My life as an advisor to TV and film

In Eddie Murphy's remakes of the Nutty Professor movies, the main character had a working molecular biology lab, with real state-of-the-art equipment. But it wasn't the director's job to figure out what the set needed to convince moviegoers of its authenticity -- it was mine.

I have had the privilege of serving as a technical advisor on a number of motion picture and television productions, by virtue of my field of expertise (molecular and clinical genetics, which happens to be a hot topic in the news and on film these days), my sideline as a film critic for a national physicians' magazine for ten years, and my location at the University of California, Los Angeles, the natural place for Hollywood filmmakers to turn when they have technical questions.

I have found that the filmmakers -- from the directors to the actors to the sound men to the carpenters -- have much in common with the scientific and medical colleagues I work with at UCLA. All are genuinely interested in these topics and want to learn as much about them as they can. Like us, all are highly professional, take great pride in their craft, work very long hours (18 hours a day or more on some shoots), and depend heavily on technology.




Some science fiction films have been amazingly prescient. A TV-movie I worked on called Condition: Critical involved an epidemic of prion disease which predated the advent of human transmission of bovine spongiform encephalopathy.



My entry point to any given project may vary. Sometimes I am contacted by a screenwriter who has only a germ of an idea he wishes to flesh out, sometimes by a producer or director for edits on a script already in production, and sometimes by the production's Visual Effects Department asking how best to depict DNA replication by computer-generated imagery (CGI) on the screen. For an episode of Chicago Hope I got a writing credit for a story on Munchausen syndrome (a patient feigning pheochromocytoma).

For both Eddie Murphy Nutty Professor movies, the studio's Art Department asked me for assistance in designing the set for Professor Klump's laboratory. They came to my research lab at UCLA and took lots of pictures, then we sat down with the Fisher products catalog and started on page one as I pointed out what they needed to order as "props" (with a budget of $50 million, money was no object).

Sometimes my advice goes unheeded. Klump was supposed to be a biology professor at a small liberal arts college, but his laboratory occupied an entire soundstage on the Universal Studios lot -- about ten times larger than the best-funded faculty member at a major research university. And while we tried to make it look as much like a real-world molecular biology lab as possible (I brought my graduate students along with me to help "dress the set"), when the director arrived for the first scene to be shot there, he ordered some of the visually boring thermal cyclers and centrifuges replaced by flasks and tubes of bubbling green and purple liquids -- more reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory than a modern facility.

In general, I've found that producers of comedy have less interest in adhering to the facts than those involved in dramas. For instance, comedy productions accept fewer of my dialogue corrections and suggestions -- even something as basic as changing "ounces" to "grams". At the other end of the spectrum are shows like Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), which prides itself on faithfulness to the underlying science. When I consult for that show, the writers call and Email me extensively to ask if a desired plot point could really happen or be detected by DNA fingerprinting. A similar experience occurred recently when I met with the writing team for Medium (interesting given the show's dubious premise of a woman using psychic abilities to solve crimes).

Even on the dramas, however, a cherished scientific truth will sometimes have to be discarded in order to enable an essential story development, such as a normally three-week-long forensic DNA analysis that's fictionally done in one hour for the sake of plot pacing. In truth, few will ever notice these gaffs. As one TV producer told me, the number of Ph.D. scientists watching his show accounts for no more than 0.00001% of the Nielsen rating audience.

While inaccuracies can be frustrating, they're often not a turnoff -- I've found that scientists are among the greatest fans of fictionalized retellings of their profession and their discoveries. Perhaps scientists can appreciate more than others the factual premises from which these tales spring, or long for a world in which big discoveries come easily and often (the antithesis of real science, as we all know). We cannot expect the film studios to adhere to the same rigorous standards of Science and Nature, and even scientists can afford to relax their vigilance once in a while and simply enjoy the entertainment.

Wayne Grody is a molecular biologist and clinician at UCLA. His research, which has been cited a total of nearly 2,000 times, focuses on the molecular genetics of metabolic and heritable neoplastic disorders.

Wayne Grody
mail@the-scientist.com

Links within this article:

Nutty Professor
http://imdb.com/title/tt0117218/

Condition: Critical
http://imdb.com/title/tt0104001/

C. Bahls, "vCJD and CJD by the numbers," The Scientist, June 7, 2004
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14729

M. May, "Advances in cellular processing," The Scientist, March 15, 2004.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14519/

Chicago Hope
http://imdb.com/title/tt0108724/

CSI
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/csi/

Medium
http://www.nbc.com/Medium/about

Wayne Grody
http://healthcare.ucla.edu/institution/physician?personnel_id=8382

DA Fitzgerald, "Bridging the gap with bioelectronics," The Scientist, March 18, 2002.
http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/12940/

Wayne Grody, abstracts
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed