Many thanks to AKALib for letting me know about Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. I wouldn’t know about this movie watching commercials on TV or on the Internet. Though I have to admit I wouldn’t know about The Last Jedi either if it weren’t for the tie-in commercials.
Hedy Lamarr is known mostly as an actress today. Her IMDB page says she’s known for Samson and Delilah (1949), Ecstasy (1933), The Strange Woman (1946) and Algiers (1938).
It’s still often repeated today that Lamarr turned down Casablanca, but I’m not going to get into that here. What Lamarr should be better known for is her scientific work that eventually led to the invention of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
The 2015 Google doodle helped, highlighting how the ex-wife of a Nazi arms dealer tried to help the Allied forces target torpedoes more reliably. A movie would help make these facts more widely known.
The official release date is today, November 24, but unless you’re in New York this week (or in Louisville, Kentucky today), you might have to wait a few weeks to see this movie.
I was thinking about how Hidden Figures was in limited release Christmas of last year before opening nationwide Epiphany this year. Perhaps people thought that movie would just barely recoup its $25 million budget, which it almost did on its opening weekend.
And then there was the weekend Hidden Figures beat Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for box office take. But Bombshell would be competing against a Star Wars episode rather than a Star Wars story.
And, much more importantly, Bombshell is a documentary rather than a fictionalized story based on actual events like Hidden Figures. Once I realized that, I understood why AMC Theaters wouldn’t show me any showtimes at all despite showing a November 24 release date.
So then, from the movie’s IMDB page, I went to the official website, which lists only one week’s worth of showtimes for Bombshell in Michigan: from January 6 (the anniversary of the wide release of Hidden Figures) to January 14, at the Detroit Film Theater (part of the Detroit Institute of Arts).
Before then, there are more showtimes in New York, as well as in D. C., Rhode Island, California, and the second most convenient for me, Columbus, Ohio (a week from today, for a week). I think I’ll wait to January.
For now, I leave you with a few more facts about Lamarr which might be useful to you if you wish to research her life story.
First, she was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler, in Vienna on November 9, 1913. Her first movie was Geld auf der Straße (1930), a romance directed by Georg Jacoby. The timing of her move to Hollywood was fortunate, because Germany annexed Austria months before the release of Algiers.
Her stage name Hedy, which became her official first name, is obviously a version of Hedwig. I’m not sure where she got Lamarr from. She is listed as Hedy Kiesler Markey on her 1942 patent with composer George Antheil (U. S. Patent 2,292,387) for a “secret communication system.”
Hedy Markey became a U. S. citizen in 1953, so I’m guessing she was qualified to vote in Florida in the 2000 election, despite her shoplifting arrests (which didn’t lead to convictions).
How she would have voted in that election, or how her vote would have been recorded, are matters of pure speculation. She died in January of that year.