Behind the Scenes of Sloan’s $180 Million Effort to Connect Science and the Humanities

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When the documentary Bombshell: the Hedy Lamarr Story, airs on PBS stations Friday, viewers will learn that Lamarr was more than just a Hollywood icon celebrated for her beauty.

Few people know the Austrian-American actress, whose film career spanned the 1930s through the early 1950s, was also a self-taught inventor. Among other inventions, she helped develop something called “frequency hopping,” a secret communication system meant for use by Allied submarines during World War II that eventually lead to the technology behind Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS.

The Lamarr documentary marks the latest in a series of projects the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has backed in the past two decades to bring the human stories behind science and technology to a broader audience. The goal is to advance the public’s understanding of the sciences by bridging the gap between science and the humanities.

To put a human face on science and technology and tell the stories of those involved, the foundation awards grants across six categories: television, film, theater, books, radio, and new media. The program has long-standing partnerships with major film festivals, drama and film schools, and prominent theaters throughout the country.

It gives out about $10 million a year across the six platforms. Every screenplay, book, film, or other proposal the grant maker supports is approved by Doron Weber, who helped launch the program in 1996 and has led it since then. To date, the program has given out roughly $180 million.

Long Road

Weber, a much beloved figure among grantees, is a writer and Rhodes Scholar who came to Sloan after directing communications at Rockefeller University, a scientific research institute. His initial effort at bringing Lamarr’s story to light started back in 2000 when he gave a small grant (about $10,000) to develop the off-Broadway play Frequency Hopping, by Elyse Singer. That was followed by grants for a screenplay about Lamarr; the book Hedy’s Folly; an upcoming miniseries currently being developed by actress Diane Kruger that Google is helping to produce; and the Bombshell documentary.

Weber says the foundation spent a total of about $1.5 million on all of the Lamarr-related vehicles so far, with the largest grant, $860,000, going toward the documentary, which is part of PBS’s American Masters series.

“The big money was spent on this documentary because television is always the most expensive of all the mediums,” says Weber. “On the other hand, with American Masters on board, we knew they were going to broadcast it, so we knew we had a guaranteed audience for that show.”

Building Blocks

The smaller grants were no less important, and Bombshell may not have happened without them. The grant maker uses the multimedia strategy to build interest in sometimes obscure subjects.

The seed for the documentary was planted in 2012 when Katherine Drew, a television producer who now serves as the associate commissioner of the New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, was director of media partnerships at the World Science Festival (a Sloan grantee). She organized a panel discussion at the festival that included Hedy’s Folly author Richard Rhodes.

Drew recognized that Lamarr’s story would make a compelling documentary, so with the help of Rhodes, she reached out to Weber, who loved the idea and told her about the Kruger project Sloan was backing. Soon actress Susan Sarandon’s production company, Reframed Pictures, got involved, as did the director Alexandra Dean. After months of research and help from previous grantees Rhodes and Kruger, Drew and Dean applied for and won the grant to make Bombshell.

Drew says that despite Weber’s 18-year effort to get Lamarr’s story out to wider audiences, he didn’t hover over the making of the documentary. His only request was that the film include Rhodes, Kruger, and other Sloan grantees who had created Lamarr-related projects.

“Doron is a quiet hero of so many people in the arts and sciences because he champions your ideas and then leaves you alone to create them,” says Drew.

Hundreds of Submissions

In conversation, Weber comes across as too busy to pay much attention to such praise. He reads hundreds of film scripts, plays, and book and new media proposals a year.

Sloan’s effort to connect science and humanities is formally called the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics program. In some cases, committees led by the program’s partners — a theater group or film festival, for example — will filter stacks of proposals down to the best ones, which Weber will then read and accept or reject.

Weber gives the committees broad guidelines and makes sure they have experts to see that the science and technology in the script are legitimate and credible.

“Our thing is to come in and bring the scientists and engineers, but ultimately we tell them it’s not a science program; it’s an arts program. But you need a certain threshold of scientific accuracy and plausibility so we can enjoy your story and characters and grow with them,” says Weber.

Other project proposals come to Weber directly, and he’ll decide without the input of a committee whether to fund a project. Weber’s power of imprimatur goes back to a promise he made to Ralph Gomory, a mathematician who was president of Sloan when Weber joined the foundation.

“There was a concern about the unpredictability of artists, so I promised I would read everything myself, and that’s a promise I’ve kept to this day,” says Weber. “You have to protect the brand and make sure it stands for a certain kind of quality and high value so when people see our name, they know it represents something.”

