Oppenheimer THE MAN | The Movie | The Manhattan Project

The Oppenheimer House, today owned by the Los Alamos Historical Society, was initially built for the sister of the Director of the Los Alamos Ranch School. J. Robert Oppenheimer, his wife Kitty, and their very young children Peter and Toni lived there during the Manhattan Project. In this video, Heather McClenahan outlines the history of the Oppenheimer House before and during the Manhattan Project.

J. Robert Oppenheimer lived in this house from 1943 to 1945. Jerry and Helene Suydam moved into the Oppenheimer House in 1958. The house eventually will become part of the Los Alamos History Museum. In this video, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalls his daily schedule at Los Alamos.

Thanks to a generous gift from Helene and Jerry Suydam, the Oppenheimer House, often called the "crown jewel" of the Manhattan Project, is in the process of historic preservation, renovation, and exhibit development.

The Oppenheimer House Fund will support the urgent infrastructure needs of the house, including electrical upgrades, code and accessibility improvements, repair and rehabilitation, hazardous materials abatement, and a fire protection system. After these updates are complete, funds will support the development of innovative exhibits and ongoing maintenance.

All donations to this fund will go directly to the Oppenheimer House.

Please join us in opening this historic home to the public.

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Virtual resources...

Oppenheimer and Manhattan Project Trivia

Challenge yourself and others with trivia about Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer, those he knew, and the Manhattan Project!

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National Park Service: 360 Photos

Explore 360 images of historic Manhattan Project sites in Hanford, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge.

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"Oppenheimer" Film Location

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SALA Event Center: Oppenheimer Events and Panel Discussions

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Oppenheimer Movie: Nominated for 8 Golden Globes

"Oppenheimer" has been nominated for eight Golden Globes. Learn more and watch special featurettes on the Oppenheimer Movie website and Universal Pictures YouTube page.

Universal Pictures: Featurettes

Regional Assets...

Ghost Ranch Movie Tours

For a limited time the standing set for the recently released motion picture Oppenheimer will be included in our tour of movie locations.

Hollywood has had a love affair with Ghost Ranch for over eight decades; inspiring movies as well as television series, reality shows, commercials, music videos and the fashion industry. Our tour travels to locations only seen by film crews, movie and TV stars, fashionistas, and musicians. We will look at film stills, talk about the various movies filmed here and, of course, admire the sweep of the Ghost Ranch landscape from these different vantage points.

Visit the sites of movies filmed here at Ghost Ranch including City Slickers, 3:10 to Yuma, Magnificent Seven, Comanche Moon, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Dark Winds, and Oppenheimer.

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Los Alamos in the Headlines...

Falling for Oppenheimer | December 19, 2023

New Mexico-filmed productions grab 10 Golden Globes nominations | December 11, 2023

SERIES: Background for the Movie "Oppenheimer" by Chris Judson

5 things to do when visiting Los Alamos | September 7, 2023

Los Alamos, New Mexico - Oppenheimer Filming Locations, House, Museum, Atomic Bomb, JFK + More! | September 2023

Not your typical tourist destination | August 10, 2023

The movie 'Oppenheimer' has more people wanting to visit Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos — the national laboratory, the town and the county — have received unprecedented tourist attention thanks to the movie "Oppenheimer." But the Laboratory is a unique place with special restrictions, many of which visitors have never heard of. Here’s a list of common questions and what to know before you go...

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The 15 Best Small Towns to Visit in 2023: Scientific Small Town - Los Alamos, New Mexico

From an ultramarathon capital in the Rockies to a laid-back village in the Florida Keys, these vibrant towns are calling your name

When director Christopher Nolan’s feature film Oppenheimer premieres on July 21, New Mexico’s Los Alamos will be playing a starring role. Tucked away at an elevation of 7,320 feet among the snowcapped peaks, canyons and mesas of northern New Mexico, the town is home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory—a renowned scientific institution employing some of the world’s top scientists and researchers, and one that also played a major part in the development of the atomic bomb. In fact, J. Robert Oppenheimer, also known as the “father of the atomic bomb” and the man at the center of Nolan’s biopic, served as the lab’s director during World War II.

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Oppenheimer: The Movie - Released July 21, 2023

Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “Oppenheimer”, release July 21, 2023, was filmed, in part, in Los Alamos in the spring of 2022, utilizing original Manhattan Project locations, including Historic Fuller Lodge, the Women’s Dormitory, The Oppenheimer House, Historic Dot Grant Trail, and The United Church.

