Highlights from the Sundance Film Festival.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: FEBRUARY 02, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 020201np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Who Were the Stars at Sundance?
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's FRESH AIR, we talk with our film critic, John Powers, about this year's Sundance Film Festival, which concluded on Sunday. Last year, "The Blair Witch Project" premiered at the festival. We'll hear about some of the movies that premiered this year that are likely to open in theaters.

Also, the Manhattan Project's secret medical experiments on humans. The scientists creating the atom bomb were worried about the health hazards of plutonium. To investigate, 18 unsuspecting patients were injected with plutonium and monitored. We'll talk with journalist Eileen Welsome, author of "The Plutonium Files."

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Our film critic, John Powers, considers the Sundance Film Festival the most important film festival in the U.S. He's been attending since the mid-'80s. Sundance was created by director, producer, and movie star Robert Redford to showcase independent films. The festival attracts emerging filmmakers, film critics, and film fans as well as distributors, producers, and agents looking for new talent.

The films that succeed at Sundance are likely to make their way to movie theaters. This year's 10-day festival concluded on Sunday. We invited John to tell us about some of the highlights.

Let's start with the two films that tied for the grand jury prize, "You Can Count on Me" and "Girl Fight."

JOHN POWERS, FILM CRITIC: They're very different films, and both are, in a way, quintessential Sundance films, I think.

"Girl Fight" is a film by a young director named Karyn Kusama, a Japanese-American born in St. Louis, who is -- and it tells the story of a young girl from the housing projects who has all sorts of anger in her because of her family life.

And she devotes herself to becoming a champion boxer, and you see her go from being just a person who brawls in the schools to a person who learns to channel her anger and put it to some sort of good use. Along the way, she gets involved with a guy who, in a kind of nod to "Rocky," her boyfriend is named Adrian, just as Sylvester Stallone's wife was named Adrian. And the whole thing builds to a fight that she has to have with her boyfriend in an amateur boxing competition.

It's a very enjoyable, sharp film, not completely original. It seems to be something of a populist crowd-pleaser, but it's very, very well done. The young actress, Michelle Rodriguez, who plays the lead, is extremely good. And Karyn Kusama is a very, very good director. The film was backed by John Sayles and Maggie Renzi, and it has some of that gritty feeling of their films. And honestly, I think that Karyn Kusama is probably already a better director than John Sayles is.

The film has a lot of energy. It works beautifully. And that was one of the films that, within 10 minutes after the film screened for the first time, Karyn Kusama had been made, that one of the interesting things about Sundance is that when your film does well, in 10 minutes you can go from being someone that no one's ever heard of to someone that lots of people have heard of, and suddenly have a big future.

The other film is a relationships film about two brothers -- about a brother and sister, played by Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. Laura Linney plays a single mom, and Ruffalo plays her sort of -- he's her brother -- he's sort of a combination of slacker, loser, and down-and-outer, and he comes to visit her in her small town where she works as a -- where she works in a bank.

And basically the film is about their interaction and their interaction around her small son. It's a very funny, sharply observed, and touching film that at least one of the jurors, you know, Kevin Smith from "Dogma" fame, you know, was seen crying after the film.

And it's a very good exploration of sibling relationships. That's the kind of thing that Sundance films often try, and this one does it particularly well.

GROSS: Would we know the writer, director, or stars for anything?

POWERS: Oh, yes. The -- well, actually, the writer/director is a playwright named Kenneth Lonergan, who's best-known to most audiences as the man who wrote the first version of "Analyze This." I've read somewhere that it was actually nine years between the time he initially wrote it and it made it to the screen.

He's also a playwright who wrote a thing called "This Is Our Youth." And just as "Girl Fight" was backed by John Sayles and Maggie Renzi, if you look at the credits of "You Can Count on Me," you see -- you'll see the name of Barbara DeFina (ph) and Martin Scorsese. And I think it's interesting that perhaps the presence of these people as strong producers and people with real -- people with real eyes for talent, somehow that gives you some sense that these were good films.

GROSS: Well, I remember, I think it was about two years ago, after Sundance, you came home and you said, "No more gay coming-of-age movies for me." You were just so tired of watching gay coming-of-age movies. Was there a genre that irritated you this year because there was so much of it?

