Sir

Your News Feature “Hollywood or bust” (Nature 430, 720–722; 200410.1038/430720a) looks at the latest attempts to wed science and Hollywood. As a newspaper science writer, I would urge that any such marriage be quickly annulled.

In 1996 I wrote a non-fiction popular book on the science of tornado and severe storm research. Being a film buff, I was delighted when the book was acquired as the official tie-in book for the Warner Brothers film Twister.

Later, to my embarrassment, I saw the film and was horrified by its manglings of meteorological science and terminology. And yet these same film-makers had bragged about “consulting” respected meteorologists.

Even a scientist as influential as Carl Sagan struggled, not entirely successfully, to preserve verisimilitude in the film version of his novel Contact. The movie Contact omits the novel's most haunting premise, which concerns the value of π. Why? Because (as one of the film's top producers later assured me) π — a concept taught in every American high school — is too difficult for audiences to grasp. What remark better expresses Hollywood's contempt for its audience?

And it's only getting worse. As film budgets soar, a studio's future might depend on the success of a single blockbuster. Thus scriptwriters are increasingly pressured to erase any dialogue that might bore or confuse lowbrow viewers. In a business as cruelly capitalistic as film-making, what alternative do they have?

As the late John Gregory Dunne observed, on the basis of his many Hollywood experiences, no aesthetic or intellectual argument can withstand the movie mogul's favourite counterblast: “It's our money.”

If Hollywood calls your laboratory, hang up.