Trailer 2 - May 8, 2023

MOVIE REVIEW [Spoiler Warning] - Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’: an artistic visual tapestry of the bomb’s science and power intricacies by Lovely Umayam | August 17, 2023

MOVIE REVIEW [Spoiler Warning] - A Manhattan Project historian comments on ‘Oppenheimer’ by Chris Griffith | July 28, 2023

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Christopher Nolan Recounts Experience with Los Alamos Extras

Entertainment Weekly Highlights "Oppenheimer" in May 9, 2023 Interview

[Cillian] MURPHY: Every day, you had these phenomenal actors, who are heroes of mine, coming in. Every day, you were having to raise your game to work with these legends. Everybody was so unbelievably well-prepared. Every single actor, no matter what size their role or the significance of their character in history, each one of them had this massive depth of knowledge that they could draw on.

[Christopher] NOLAN: I was thinking that it even applied to the extras. We were in the real Los Alamos and we had a lot of real scientists as extras. We needed the crowd of extras to give reactions, and improvise, and we were getting sort of impromptu, very educated speeches. It was really fun to listen to. You've been on sets where you've got a lot of extras around and they're more or less thinking about lunch. These guys were thinking about the geopolitical implications of nuclear arms and knew a lot about it. It actually was a great reminder every day of: We have to be really on our game, we have to be faithful to the history here, and really know what we're up to.

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Inside Christopher Nolan’s 57-day race to shoot ‘Oppenheimer’ by Jada Yuan | July 19, 2023

Capturing the mad scramble to build the first atomic bomb required rapid-fire filming, strict set rules and the construction of an entire 1940s western town

The drive to Los Alamos from the valley below feels treacherous, even now.

J. Robert Oppenheimer chose this intensely remote location in northern New Mexico for the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government’s secret program to build an atomic bomb during World War II, precisely because it is situated on a maze of four mesas separated by deep canyons. It’s nearly impossible to find, and impenetrable if someone did locate it. Where better to save Western civilization than a mountainous high desert plateau, 7,200 feet above sea level, that looks like it’s straight out of a John Ford western?

Just as in 1943, the main entrance to town is a narrow highway that twists and turns atop cliffs of volcanic rock. The only difference now is that it’s paved. And it was up that “tricky road,” as he calls it, that Christopher Nolan found himself driving in June 2021, on a road trip from Los Angeles with his then-13-year-old son Magnus. By then, the director, known for critically acclaimed blockbusters such as “Inception” and “Dunkirk,” had already spent months writing the script for his own secret project on the man known as the father of the atomic bomb — an adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “American Prometheus” — and had hit a creative block. So, he’d decided to make a pilgrimage to the town that Oppenheimer (and the U.S. military) built.

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Where was ‘Oppenheimer’ filmed? All ‘Oppenheimer’ filming locations by Tom Disalvo | May 8, 2023

Fresh off the release of the new trailer for 'Oppenheimer', we're sifting through all the filming locations used for Christopher Nolan's upcoming epic.

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Striving for Authenticity, Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt Filmed in the Oppenheimers’ Actual Los Alamos House by Jim Hemphill | July 26, 2023

Production designer Ruth De Jong tells IndieWire how she combined sets with practical locations to build a desert town.

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Photo essay of seldom-seen sights appears in Smithsonian magazine and on display in downtown Los Alamos | July 25, 2023

Former physicist photographs Manhattan Project history where it happened

Thanks to Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist-turned-freelance photographer Minesh Bacrania, science enthusiasts, history buffs and the just-plain curious can now view seldom-seen sights of the Manhattan Project in the pages of the July/August 2023 issue of Smithsonian Magazine and in a large-scale display in the windows of the former CB Fox Department Store (1735 Central Avenue, Los Alamos).

While some buildings that were in use during the Manhattan Project, like Fuller Lodge and J. Robert Oppenheimer’s house, are now the property of Los Alamos County and the Los Alamos History Museum and available to the public, the research sites are still off limits, surrounded by 40 square miles of present-day Lab property, accessible only by employees with a security clearance.

Now, during the 80th anniversary of the Manhattan Project and in response to increased awareness stemming from the recently released movie, “Oppenheimer,” these photos allow the public to see what they wouldn’t be able to otherwise.

“Manhattan Project employees didn’t have ivory towers and shiny facilities,” Bacrania says. “They had relatively dumpy buildings on a mesa in the desert. It’s incredible to think that such a simple setup precipitated these huge technological advances.”