POWERS: You know, oddly enough, you know, I think the one thing that irritated me most this year was the tendency to make movies cute. I don't know exactly how this happened. I probably blame things like "Twin Peaks" and "Friends" and the success of such things. But now it seems that when people in the indie film world want to create interesting characters, what they do is, they come up with quirky characters. And probably the worst films I saw this year were the films that were trying to be so studiously adorable and cute.

It must be said that this year's festival was probably the best one in the last five years. I'm not sure that the very best films were as good as they sometimes are, but the overall standard was extremely high. So, I mean, it's kind of -- if you want to say it this way, the best were not as good as usual, but the bad were not as bad as they often are.

GROSS: There's a new movie adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel about the yuppie serial killer called "American Psycho." And you saw that at Sundance. What did you think?

POWERS: Yes, well, "American Psycho" was the hottest ticket, I think, of the entire festival. I mean, it showed early in the festival and came with all of the notoriety that comes with the Bret Easton Ellis novel, and with the industry back story of the fact that at one point, the director, Mary Harron, was -- suddenly discovered that Leonardo DiCaprio, hot off "Titanic," was interested in starring in the movie. And suddenly it went from a low-budget movie to a movie where there was talk they were going to pay Leonardo DiCaprio $21 million to be in it.

To her great credit, she fought that, and wound up with the star Christian Bale. And what she's done is, she's taken a novel that I thought was almost worthless and unreadable and distilled it into something that's a rather sharp and extremely funny satire on late '80s Wall Street men, who basically are hollow creatures except for their Nino Sarutti (ph) suits and their expensive business cards. And underneath that is a hatred and violence toward women.

It doesn't sound as if it would be very funny, what Harron has done is, she's taken a book that was just filled with name brands and sharpened the jokes so that what seems like a very simple thing, which is a satire of selfish, greedy white men, actually has a lot of punch and force. What she also manages to do is capture the feel and look of a particular kind of high-class, high-toned wannabe New York City. And it's an extremely well-shot and well-edited film. Her last film was "I Shot Andy Warhol," and this is a great advance technically beyond that.

GROSS: How did "American Psycho" do with the Sundance audience? I take it it didn't win any audience awards.

POWERS: No. "American Psycho" is not the kind of film that audiences at Sundance tend to like. You know, the official idea behind Sundance is that you're promoting edgy independent films. But the truth is, the Sundance audience tends to want rather sentimental, comic crowd-pleasers. So you see lots of standing ovations for films that, I think when they later appear in the world, real world audiences can't quite believe were -- received standing ovations at Sundance.

What I liked about "American Psycho" is that it was one of the few films there that had real cinematic ambition. I think, you know, that one of the things that's happened to Sundance over the years is that a lot of people go making films that are somehow designed to get them deeper into the film industry. And so what they make are indie versions of Hollywood films.

Something like "American Psycho" is quite different than that, and I think that's one of the things I like and respect about the film, was -- it's especially true of people who've made one or two films. What happens is that they make a film that might be edgy for their first film. Then no one goes to see it, and suddenly they realize they may never get to make another film if their second film isn't somehow popular.

And what that means is, you see a lot of second films by people who made sharp, independent-minded first films who make second films that look like low-budget Disney films. You know, they're filled with cute characters, they're adorable, and they're building toward a sentimental ending.

"American Psycho" did none of that. It was Mary Harron's second film, and she clearly went for it. And I respected that particularly, because Sundance is a place where you can see people who usually don't go for it.

GROSS: Now, you mentioned there's a certain kind of film that seems to go over at Sundance, and earlier you were talking about quirky, that quirky's very popular there. Why do you think that's true?

POWERS: Well, I think that a lot of American independent films -- and this is larger than Sundance -- you know, are caught halfway between what they think of as the real world and the larger-than-life mythologized Hollywood characters. So what they're trying to do is come up with interesting characters, but unlike, let's say, the Europeans, which have a great tradition of realistically depicting characters, in -- American movies don't really have that.

And so you find something that's halfway between a movie star-type character and an ordinary life type of character. And usually the way of doing the shorthand for that is to make people quirky or offbeat. Everyone has one or two qualities, and they might wear something funny, and it's a shorthand for saying, These aren't larger-than-life Hollywood characters, they're real people. But, of course, they aren't real people.

