http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/04/science/04FILM.html

Hollywood Star's Wartime Secret Becomes a Screenplay

By KENNETH CHANG

Published: May 4, 2004

In 1933, at age 19, she swam in the nude in the notorious Czech film "Ecstasy." Often called the
most beautiful woman in the world, she married badly — to a domineering Austrian munitions
manufacturer — and escaped by drugging the maid and climbing out a window. She made her
way to Hollywood, where she starred in movies with Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable and Jimmy
Stewart.

Then there is the less known chapter of her life. In World War II, she offered her services as an
inventor of weapons, coming up with a brainstorm that helped lead to wireless Internet and
cellphones.

The Hedy Lamarr story: does it sound like the plot of a movie?

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation thinks so. The foundation, which typically supports science and
technology projects like a census of marine life and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to map millions of
galaxies, is now making grants for screenplays with science or technology themes. This year, it
awarded $48,000 to Gretchen Somerfeld, a Los Angeles writer, to refine her screenplay about
Lamarr.

At the TriBeCa Film Festival on Sunday, actors read from Ms. Somerfeld's screenplay "Face
Value." Sloan also makes grants at the Sundance and Hamptons film festivals.

"The bottom line in all of this is simply we think there are great opportunities here, great characters,
great stories that have been largely unexplored," said Doron Weber, director of the Sloan program
for public understanding of science and technology. "And when I speak of opportunities, I don't
mean in an educational sense. We're speaking of what we believe are box office opportunities."

On Saturday at the festival, David Baxter, the other winner of a TriBeCa Sloan grant this year, will
present background on his screenplay "The Broken Code." It tells of Rosalind Franklin, whose
X-ray images of DNA provided the inspiration for James Watson and Francis Crick to deduce its
double-helix structure.

Franklin, who died in 1958, never knew that Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick had seen her images, and Mr.
Baxter's screenplay traces the efforts of a friend and writer, Anne Sayre, who documented her
contributions two decades later.

The Sloan Foundation also aids popular science books and Broadway plays. The goal, Mr. Weber
said, is "to create more realistic and compelling and entertaining stories about science and
technology and challenge existing stereotypes of scientists and engineers in the popular
imagination."

Mr. Weber concedes that Hollywood, with its track record of mad-scientist stereotypes and plots
that hinge on fallacious science, is a harder nut to crack. Movies are more expensive, take longer
to produce and have to appeal to larger audiences who mostly do not care about any underlying
physics or biology.

Filmmakers are not antiscience, he said; often, they just do not know any scientists. His program
has also offered grants at film schools and has scientists speak to film students.

"The idea is to get more work into the pipeline," he said.

"Broken Code" is one of four projects related to the discovery of the double helix now circulating in
Hollywood, and Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory Productions has signed on as executive
producer.

Ms. Somerfeld confesses that science was her worst subject in school. What attracted her to
Lamarr's story was not the technology, but her struggle to be seen as more than a beautiful
woman. ("Any girl can be glamorous," Lamarr once said. "All you have to do is stand still and look
stupid.")

Ms. Somerfeld called Lamarr "a woman who was out of sync with her time."

"Had she been born in another era," the writer said, "she could have really gone for it and lived up
to her potential."

In her marriage to Fritz Mandl, the munitions maker, Lamarr sat in on his business meetings and
learned that one of the elusive goals was to control weapons remotely by radio signals, what today
would be called smart bombs. But radio signals can be readily jammed.

Lamarr's insight was to realize that continuously and randomly changing the radio frequencies
would defy jamming. In early 1940, she and the composer George Antheil devised a system for
airplanes to direct torpedoes toward their targets. Inspired by player pianos, Antheil conceived of a
pair of paper rolls, one in the airplane, one in the torpedo, to specify the sequence of changing
frequencies. "It's the damnedest Rube Goldberg you ever saw," said David Hughes, a retired
colonel and a communications expert who will be the scientific consultant to Ms. Somerfeld. "But
the seminal idea was there."

Antheil and Lamarr patented their scheme, which they called "frequency hopping," and donated it
to the government. The Navy, doubting that the paper-roll devices could be built, declined to try to
pursue it but nonetheless classified the idea.

An article in The New York Times on Oct. 1, 1941, briefly noted Lamarr's invention, saying, "So
vital is her discovery to national defense that government officials will not allow publication of its
details."

In the late 50's, the frequency-hopping idea began to be used in military computer chips. Lamarr
received no recognition, because the patent remained classified until 1985. Since then, the idea
has been applied to cellphones, cordless phones and Wi-Fi Internet protocols that allow many
people to share the same range of radio frequencies. (If the frequencies continuously change, the
chances of one signal's interfering with another drop.)

Lamarr, who lived a reclusive life in her later years, won the Pioneer Award of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation in 1997. The award recognizes major achievements in computer
communications. She died in 2000.

With the vagaries of filmmaking, "Face Value" is still far from production, but it has a chance, Mr.
Weber said.

"The film has buzz," he said. "It's now in the pile of things they're going to look at."