940), which traced a German doctor's discovery of a cure for syphilis, and The Great Moment (Paramount 1944), which described the discovery of ether as a general discovery of ether as a general anesthesia.  

These movies were part of a series of historical films portraying inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and scientists like Madame Curie as creative heroes striving to better human life.  Concurrently, there was a series of science fiction/horror films about men and women who were also trying to find cures for cancer, to expand the life span, and even bring back the dead. But these scientists went too far, committed crimes, went mad, and were destroyed. The 1936 Universal film The Invisible Ray contains a line that ultimately became a trope for these movies: “There are some secrets we are not meant to probe.”  

Films about medical science took a back seat in the early 1940s to movies meant to boost optimism about the war effort. After the war, filmmakers’ view took a darker turn that mirrored the mood of the many who had lost loved ones in the conflict and those who had seen the horrors of war that ended with death camps and the detonations of two atomic bombs. Not only were there film noirs about criminal behavior but movies that mirrored the mad scientist films of the 1930s. Japanese filmmakers envisioned that the atomic bombs that hit Japan as having unintentionally engendered the gigantic monster Godzilla. American filmmakers responded with Them! (Warners 1954), which involved giant radiated ants and Tarantula (Universal 1955) in which a scientist’s experiments to produce a super-nutrient to enlarge the food stock went wildly astray.

There was a sense that science had indeed gone too far, that it was out of control, and that it was no longer our savior. The 1956 20^th Century Fox film Bigger Than Life told a story inspired by a true incident of a seriously ill schoolteacher’s dependence on the “miracle” drug cortisone that drives him mad. Mayo Clinic researchers had won the Noble Prize for Medicine in 1950 for the development of cortisone for the treatment of severe pain. If the film had been made in the 1930s as an A-movie, the researchers would have been portrayed as heroes. Instead, Bigger than Life focused on the drug’s side effects.

A logical extension of this trend was fueled by the growth of biopharmaceutical companies as really big businesses and accusations of actions such as the suppression of negative clinical results of experimental drugs because they would keep the drugs off the market and harm the company’s bottom line. The Constant Gardener (2005), based on the novel by John Le Carre, told the fictional story of a man who learns that his wife was murdered for trying to release negative clinical trial results. The film won the best actress Academy Award (Rachel Weisz). In a related vein, there have been several fact-derived movies—Lorenzo’s Oil (Universal 1992) and Extraordinary Measures (CBS Films 2010) --in which parents go off on their own to find treatments or cures for their children’s diseases because biopharma companies won’t or can’t.

During the last 10 years, filmmakers finally made two positive fact-derived medical research movies. One, Living Proof (2008), was made for the cable tv network Lifetime and was based on the heroic 10-year efforts of Dr. Dennis Slamon to get the Food and Drug Administration to approve the breast cancer drug Herceptin, which, in combination with chemotherapy, increased survival rates. The movie accurately depicted the long process of drug approval and related the stories of three patients.  But the movie’s viewership of 2.8 million was a quarter of that of even a mediocre movie, which would itself then be shown on cable.

The second, Concussion (Universal 2015) was released to theatres and looked like it had everything going for it. It combined football and medical research and was based on the successful efforts of Dr. Bennet Omalu, a forensic pathologist who fought against the National Football League allegedly trying to suppress his research that indicated professional football players were suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) brain degeneration. The medical researcher is the hero. It’s an earnest if slow-moving and overlong film. But it tanked at the box office. It cost $35 million to produce and reportedly an equal amount to market and earned $48 million worldwide despite extensive promotion due to the timeliness of its topic. The conclusion of some was that football fans just didn’t want to see a movie that depicts the tackling and slamming they love as harmful. It was perhaps the right approach for the wrong topic. This effect is reminiscent of the failure of the 1976 film Two-Minute Warning about a sniper’s plan to kill people at random while they are watching the Super Bowl, which turned out to be a nightmare that football fans didn’t want to pay to see.

The medical scientist as hero approach may have worked in the 1930s because it was in keeping with the nation’s optimism as it emerged from the Great Depression. The films were also telling the broadest stories of medical innovation—vaccination, yellow fever, syphilis—that were easily understood, the low-hanging fruit so to speak. Stories about finding the appropriate chemical formulation are likely to encounter the same problem as movies about songwriters and novelists—they are basically about the highly undramatic process of people thinking. 

But saying that is like deciding not to make a movie about the sinking of the Titanic because everyone knows how it ends. There are obstacles that filmmakers need to surmount. But the stories are important and need to be told if filmmakers can figure out how to tell them. Drugs that failed to cure a cancer have been repurposed to cure other illnesses. Genomic mapping has enabled the discovery of new treatments for some cancers, diabetes and obesity as well as a better understanding of how and why a disease strikes. Isn't that as exciting as crime scene investigations?