Einstein in Hollywood: The untold story

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Until now, little has been known of Albert Einstein’s brief career in Hollywood, where the great physicist and mathematician spent two frustrating years as a screenwriter in the 1930s. But the recent finding of a trunk full of his screenplays and memos has shed new light on the episode.

Though neither of the two full scripts Einstein wrote were ever filmed, he did contribute scenes and dialogue for three movies produced at MGM and Columbia in 1936 and 1937, a time when he left his home in Princeton, N.J., after becoming depressed by the death of his wife, Elsa, and the rise of fascism in Europe.

“It was all a bit of a fluke,” said Emery Cleves, a security guard at Bob’s Friendly Storage in Princeton, who discovered Einstein’s trunk in a little-used basement. “To try to lift his spirits, he got in his banged-up Hudson coupe and decided to see the country. In California, he met Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, at the Brown Derby. Mayer said, ‘I hear you’re the smartest guy in the world. Well, I could use a smart guy for a change. Come work for me and I’ll introduce you to Jean Harlow.’”

As it happened, Einstein was a movie buff. While living in Europe, he’d been influenced by and was an influence on the German expressionist filmmakers Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, but also was entranced by such Hollywood icons as Charles Chaplin, Mickey Mouse and Lillian Gish. “If you read my 1920 paper on critical opalescence, you will see a direct link to Lang’s Metropolis, he once told colleague Max Planck.

Though Einstein had never written anything besides scientific papers, he accepted Mayer’s offer and was given an office on the MGM lot in Culver City. There he banged out script pages on an Underwood alongside Hollywood hacks and also literary legends such as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But Einstein’s efforts went unappreciated by his superiors. “Whenever there’s a scene involving theoretical physics, he’s the cat’s pajamas,” head of production David Selznick told Mayer. “But he’s weak on dialogue, plotting and structure and he seems obsessed with lighting. He always puts in some insanely complicated formula for the lighting director to follow.”

For his part, Einstein felt his work was misunderstood. “You’ve cut my best lines,” he complained in an emotional memo to producer Walter Wanger after he was assigned to do a polish on the western Last Mule to Utah, starring Randolph Scott and Ginger Rogers. He cited a scene containing this dialogue:

Doc: I wouldn’t draw if I were you, Connors. You see I have timed your action and it takes you .0745 of a second just to clear the holster. By then, my bullet will be on its way. If we express its trajectory as X and the muzzle velocity as Y, then X plus Y squared equals Connors kaput.

Connors: Maybe so. But even assuming your calculations are correct, you’ve failed to take an important element into consideration.

Doc: And what might that be?

Connors: The fact that my confederate Blackie Cantrell, now perched on the roof of the saloon, is aiming a .30-calibre projectile from his Winchester rifle which, fired at an angle of 46 degrees, will likely strike you in the neck, severing your carotid artery.

Doc (glancing at his watch): You’ve positioned Blackie improperly, Connors. At this hour, the sun will shine right in his eyes.

Wanger deleted the dialogue and penciled in: “They draw and fire. Connors falls dead.”

Einstein stormed into Mayer’s office and angrily complained: “Without knowing the math, the audience cannot understand why Doc wins. It’s a catastrophic change.” But Mayer merely shrugged and said, “Al, can you come back later? I’ve got Joan Crawford under the desk.”

A week later, Einstein was traded to Columbia for an assistant director, two gaffers and Francis the Talking Mule. His stint at Columbia was a fiasco. Einstein was appalled when in their first meeting, studio boss Harry Cohn ordered him to get a haircut and said he hoped Einstein wasn’t “going to be a prima donna like that drunken putz Scott Fitzgerald.”

Einstein worked hard on an original script about a tormented scientist whose greatest invention is used not for peaceful purposes, as he intended, but to destroy civilization. But when Cohn took it away from him and had it turned into an Abbott and Costello comedy, Einstein grew despondent, started smoking and initiated a disastrous affair with character actress Margaret Dumont.

Soon afterward, he was back in Princeton, working on theoretical physics. He never again saw another motion picture.