GROSS: The big success, financial success, from last year's festival was "The Blair Witch Project," which I think was bought by its distributor for, like, a million dollars, and, you know, did exceptionally well at the box office. I don't remember the figures. What was the impact of that financially and artistically on Sundance this year?

POWERS: Yes. Well, I think the interesting thing is that "The Blair Witch Project's" influence on Sundance -- well, it will probably take another year for that to happen. But what does happen when you have a film make that much money is, everyone thinks that there's a huge amount of money to be made in independent film if you do it right. So that's the first thing, is it somehow changes people's perception of what a film ought to do in the box office and what kind of films ought to be made.

The second thing is, it was a film that was shot very cheaply using video equipment. And I think the thing that was very striking at this year's Sundance was the way that the video revolution, in particular the digital revolution and the Internet revolution, have finally begun to hit Sundance.

I mean, I was talking to a friend, who -- and we were saying that one of the things that happens when you're in the middle of the festival is that you see all the trees, and the trees are the individual films. Yet when you step back and look at the bigger picture, sometimes the bigger picture can be found in your press box, where this year, suddenly, I had so many press releases from things like Atom.com, which is a new Internet thing which was buying short films to broadcast over the Internet, or you would read in the credits of films that it was -- that there were people who were Internet people who were the investors in the films.

And you realized when you went to a competition film like "Chuck and Buck," a very amusing film by Miguel Arteta, that it was actually shot on digital video. And probably if one were to look back on this festival a few years from now, what you would realize was that the most important story was the increasing digitalization, videoization and Internetization of independent film.

GROSS: My guest is our film critic, John Powers. And we're talking about the Sundance Film Festival, which ended on Sunday. We'll talk more about the festival after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: My guest is our film critic, John Powers, and we're talking about the Sundance Film Festival, which wrapped up on Sunday.

Sundance is a festival for independent movies, and the meaning of an independent film has changed a lot over the past few years. What do you think is the state of independent film now?

POWERS: Yes. Well, independent film has always been a tricky concept to define. Some people want to define it artistically, but historically, the real way of defining it has had to do with who's paying for the film. And, you know, in the past, you -- it was very easy to tell. You had people who were working for studios, and then you had people who were going around asking their family dentist or their dad's best friend for money to make a film.

Over the last few years, what's happened is that the studios have grasped that there's lots of money to be made from independent film. And so what they've done is, they've set up their own boutique operations, so they're now making films that are in many ways indistinguishable from the old independent films of the past. They have low budgets, they have second- or third-tier stars, and they deal with material that seems slightly edgy by Hollywood standards.

So I think that the -- what you now have is a situation where you still have the people who are cobbling together money by going to the dentist or doctor or family friend. You then have the people who go to a company like Miramax, which used to be an independent film company, but is now part of Disney. And then finally you have the people who make films for what are clearly major corporations.

But a film like "Magnolia," by Paul Thomas Anderson, while its financing is clearly not independent, in its spirit, it's independent. Similarly, a film like "Rushmore" was made for Disney, but even though Disney's money is behind it, it's far more independent, quirky, original, and auteurist than a lot of the films that were -- that I saw this year at Sundance.

GROSS: What's the importance now of the festival to you as a critic?

POWERS: Well, I think there are two levels of importance of Sundance. The first is that it's an exciting thing, because it may be the only film festival in the world where reputations can be made overnight. And the journalist in any critic is excited by that. You know, you're seeing films that no one else has seen, and you realize that if it's good, there might be some new star in the firmament, and that there'll be lots of stuff to write about. And maybe there's a great talent you'll be watching for years and years and years.

And at Sundance, you really don't know that. Even at Cannes, you're more likely to know than you are at Sundance.

I think the second thing is that the indie film scene is now an institutional part of American culture, and if you want to understand what's both good and bad in American culture, it's very, very useful to see the kind of things that are coming out at Sundance. It's sort of a barometer for, let's say, what is considered edgy or avant-garde or out of the mainstream.

You know, by that standard, this year's festival, which had lots of good films, wasn't very edgy or avant-garde. And probably when people look back on this period maybe 20 years from now, I think they will think of it as perhaps now one of the least bold and edgy and avant-garde periods in American art history, and not just film history.

GROSS: What are the movies that you thought would have the greatest chance of really catching on from last year's festival, and how did they do in reality?

POWERS: Well, I think the film that I knew was going to be a hit was "The Blair Witch Project." You know, I didn't think it was a great film, but I saw everyone freaking out at the screening, and when you realize that these are people, you know, Hollywood people, you know, many of whom, you know, would step on their parents for a dime, to have them be that scared, I realized there was actually something going on in that film.

As for the other films, I can barely even remember them. I think probably that what happened with a lot of Sundance films is that they succeed at Sundance and then fail in the marketplace.

Last year's winner was a film about Vietnam called "Three Seasons," which came and went, got some good reviews, but barely left a ripple. And the truth is, with a lot of these American independent films, including the ones that I really like, that usually happens, that the test finally, in a commercial medium like filmmaking, is the market, and at this point most of the Sundance films don't really make it in the market. But enough do, and in a big enough way, that the dream is always there.

I was talking, very interestingly, to a guy who works for one of the major distributors, and he was talking about the film "You Can Count on Me." And he was saying he thought that was his favorite film of the festival. He thought it was really, really good, but that his company would never -- you know, even if they could, they would never want to distribute it, because they knew it couldn't make enough money.

So he would pick up a film that was less good because he thought it would make more money, or at least there was the possibility that it would make more money, because in the fantasy of film exhibitors and distributors, you often look at a film, and you don't -- and even if you think it won't make money, you can imagine a scenario where it might make money, where it might be a huge hit.

"You Can Count on Me" never proposed such a scenario, which is to say, it was a very, very good film, really well written, really well directed, really well acted, people really liked it. But no one could figure out how you'd market it to make it a hit.

In contrast, you could take a film like "Girl Fight," which tied with it, and people could think, Wow, this is a girl power film, I could see how we can market this. This might make $50 million.

And so therefore, "Girl Fight" is a much hotter film than "You Can Count on Me," even though a lot of the people, industry people, thought "You Can Count on Me" was a better film. They nevertheless realized that they couldn't even delude themselves that "You Can Count on Me" would make a lot of money.

GROSS: I know at last year's festival, there were several documentaries that were really highly regarded, two or three of them being just about Vietnam and its aftermath. What about the documentaries at this year's Sundance?

POWERS: Yes. Well, it's a general rule of thumb that the documentaries at Sundance are always better than the narrative films. And I think, you know, there are two reasons for it.

One is that there's less money in documentary, so you're more likely to be getting a genuine labor of love. In fact, one of the funny things is, when you go into a documentary screening, what you notice right away is that the filmmakers and the producers tend to be 10 or 15 years older than they are in the dramatic feature competition. That's the first thing. And then the audience probably tends to be 20 or 25 years older.

It's a different kind of thing. The commitments that people have in documentary are different. They tend not to go into it to make money. So that's the first thing, which is one reason why documentary tends to be very strong.

I think the second thing is that the world is really interesting. And I remember once talking to this great Brazilian filmmaker, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, who was saying that whenever he was asked to be on a jury, he always preferred to be on the documentary jury, because in the -- he -- well, he said the problem was in feature films, that if a dramatic film is bad, there's nothing in it that's interesting. Whereas in a documentary, if not -- even if the film's not very good, you can always see a dog walking along the street in the background to keep you interested.

Or you'll see -- or you'll see somebody with a funny face walking by what -- the action, whereas in a dramatic feature film, they're always careful to remove the dog and the funny face from the film. So you just -- what -- all you has -- have is the bad film. Whereas in documentary, you have the world.

What that means in Sundance terms is that you usually have a competition filled with very, very good films. And what struck me was that I saw several documentaries, not a single winner. And what was -- because there were simply too many films to see. I didn't see a single winner. And yet I saw four or five really terrific documentaries.

GROSS: Name one of the documentaries that you particularly liked.

POWERS: Yes. Well, I saw a very interesting film about the deaf community called "Sound and Fury," which had to do with the implants that they are now putting in some young deaf people to allow them to hear. And the whole film followed a family, two brothers who had different families, both of whom had deaf children. One of the brothers had a deaf child. He was a hearing man. And he was putting in a cochlear implants into his child because he wanted his child to be able to hear and live a so-called normal life.

