Director Robert Kenner Opens New Film “Command and Control”

Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker and Windsor Square resident Robert Kenner will open his latest film, “Command and Control,” this Friday, September 30th at the Nuart Theatre where he will do a Q & A session with Eric Schlosser, author of the book upon which the movie is based and co-author with Kenner of the screenplay, at 7:30 pm and again on Saturday at 7:30 pm. The film is also opening in Boston and Philadelphia.

“The thin line between safety and Armageddon is at the center of “Command and Control” documentary,” wrote LA Times Film critic Kenneth Turan. “Lots of documentaries these days will tell you to be afraid, to be very afraid, but few will scare you as coolly and as convincingly as “Command and Control.”

The documentary focuses on a Sept. 18, 1980, accident at a Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Ark., which came terrifyingly close to causing a nuclear explosion that would have devastated the entire East Coast. The chilling nightmare plays out at a Titan II missile complex in Arkansas in September, 1980. A worker accidentally drops a tool, puncturing the fuel tank of an intercontinental ballistic missile carrying the most powerful nuclear warhead in our nuclear arsenal.

“At this point “Command and Control” goes back and forth between the Air Force’s attempts to deal with this crisis and other past nuclear weapons accidents. The Air Force says there have been 32 of these, which is scary enough, but the film claims there have been more than one thousand,” wrote Turan.

Directed by Robert Kenner (“Food Inc.”) and based on the critically acclaimed book by Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”), “Command and Control” is a minute-by-minute account of this long-hidden story.

Putting a camera where there was no camera that night, Kenner brings this nonfiction thriller to life with stunning original footage shot in a decommissioned Titan II missile silo. Eyewitness accounts — from the man who dropped the socket, to the man who designed the warhead, to the Secretary of Defense— chronicle nine hours of terror that prevented an explosion 600 times more powerful than Hiroshima.

The Nuart Theatre
11272 Santa Monica Blvd.
LA, CA 90025
Tickets