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An Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Los Alamos Lab Where J. Robert Oppenheimer Created the Atomic Bomb

In never-before-seen photographs, explore the secret U.S. facility and home to the Manhattan Project scientists who developed the first nuclear weapon

Smithsonian Magazine | History | July/August 2023

In February 1943, the Los Alamos Ranch School, an outdoorsy institution for boys, abruptly closed its doors so the U.S. government could take over the campus. A local poet named Peggy Pond Church, daughter of the school’s founder, later described the “element of extreme haste and mystery” that surrounded the whole operation. As bulldozers arrived on the New Mexico campus, she had her first glimpse of J. Robert Oppenheimer. “Cowboy boots and all,” she wrote, “he hurried in the front door and out the back, peering quickly into the kitchen and bedrooms. I was impressed, even in that brief meeting, by his nervous energy and by the intensity of the blue eyes that seemed to take in everything at a glance, like a bird flying from branch to branch in a deep forest.”

Oppenheimer, then 38, had been tapped to lead a facility that government documents called Project Y. The physicists working there were part of the ultra-secret Manhattan Project, and they had one goal—developing the first nuclear weapon before the Nazis beat them to it.

During the last two years of World War II, between 1,500 and 8,200 scientists and staff members lived on the Ranch School campus and in a quickly constructed nearby town. One of the first to arrive, in March 1943, was Richard Feynman, another New Yorker, who had recently earned his PhD at Princeton University. “The beauty of the scenery, for a person from the East who didn’t travel much, was sensational,” Feynman said later. “There are the great cliffs that you’ve probably seen in pictures. You’d come up from below and be very surprised to see this high mesa.”

Read the full article to learn more and to view photographs by Minesh Bacrania of several Manhattan Project National Historical Park sites "behind-the-fence" at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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Oppie—“A very mysterious and delphic character.” Interview with Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus by Dan Drollette Jr. | July 17, 2023

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Books Like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer by Sara Kapheim | Published Feb 24, 2023

The story of the father of the atomic bomb is coming to the silver screen.

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COUNTDOWN TO ‘OPPENHEIMER’ - Los Alamos embracing 'Oppenheimer' film by Robert Nott | Jul 20, 2023 Updated Jul 21, 2023

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Team Oppie | Published Jun 25, 2023

Los Alamos prepares for the new Oppenheimer move, as we hear from Team Oppie Leaders David Izraelevitz & Lauren McDaniel.

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Arts boom by Ania Hull | for The New Mexican | Jul 21, 2023

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A timeline of Oppenheimer and his legacy By Dan Drollette Jr. | July 17, 2023

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Oppenheimer (Gamified) | Category | JEOPARDY!

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"Oppenheimer," the father of the atomic bomb

In his latest film, "Oppenheimer," director Christopher Nolan examines the efforts of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the race to build the atomic bomb that ended World War II. What happened after the war proved to be an entirely different power struggle, as Oppenheimer was accused of being a Russian agent. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin talks with Nolan, and with Kai Bird, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, "American Prometheus." He also visits Los Alamos and the Trinity site - Ground Zero for when the world changed.

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Women's History Month: The legacy of female scientists on the Manhattan Project

"It's such an interesting legacy, to see how it's developed and how it's ongoing," Mary Scales, acting site manager at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, said.

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The harrowing story of the Nagasaki bombing mission by Ellen Bradbury, Sandra Blakeslee | Originally Published August 4, 2015 - Republished spring 2023

Editor’s note: Due to popular demand we thought it appropriate to republish this Bulletin article, which deals with an often-overlooked aspect of the atomic bombings in Japan, as told to New York Times reporter Sandra Blakeslee by Ellen Bradbury of Los Alamos.

First, some background. Before he died in 2005, retired Navy man Frederick L. Ashworth revealed some little-known information about the dropping of the Nagasaki atomic bomb to his friend and neighbor, Ellen Bradbury, who subsequently wrote it down. Ashworth had been the operations officer in charge of the final testing and assembly of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb components, and he was in command of the device while aboard the plane that actually dropped the weapon on Nagasaki. Years later, New York Times science reporter Sandra Blakeslee worked closely with Bradbury to craft the article below from Ashworth’s recollections, and to locate corroborating accounts, interviews, and other support materials. Other observers may disagree with Ashworth’s details and views—especially because so much time has passed since August 9, 1945. But Ashworth’s detailed, in-depth account—recounted here in full for the first time—provides a different view of the Nagasaki mission than much of what was written previously.