His brother also had a daughter who was hearing-impaired, but because this brother was deaf, he thought it was partly an assault on the dignity of the deaf community, but also on the deaf world to -- and it would -- it might destroy her life, to give her the implants, because she would lose touch with her community. And it became a very passionate, angry film disputing this question of, should you or should you not put in implants in deaf children? with all sorts of complicated familial, historical, and political reasons.

An extremely interesting film, you know, that held me from beginning to end, where the filmmakers had gone in and found the right people, and those -- then those right people had let them watch how they lived through their events, very passionate, angry events, with mothers and sons screaming at one another, deaf people being furious with other deaf people because they'd let their kids have implants. A really interesting film.

GROSS: Well, John, a pleasure to talk with you.

POWERS: Oh, it's always a pleasure to talk to you, Terry.

GROSS: John Powers is film critic for FRESH AIR and "Vogue."

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: John Powers
High: Fresh Air film critic John Powers talks to Terry Gross about this year's Sundance Film Festival. The festival, held annually in Park City, Utah, concluded this past weekend. John Powers is film critic for "Vogue" Magazine.
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End-Story: Who Were the Stars at Sundance?
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: FEBRUARY 02, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 020202np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Eileen Welsome Discusses "The Plutonium Files"
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:30

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: As scientists during World War I raced to build the first atomic bomb, they injected 18 unsuspecting hospital patients with plutonium to study the effects of plutonium on the human body.

Coming up, we talk with journalist Eileen Welsome, author of "The Plutonium Files."

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Last week, the government admitted that workers who helped make the first nuclear weapons were exposed to radiation and chemicals that led to cancer. Here's a related story.

When the scientists with the Manhattan Project were creating the first atom bombs, they worried about the health hazards of plutonium and the possibility of it causing a cancer epidemic. As part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, 18 hospital patients were injected with plutonium without their knowledge. Not only were the injections top secret, the very existence of plutonium was top secret.

The patients were all believed to be terminally ill and were in hospitals adjacent to nuclear research facilities. Most of the patients were injected with five micrograms of plutonium, which was five times the dose that doctors in 1945 believed would cause cancer.

But two of the patients were injected with 95 micrograms.

My guest, Eileen Welsome, has investigated the story since 1987 and won a 1994 Pulitzer Prize for her series in "The Albuquerque Tribune." Now she's written a new book called "The Plutonium Files."

She learned that there were no cancers that could directly be attributed to the injections, but the patients weren't monitored after the experiments ended.

EILEEN WELSOME, "THE PLUTONIUM FILES": The injections occurred between 1945 and 1947. Three of them occurred during the war, and the remainder occurred after the war. What I found in documents that were not made public until the mid-'90s is that after the Manhattan Project was disbanded and the Atomic Energy Commission came into being, there was a great furor inside the commission about this experiment. And essentially the decision was made to classify all these reports top secret.

So over time, this study and these people were more or less forgotten.

In the mid-'70s, a scientist from Berkeley by the name of Patricia Durbin (ph), who had worked with one of the original scientists there, who was involved in three of the California injections, rediscovered this experiment, more or less. And at that time, the survivors were brought back into the hospital, Strong Memorial Hospital at Rochester, and studied. And a program was undertaken to exhume the bodies of some of the deceased patients.

And at that time is when they took blood tests and urine and stool samples and X-rays and discovered the bone changes to these patients. So they were never followed during their lifetime to see the long-term effects of these injections.

GROSS: Were you able to meet any of the survivors?

WELSOME: That was my hope when I first started out investigating this experiment. But I soon learned that the last survivor -- his name was Elmer Allen (ph), he lived in Italy, Texas -- he died a year -- about a year before I found his family, before I discovered his identity and found his widow, Fredna (ph) Allen. So I was not able to interview any of these patients.

I did, however, interview their wives, I interviewed their children, I interviewed their nephews and nieces, I interviewed their neighbors. I tried to interview anybody and everybody who might have known them, and in several cases I also was able to get ahold of their medical records.

And so I was able to learn more about their lives through that process as well.

GROSS: What were some of the family reactions?

WELSOME: Well, the families were -- it was a very touchy situation, because it sounded rather far fetched when I contacted them, (inaudible)...

GROSS: Oh, you broke the news?

