I met Feynman a couple times. I was young. Advantages of going to Christmas parties at the Mark's: eggnog with Richard Feynman. Disadvantages of going to Christmas parties at the Mark's: all these lionized old physicists are just creepy old men. I think I met Stephen Hawking once but that's only because I remember a really creepy dude in a robochair. 5-year-olds can't shoot the shit about the Schwartzchild Radius. So it's not like we were drinking buds, but the people I know who actually knew Feynman describe him as a total cut-up. He was a lot more Robin Williams than Ian McKellen. If I had to guess - and it's just a guess - Badham and Parkes were going for Oppenheimer.
It's been a while since I watched Wargames but Falkens character was almost certainly based somewhat on Oppenheimer. I think there are parallels between the Falkens belief that war was inevitable and Oppenheimers difficulty in dealing with his treatment after the bombs were dropped. Falken didnt "fit" with Feynman in terms of personality at all.
I rewatched the film yesterday. It still holds up today as a great film. So many of the movies I loved as a kid don't, so that was refreshing. Anyone reading this should watch Wargames. Was it chosen for the movie club?
There are two films I desperately wanted to write sequels to: Wargames and The Day The Earth Stood Still. They're both Cold War parables in which all of our struggles amount to nothing in the face of superior intelligence and the only thing that saves us from armageddon is the compassion of the superior force. Both films end as cautionary tales: WOPR/Joshua isn't removed from service (as far as we can tell; he opts not to start nuclear war because he sees it as futile. Klaatu doesn't wipe out the human race because we're left with a warning to shape the fuck up or he'll come straighten us the fuck out. In the story DTESS is based on ("Farewell to the Master"), the real power is Gort - Klaatu is just this omnipotent robot's servant. I wanted to write a DTESS in which Gort has been sitting there, immobile, on the Capitol steps since 1951, unnoticed and disregarded as the Global War On Terror engulfs us all... then suddenly he's gone and key people start disappearing. I wanted to make a terrorism parable tie-in to the Cold War parable Robert Wise gave us. Instead we got Keanu Reeves and global warming. I wanted to write a Wargames in which... well, not this. Oh well.
The Wargames video game for PC was pretty damn fun on top of it being a good movie.