Hidden Figures

The value of some projects, however, are apparent from the outset. Writer Margot Lee Shetterly received a $50,000 grant from Weber’s program in 2014, four years into work on her nonfiction book Hidden Figures, about three African-American female mathematicians who were largely unknown to the public but who were instrumental to NASA’s work during the Space Race of the 20th Century.

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Shetterly started research for the book in 2010 and quickly attracted the attention of Hollywood. By the time she landed the grant, a film had already been optioned and she was under pressure to finish the book.

“That was a unicorn because it happened so fast,” says Weber. “Usually it takes many years, but with that one everything fell into place and just took off.”

The grant gave Shetterly the freedom to focus full-time on finishing the extensive research for the book: interviewing the women, traveling to where they had grown up to interview those who had known them, talking to people at NASA, and searching out archival information. The film was a hit at the box office and attracted much critical acclaim.

“It was an extremely busy time, an intensive part of the research, and the grant allowed me to give the work the kind of focus it needed to bring it fully to fruition,” says Shetterly. The book and, especially, the film launched a worldwide movement of girls forming math clubs, says Valerie Conn, executive director of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a nonprofit created several years ago to increase philanthropic support for basic research in the natural sciences and mathematics.

“It’s not often something like that happens, especially in STEM, so it made an immediate impact on people and their interest in math,” says Conn.

Conn said people in fields like science and math have historically had a hard time telling compelling stories about their work, making Weber’s ability to think outside the usual parameters of the sciences especially valuable.

Some of the other efforts Weber’s program has backed include The Imitation Game, a 2014 film about Alan Turing, an English mathematician, cryptanalyst, World War II code breaker, and computer scientist who is considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

Sloan also supported David Auburn’s 2000 play Proof, about a deceased mathematical genius and his daughter. Proof went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in drama and a Tony Award and was adapted into a popular film of the same name. Weber also decided to support Radiolab, a nationally syndicated public radio show that approaches broad scientific and philosophical topics in an accessible and sometimes humorous way.

Measuring Success

Although the Public Understanding program is essentially Weber’s baby, like most foundation program directors, he still has to make the case to Sloan Foundation leaders for the money he spends on projects he approves. He must also show quantifiable results.

That can be tricky when it comes to the arts, so Weber takes a wide-ranging approach. A documentary like Bombshell is easy to measure since Weber knows that one broadcast of an American Masters program is going to capture around 1 million viewers. An off-Broadway play is harder to quantify because it attracts a smaller audience, so Weber multiplies the number seats a theater has by how many weeks a show is running to get potential audience numbers. For small theaters, that’s usually only about 2,000 people, tops, says Weber.

But if the play gets reviewed in a major newspaper like the New York Times, he can then add on the million or so people who are likely to read about the play and get exposed to its ideas. And if the play gets published by the Samuel French company (the main publisher of U.S. plays), then he knows 100,000 or so students across the country will be exposed to the work in their drama or other courses.

Weber cautions that there isn’t any one particular formula or approach to measuring success. Finding creative ways to argue not only for his program but more broadly for the value of the arts is yet another part of Weber’s arsenal.

“You can’t always immediately see the impact of a work of art, but it may open your mind to some of the things science and technology are concerned with,” says Weber. “I think art can do that in a way that’s more powerful and more integrated than any other medium or form.”

He says grant makers that support cultural efforts to promote the sciences and related fields should always be thinking about creative ways to measure their programs’ successes but with one caveat: important factors like raising consciousness and awareness are always going to be hard to measure, but that doesn’t mean foundations should discount the long-term importance of those efforts.

“I’m all for data in every way, but you can be too narrow about it,” says Weber. “You have to be patient. Sometimes it takes time for people to awaken to something.”

Influencing Other Grant Makers

When it started making grants to filmmakers and others, Sloan had little company. But now, says Vincent Stehle, executive director of Media Impact Funders, other foundations have watched Sloan’s accomplishments and are starting to follow its lead.

Among those efforts are the Simons Foundation’s Science Sandbox, which backs projects that tell science stories in a way that brings them to a wide audience and makes them relevant to everyday life; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Tangled Bank Studios, a film and media production arm that produces science documentaries.

Says Stehle: “After many years of Sloan doing this work, people are finally stepping up and recognizing the potential of influencing a wider audience through popular culture.”