WELSOME: That's correct. None of these families knew what happened to their loved ones until I tracked them down and told them. And I had to be very careful because I was in the process of trying to, A, make sure that these, in fact, were the correct individuals I was looking for, and I also didn't want to put words in anybody's mouth.

So I approached the subject rather gingerly and told them, and then also supplied them with whatever documents I had obtained from the federal government about what happened to them. And most of the people were initially rather bemused by it, very surprised, very shocked.

But it was only after thinking about it, and in the months and weeks to come, that they grew very angry about what had been done to their loved ones.

GROSS: Have any of them taken action against the government, filed any lawsuit?

WELSOME: After I identified five of these individuals, there was a huge national furor, and President Clinton instructed all the federal agencies to make any records on any of these experiments public. And at which point thousands and thousands of records started flowing into the public domain.

I also was able to obtain more records on the experiment and was able to identify all but one of the remaining patients. And in the following months and years, a number of these people, not just the relatives of the plutonium injectees but subjects and relatives in other parts of the country banded together and did file lawsuits against the federal government, and the families of the plutonium injectees eventually were awarded on average $400,000 apiece.

GROSS: Well, what about the scientists behind these experiments? What were their justifications for injecting plutonium into people who didn't even know what was happening?

WELSOME: Well, I think that they were patriots gone awry. I think that they felt -- they just felt it was imperative to know more about this material in order to better set standards, in order to protect the workers who were actually handling this new substance.

As I mentioned, all the plutonium in the world could have fit on the head of a pin, but they knew in a matter of months that they were going to have kilograms of this stuff. And they knew that plutonium behaved like radium. And they knew that one microgram of radium, which is a millionth of a gram, could cause cancer.

So they were -- they just felt that it was imperative to get this information, and it outweighed any ethical concerns about, Should we tell these people? Is this the right thing to do? I think they just felt that the ends justified the means.

GROSS: My guest is Eileen Welsome, author of "The Plutonium Files." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: My guest, Eileen Welsome, won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Manhattan Project's secret medical experiments during and shortly after World War I, injecting unsuspecting hospital patients with plutonium.

Now, injecting plutonium into unknowing people in the hospital was just one aspect of the radiation experiments that you investigated. You also investigated something called total body irradiation, known as TBI, total body irradiation.

What is that, and what was the purpose of the experiments with total body irradiation?

WELSOME: During the war, the scientists -- it's hard to under -- it's hard to -- for us to realize now, but during the war, very little was known about radiation, both its external effects and the effects caused by radioisotopes that were absorbed internally.

So during the war, they did a lot of down and dirty experiments. And then they dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a lot of the doctors and scientists working on the Manhattan Project went over there to see what had happened, along with a number of military personnel.

And I think that when they saw -- when they got there, a lot of the people were still dying of radiation sickness caused by the bomb. Their hair was still falling out, they were still vomiting, some of them were still experiencing diarrhea. They had terrific -- horrific burns. They were developing gangrene. They had pneumonia, and so on.

And I think, putting myself in the place of the doctors and scientists that arrived there in these burnt-out cities and this rubble, that they were just simply horrified by what these bombs had done. And so they -- when they returned to the United States, they embarked upon a vast research effort that just grew and grew and grew over time.

They believed, both the doctors and scientists and military officials and the government, that the next war would be a nuclear war, that it would be fought on an atomic battlefield in which soldiers would be going into the battle where bombs were going off 100 feet away from them. And the generals needed to know, Well, what's going to happen to my troops? Are they going to fall down and die? Are they going to get sick and start vomiting? Are they going to be able to proceed forward and to attack the enemy?

And so they needed to know more about the effects of radiation, total body radiation. And so a number of the studies that were done after the war were done in civilian hospitals. They were sponsored by the military, in which patients who were going -- undergoing radiation for their cancers were irradiated over their whole bodies. And then the scientists and doctors sort of observed the responses, and they provided this information to the military, which in turn would help the generals learn more about how to fight a nuclear war.

GROSS: Who was chosen as a -- as research subjects for these experiments into total body irradiation?

WELSOME: There were patients at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, Texas. There were patients at Cincinnati General Hospital in Ohio. And there were some other studies that were also done around the country. And these studies were funded by the Pentagon, and the patients were observed, and information about the nausea and the vomiting were taken down and passed to the military.

