University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum is used to seeing Hollywood take creative license with insects. After 25 years of screening films about giant bugs and killer swarms at an annual film festival she organizes, Berenbaum can only laugh when she sees yet more improbable science.
Consider "The Fly," she said, where a post-transformation Jeff Goldblum gains the power to walk across ceilings despite his human size.
"Flies can walk on the ceiling not because they're flies but because they're small," Berenbaum said. "It just kind of blows willing suspension of disbelief out of the water."
This week, Berenbaum found herself with some recourse as she mingled with directors, producers and screenwriters at a Los Angeles symposium designed to foster film and television productions inspired by science and based in fact.
At the symposium, organized by the National Academy of Sciences' new Science and Entertainment Exchange, Berenbaum said scientists fielded queries from screenwriters fishing for inspiration with questions like: "If you had to pick an emerging infectious disease that could wipe out humanity, which one would you pick?"
The purpose, she said, was to help filmmakers find science-based ideas more accurate and realistic than giant killer grasshoppers and mad scientists. "There will always be bad insect films," Berenbaum said. "But there's hope."
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