Maintenance Manager Jerry McDonald recommends Downwind, a Backlot Docs presentation.
I was compelled to watch Downwind, released August 2023, because to me it’s an important topic that affects us all to this day.
Martin Sheen narrates this harrowing exposé of the United States’ disregard for everyone living downwind when they tested 928 large-scale nuclear weapons in Nevada from 1951 to 1992.
Science fiction is one of my favorite categories, but this is a nonfiction documentary with people who have had this seriously affect their lives and their stories are real. (I rented Oppenheimer back in May 2024 and found it to meet all the rave reviews. A chilling thriller that seemed to want to make sense of the chaos that ruled the cold war.)
Patrick Wayne, John Wayne’s son, calls this “pervasive stuff.” He starts with memories of his father’s career taking them to Utah to film The Conqueror. (Kind of hard to picture his dad as Genghis Khan.) Patrick mentions how they brought back some red soil to Hollywood that made Geiger counters go crazy. Everybody had them back then and they were all going to get rich mining Uranium.
It turns out that most of the cast and crew eventually died of cancer.
The US Department of Energy exploded 928 bombs in Mercury, Nevada. Some Native American’s are interviewed along with movie star Michael Douglas and some dialog from comedian Lewis Black who asks “What extra stuff didn’t they learn from the first one that they had to do it 928 more times?” In 1990 Congress came up the with radiation exposure compensation act. One must prove that they were exposed and are awarded $50,000. Rotten Tomatoes rated Downwind 100%.
The everyday people they interview have amazing stories and to me it’s a subject that needs to be brought out into the mainstream of knowledge and fact.
It’s not an easy subject to talk about with most of the people I know, and yes we needed a deterrent system to keep the bad guys away but we still need to deal with the price of letting the genie out of the bottle.
