The Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Project is a 1986 American science fiction thriller film. Named after the World War II-era program that constructed the first atomic bombs, the plot revolves around a gifted high school student who decides to construct an atomic bomb for a national science fair. It was directed by Marshall Brickman, based upon his screenplay co-written with Thomas Baum, and starred Christopher Collet, John Lithgow, John Mahoney, Jill Eikenberry and Cynthia Nixon. This filma box-office bomb whose ticket sales recovered just 21 percent of its budgetwas the first from the short-lived Gladden Entertainment. The film's director and screenplay co-writer Marshall Brickman had established his career as a co-writer on several Woody Allen films. The Manhattan Project was his third film as director, following the comedies Simon (1980) and Lovesick (1983). Plot Dr. John Mathewson discovers a new process for refining plutonium to purities greater than 99.997 percent. The United States government provides him a laboratory located in Ithaca, New York, masked as a medical company. John moves to Ithaca and meets real estate agent Elizabeth Stephens while searching for an apartment. He attempts to win the affections of the single mother by inviting her teenage son Paul to take a tour of the lab. John is confident in the lab's cover story but Paul, an unusually gifted student with a passion for science, becomes suspicious when he discovers a statistically impossible patch of five-leaf clover on the grounds. Paul and his aspiring journalist girlfriend, Jenny Anderman, decide to expose the weapons factory to the media, stealing a container of plutonium as evidence. Once they succeed, Paul declares that the plutonium alone is insufficient, as no-one would be impressed by two kids stealing something from a lab. Instead, he convinces Jenny he can create the world's first privately-built nuclear device, exposing the lab to the world by audaciously entering it into the New York Science Fair. After convincing his mother and his school that his project is about hamsters bred in darkness, he begins research and construction of the bomb.