The Collaboration

Left to right, top to bottom: Peter & Bill, 20+ years here and there: Peter & Bill passing the hat in Santa Monica; Peter & Bill with Paul Conrad’s Chain Reaction monument in front of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium where Leo launched his Road to War Tour that would become the world’s first nuclear disarmament PAC; below that, Peter and Ed Asner–our illustrious Hollywood Dutch Uncle; Peter & Bill at the first Hollywood performance of Uranium + Peaches where Ed Asner, Joe Estevez and Arnie Weiss, directed by Ayana Cahrr, received a standing ovation for conjuring up Leo, Urey and Jimmy; Peter & Bill near the infamous round table at The Algonquin; Peter & Bill on the set at The Salk Institute; and Bill and Ed banging heads at Art’s Deli.

About the Collaboration

In the early 1960’s, in a satirical fable, Leo Szilard wrote, “Americans are free to say what they think, because they do not think what they are not free to say.” And a decade later, 12-year-old Peter Cook was reprimanded for writing what he wasn’t supposed to think in a play entitled “Hope Takes a Holiday.” This short drama angered his teacher and confused his classmates by mocking the cartoon character Bert the Turtle for urging Americans to “duck and cover” under their desks in case of nuclear attack.

In his own way, William Lanouette was skewering U.S. and Soviet “civil defense” campaigns as a journalist in the 1970’s. His fascination with the Atomic Age and its sometimes absurdist politics led him to write a biography of Szilard, who more than anyone lived both sides of the arms race, working to prevent, then to hasten, and finally to outlaw nuclear weapons.

By the late 1990’s, Cook made Lanouette’s acquaintance when he read and enjoyed the Szilard biography and called the author to say so. Tentatively, Cook asked Lanouette to look at a film script about the people who created the Atomic Age. It needed lots of work, but prompted the two to focus on a fateful meeting, in May 1945, when Szilard and Jimmy Byrnes personified the struggle with the nuclear genie. A writing partnership evolved across three time zones and a generation–mostly by telephony, sometimes by telepathy. After three years’ collaboration, they finally met face-to-face at the first staged reading of Uranium + Peaches in New York City in November 2002.