I finally carved out the time to watch "Oppenheimer," being Ernest Lawrence's academic great-grandson (but that's another story).
Stickler for the New Mexico landscape, I quickly realized that the New Mexico scenes were not filmed at either Los Alamos or the Trinity Site. Dead giveaway is that the iconic mesa-topped peak of Pedernal, not visible from Los Alamos, frames the background of many scenes such as this one.
But that got me thinking. Pedernal was the magnet-mountain of Georgia O'Keeffe, who lived in Abiquiu (about 50 miles away from Los Alamos) through the 1940s (her most iconic painting of Pedernal was made in 1941-42, according to the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum). And O'Keefe spent a huge amount of time toodling around New Mexico in her Model A Ford. It makes me wonder, in her New Mexico wanderings did she ever blunder in to "Project Y" (the secret lab ran by Oppenheimer, now known as Los Alamos National Lab) or its associated restricted areas? Did she have a clue about what was going on there? Did she ever cross paths with Oppenheimer? It would make for a fascinating short story, at least!
