The Producer's Story:
Rediscovering a Forgotten Genius
by Stephen Lyons
In 1998, buoyed by the success of the 1996 broadcast of
"Einstein Revealed," a two-hour biography that explored
Einstein's personal life as well as his science, NOVA set out
to launch a bigger project using similar production
techniques. We called it Lives in Science: four films
that would combine documentary and drama, each focusing on the
life and work of a single scientist, played by an actor
speaking words drawn from the scientist's own writings.
Looking for an African-American scientist whose story would
allow us to explore the issue of race in science, we
considered agronomist George Washington Carver, biologist E.
E. Just, and blood bank pioneer Charles Drew, among others.
But Percy Julian's story stood out. While he'd encountered the
same racial obstacles all black scientists of his generation
faced, Julian had overcome them more successfully than any
other African-American in the first half of the 20th century.
There was just one problem: no book about Percy Julian
existed. When producers set out to make film biographies, they
almost always piggyback on years of research that historians
or biographers have already done. But no science historian had
ever studied Julian's career; no biographer had ever told his
story. The literature on Julian consisted of a brief
biographical memoir by a longtime friend, chemist Bernhard
Witkop of the National Institutes of Health; a 1946
Reader's Digest profile; a 1993 magazine article about
the Postal Service's decision to name a stamp in Julian's
honor, and scattered press clippings and Web sites of
uncertain reliability.
Getting under way
This was hardly enough to base a two-hour program on, and it
meant that before we could even think about making a film,
we'd have to do the kind of original research that normally
goes into writing a book. It was a daunting prospect. Neither
director Llew Smith nor I had a background in chemistry. We
didn't know how long the research would take, how much it
would cost, or where the money could come from. The sensible
thing would have been to wait for a Julian book to come out.
But his story was so compelling that NOVA swallowed hard and
plunged in.
Our faith was soon rewarded. In March 1999, the American
Chemical Society held a Julian centennial symposium at its
national meeting. The symposium had been organized by a
retired black chemist named Jim Shoffner, whose own career in
chemistry had been inspired by Julian's example, and who had
long been working to call attention to the Julian story. As
the symposium was wrapping up, Shoffner casually mentioned
that NOVA was hoping to produce a Julian biography and that a
NOVA representative was in the audience. I stood up to
identify myself. Minutes later, a man named Bob Lichter
approached and introduced himself. "I'm the executive director
of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation," he said, "and
we'd like to help."
It was the first sign that others would see the value of
telling Percy Julian's story. By the summer of 2000, a grant
from the Dreyfus Foundation—one of the many generous
funders
that would ultimately support the project—enabled us to
get under way.
Witnesses
Two members of the Julian team, Meredith Woods and Patricia
Garcia-Rios, focused on building the archival record: combing
newspaper and photo archives, libraries, and databases for
popular articles, patent applications, scientific papers,
photographs, and archival film that might be useful for the
program. Meanwhile, Llew Smith and I began a series of oral
history interviews. Though Julian had died 25 years earlier,
many people who had known him personally were still alive.
From all these interviews emerged a portrait of a new Julian,
admirable but also flawed.
In Greencastle, Indiana, seat of Julian's alma mater, DePauw
University, we met Jack and Marion Cook, who had worked for
years to call attention to the Julian story. The Cooks helped
us put together a list of 20 known "Julian associates," and
each time we interviewed one of them we asked, "Who else
should we talk to?" As the list grew to 30 people, then 40,
then 50, two historians from our partners at the Chemical
Heritage Foundation joined in the effort. With tape recorders
in hand, we fanned out across the country, learning everything
we could from Julian's family members, friends, former
students, and coworkers.
-
Outside Orlando, Florida, we met 89-year-old Ray Dawson,
who described in vivid detail the work he'd done as a
DePauw undergraduate 65 years earlier to assist Julian in
his famous battle with Oxford's Robert Robinson over the
synthesis of physostigmine. To beat the heat of the
Greencastle summer, they had often worked late into the
night, then driven out to a little shanty at the railroad
switching yards north of town for coffee and conversation.
It was during one of these late-night talks that Julian
told Dawson about his fiancée, Anna Johnson, who
was sending him letters from back East demanding to know:
Are you going to marry me or not?
-
In Ohio, we discovered former Glidden chemists Helen
Printy and Earl Dailey. They'd had a falling out with
Julian and long ago left the chemical business to open a
bar in Cleveland. But when we found them through an
Internet search, all the memories came rushing back. I
arrived in town expecting to do a three-hour interview but
stayed for three days.
-
In Cincinnati, we found Jim Letton, who'd worked for
Julian for more than a decade before returning to school
and earning his doctorate in chemistry. He told
heartbreaking stories about graduating from college in
1955 and spending two years in a futile search for a job
in chemistry—until he learned of a Chicago firm
called Julian Laboratories where black chemists were
welcome.
-
In Madison, Wisconsin, Julian's son, Percy Jr., described
in chilling detail the repeated racial attacks his family
had faced after moving into the predominantly white
Chicago suburb of Oak Park, and his parents' steely
determination to withstand the pressure to move out.
-
North of Chicago, we visited Wayne Cole, who'd studied
under Julian at DePauw and then served as his right-hand
man at the Glidden Company for more than a decade. At 86,
Cole was gaunt, hunch-backed, and unsteady on his feet,
but when he opened his mouth, out came sentences of
astonishing clarity and precision. Asked about chemical
processes he and Julian had used to treat the soybean 60
years earlier, he described them as if they had happened
yesterday.
Preserving a legacy
Before long, it dawned on us that we weren't just producing a
film. We were preserving the legacy of one of the most
significant scientists in American history—capturing the
memories of his closest associates while there was still time.
In the end, we would interview more than 60 people in 13
states. (We plan to donate the transcripts of our
interviews—more than 2,000 pages of them—to a
research archive, a priceless resource for future scholars
hoping to study Julian's life and career.)
To a great extent, his story is told by the people who knew
him best.
From all these interviews emerged a portrait of a new Julian,
admirable but also flawed—more complex, more human, and
more real than the heroic figure we'd read about in
Reader's Digest. Through these interviews we also
discovered whole new aspects of Julian's story—new
details about his Vienna years, his performance as the star
witness in congressional hearings, and his growing commitment
to civil rights, among many others. These new chapters made
his story even more dramatic than the one that had lured us
into the project.
But even as our excitement about the Julian story grew, so did
our fear—fear that we would lose critical eyewitnesses
before we could begin production. At this point, Jim Shoffner
came to our aid for the second time. Newly elected to the
American Chemical Society's Board of Directors, Shoffner
persuaded ACS to award the Julian project a special grant. The
funds allowed us to return to the 15 best storytellers we had
found in our initial research and record broadcast-quality
video interviews. Just in time, as it turned out: five of
those 15 died in the next three years. But they live on in the
film, giving the Julian profile an immediacy that is rare in a
television biography. To a great extent, his story is told by
the people who knew him best.
These people didn't just share their stories. Many also gave
us Julian-related artifacts they'd been holding onto for more
than a quarter century, as if waiting for us to come along.
These included letters, postcards, photographs, even an
unfinished autobiography Julian had started 40 years before.
Julian's longtime secretary, Joan Bowman, gave us a precious
recording of a speech Julian had given at Indiana University
in 1965 (see
Julian Speaks).
And from Peter Walton, a longtime Julian employee and family
friend, came the script of one very special speech entitled
"From Beans and Wild Yams to the Wonder Drugs." In the speech,
delivered to an Oak Park church group in 1959, Julian
described his entire scientific career in colorful layman's
language. Fascinating, moving and funny, the speech would
eventually become the backbone of the film, with Tony
Award-winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson delivering excerpts from
the speech as Julian's story unfolds.
A collaborative effort
In the end, Percy Julian's television biography got made
because NOVA had the faith and courage to forge ahead in the
face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and because we got
an extraordinary amount of help along the way. The film is
truly a collaborative effort, made possible by the support of
organizations that also wished to see Julian's remarkable
story brought to a wide audience, and by scores of individuals
who contributed to it in ways large and small. We thank them
all. "Forgotten Genius" is their film, too.
