(7/20/20) Greg Mitchell’s new book “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood―and America―Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military—for reasons of propaganda, politics, and petty human vanity (this was Hollywood). Join us for one of the strangest origin stories in the history of moviemaking in this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI.