The movie Michael Douglas compared to a “religious awakening”
Few actors in the late 20th-century landscape of Hollywood could compare to the majesty of Michael Douglas, an actor known for his titanic dramatic power. Collaborating with such filmmakers as Oliver Stone, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher, among many others, Douglas has earned both critical and commercial acclaim throughout his career, earning two Academy Awards in the process.
Rising to prominence in the 1970s, it wouldn’t be until the following decade that Douglas would truly find success, starring in the beloved 1984 adventure flick Romancing the Stone, as well as the raunchy erotic thriller Fatal Attraction three years later. In the very same year, Douglas would take home his second Academy Award, and his first for an acting performance, thriving in Stone’s business drama Wall Street.
Indeed, his first award came way back in 1975 with the release of the ‘Best Picture’ winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an iconic film for which he was one of the producers. Whilst he wouldn’t truly reach acclaim for his acting performances till the 1980s, he was making a name for himself behind the scenes in the 1970s, producing several movies, including 1979’s The China Syndrome.
Helmed by James Bridges, the film tells the story of a reporter who uncovers several major safety hazards at a nuclear power plant, with Douglas co-starring alongside the excellent Jane Fonda, as well as Jack Lemmon and Scott Brady. Exploring the potential devastation of nuclear disaster, one line in the movie refers to the fact that an explosion could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable”.
Any movie buff who saw the movie back in 1979 would have brushed off the line but would have surely remembered it once again following the events of March 28th 1979, when the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant went into meltdown. Remarkably, the power plant was based in Pennsylvania, with the disaster becoming the worst accident in U.S. nuclear power plant history.
Whilst many brushed it off as a strange coincidence, others were more profoundly affected by the strange occurrence, especially as Fonda was desperately against the idea of nuclear power.
Watching the news unfolding on TV, with much of the images sharing eerie similarities with scenes in the movie, Michael Douglas was rattled, almost instantly changing his stance on nuclear power there and then. “It was a religious awakening,” the actor recalled in an interview with the New York Times, adding, “I felt it was God’s hand”.
Take a look at the trailer for The China Syndrome below and witness one of cinema’s strangest ever coincidences.