The other thing that they were looking for was called the dosimeter, or a measurement, something that they -- that could be administered on the atomic battlefield so that the doctors would know who was worth saving and who was going to die. For example, if they knew a soldier had just gotten 400 rads, well, that gentleman was going to die, and they could move on to the -- they could -- then they would move on to the next injured soldier.

GROSS: So the people who were given this total body irradiation, what were they told? They weren't told that they were being used as part of this larger medical experiment.

WELSOME: Well, there's conflicting information about what they were told. For example, I'll speak about Cincinnati. The doctors and scientists there contend to this day that the patients were told that part of the purpose of this experiment was to help the military learn more about nuclear warfare.

But the relatives of the patients maintained that their loved ones were not told anything about the purpose of this study, and that they were simply told that this was an experimental treatment that helped -- that might reduce the pain from their cancers. Wouldn't necessarily eradicate the cancer but might make them feel more comfortable, shrink the tumor, and so on.

GROSS: What did you learn about the side effects of these experiments?

WELSOME: Well, these experiments were horrific studies, and the Pentagon records that have been made public show that, oh, I think a number of the patients began vomiting almost immediately upon exposure and died within, oh, 15, 30, to 60 days, the time period in which the effects of radiation would occur, and that they died from the exposures and not from their diseases.

So they did suffer tremendously, and in -- and many of them were in acute pain when they died.

GROSS: Eileen, how did you first get onto this story?

WELSOME: I was working as a reporter at "The Albuquerque Tribune" in 1987, and I was doing a story about water at Kirtland Air Force Base, and I came across an Air Force report about sites around the country that it was going to clean up. And in that report, there were two sites at Kirtland Air Force Base that contained radioactive animal carcasses. And I was really struck by that, and I wondered what kind of animals were in the dumps, and why were they radioactive?

So I eventually managed to get ahold of a bunch of reports on these old animal experiments, and I went over to the base one afternoon and read them. And toward the end of the day in one of these animal reports, my eye fell on a footnote describing 18 humans who had been injected with plutonium. And I sort of sat up -- I just -- I was struck by that information. I was astonished to think the federal government had injected 18 of its own citizens with plutonium.

And so I began my research the next day at the University of New Mexico Library looking into this. And what I found out was that these 18 people, who were known by code numbers only, had been injected by the doctors and scientists working for the Manhattan Project.

And so through the years I gradually accumulated data on this experiment, trying to find anything I could, any scrap of information I could that would help me identify these people.

GROSS: How difficult was it to get the files from the government on these experiments?

WELSOME: It was extremely, extremely difficult, and in fact, I got -- I pushed and pulled and poked and called them and nagged them. And they sent me a few scraps of paper, fact sheets, upon (ph) anything that would have identified the scientists who were involved in this study, or the patients, had been whited out.

And I would call and say, Well, you know, you must have more. This was obviously an important study to you. There's no privacy issue here. All the patients are dead. There's no security issues. There's got to be more documents on this. And they essentially said that there wasn't. And they also said they would not release the names. I don't think they even had the names of these people.

So I, through these documents, through the scientific reports I was able to acquire and through the fact sheets that the federal government sent me, I tracked down these -- names of these people on my own. And I just got lucky.

GROSS: My guest is Eileen Welsome, author of "The Plutonium Files." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest, Eileen Welsome, won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Manhattan Project's secret medical experiments during and shortly after World War I, injecting unsuspecting hospital patients with plutonium. She uncovered information through the Freedom of Information Act and by tracking down family members of the experiments' victims.

How did you finally get the information that you needed? Was there a certain technique or a certain door that you knocked on that got you some of the stuff you needed?

WELSOME: Well, it was through old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. Basically, I just -- I swept in everything I could find out about these patients. I followed every footnote. And one day, when I was rereading my file, my eye fell on the two words that would unlock this story. And those words were "Italy, Texas."

And the document stated that one of the scientists had contacted the physician of Cal 3 in Italy, Texas. Now, Cal 3 was the code name for the third California patient injected. And by then I knew a lot about that patient, and I knew that I could find him, even if it meant going door to door in Italy, Texas.

GROSS: Did you have to go door to door?

WELSOME: Well, what I did was, I (inaudible) -- I was sitting in the press room. Soon as I saw the words "Italy, Texas," having gone to school in Italy, I knew it had to be a small town. So I called directory assistance, got the number for Italy's city hall, and got ahold of somebody there, the operator, and described this man I was looking for. I knew at that point he would have been an African-American who would have been about 80 years old who had had his left leg amputated in 1947, three days after they gave him this injection of plutonium.

So I called the -- when I was talking to the person from the Italy city hall, I described this man, and she said, "Oh, you're looking for Elmer Allen, but he died a year ago. Would you like his wife's number?" And I said, well, of course I would, and I took down the number and called her in about three minutes and set up an appointment to meet her that week in Texas, and flew over there and met with her.

And we -- she pulled out all her documents, and I pulled out all my documents. And her daughter was there. And by the end of the interview, we were all convinced that Elmer Allen was in fact Cal 3. And he was.

GROSS: And what about government documents? How did you finally get them released?

WELSOME: Well, after I got this -- the few facts sheets that they gave me, and after I found Elmer Allen, my paper then got our attorneys to file a huge new Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Energy. And then our lawyers just began pushing and prodding them nearly every day to -- just hounding them to get some documents that we needed. And shortly before we went to press, we got about six memos or so which absolutely confirmed that Elmer Allen was indeed Cal 3.

GROSS: What impact did the story have on you as a reporter and as an American citizen?

WELSOME: Oh, it had -- it was an incredible story. It was the big story that nearly stopped the little paper. I mean, after Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary admitted that, in fact, the government had done the plutonium experiment and many others, it -- the story just grew overnight.

And reporters from all over the country, all over the world, began calling the paper trying to get more information from us. We ran out of fax paper. We ran out of copying paper. Literally, at one time, every phone in the newsroom, someone was on hold waiting for me. And I just -- I...

(LAUGHTER)

WELSOME: ... I couldn't get to them. There would be 30 and 40 pink slips on my desk. I just -- one afternoon I just sat there and put my head down and cried, because I was still trying to report the story also. The story was still unfolding.

And I was trying to -- I thought the best thing to do, once I had -- once my series was published, was just give the people the names of the people I had found, give the reporters the names of the families, if the families agreed to that, and then they could make their own arrangements with them and do their own stories.

So that's what they did. But I just sat there one afternoon and just -- you know, I just put my head down and cried. It was overwhelming, the pressure and the stress, the excitement and so on. But eventually things calmed down, and we kept moving forward, and we kept writing -- we kept writing stories, and the media would come in, and Phil Muss (ph) says, "We worked (ph)." It was pretty crazy.

GROSS: What about the impact of the story on your feelings as an American citizen?

WELSOME: Oh, it didn't -- you know, it didn't make me any more cynical. I think I wasn't surprised. I feel -- I guess I'm -- I don't think I'm any more wary than I've ever been. I'm -- it confirmed what I knew. It did make me feel, as a reporter and a journalist, very proud, because this was a case where, you know, we're so reviled in the media, and rightly so, because we do a lot of things that aren't right, or aren't well thought out.

But sometimes, you know, we do do things right, and sometimes we have the capacity to correct grave injustices. And this was a case where long-simmering injustices were brought to light and where the president of the United States finally stood up in front of the American people and said, Hey, this was wrong, and we did wrong, and we're going to try and make sure that this never happens again.

And for me as a reporter, that -- when -- that was exactly what I thought when I found that footnote. I thought, This is wrong. You know, the federal government shouldn't have done this.

So there was a direct link for me between that emotion I had in that basement working all alone and finding that footnote, and hearing President Clinton admit it to the American people. And I felt very proud and very moved by that.

GROSS: Eileen Welsome is the author of "The Plutonium Files."

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our engineers are Fred Snyder (ph) and Audrey Bentham. Dorothy Ferebee is our administrative assistant. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.

I'm Terry Gross.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Eileen Welsome
High: Journalist Eileen Welsome talks about her book, "The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War." "The Plutonium Files" is about the thousands of secret government-sponsored radiation experiments conducted on unsuspecting Americans during the Cold War. Welsome won the Pulitzer Prize for her initial research and writing on these experiments. Her book includes new facts about the Manhattan Project, the scientists who conducted the research, and the experiments' victims.
Spec: Government; Science; Health and Medicine; Crime

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End-Story: Eileen Welsome Discusses "The Plutonium Files"
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