RESEARCH
Ned O'Gorman & Kevin Hamilton

SITE DESIGN
Kevin Hamilton

USER EXPERIENCE & SITE IMPLEMENTATION
Janki Thakkar

DATABASE CONSTRUCTION
Jessica Landau
Laura Shea

Lookout Mountain Laboratory, also known as Lookout Mountain Air Force Station, served as the headquarters of the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron of the United States Air Force from 1947-1969. Established originally to provide secure and reliable documentation of nuclear tests in the Pacific after World War II, the secret facility grew quickly during its short life to become the go-to chronicler for the Atomic Energy Commission, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Air Force at large. Relying on more than 200 civilian and military personnel at a time at home and many more aboard in its global detachments, the unit drew from a wide array of experts in photography and motion picture production to create thousands of edited films and countless photographs. Scientists, military leaders, diplomats and Hollywood professionals converged on this secret location in a residential area of Hollywood known as Laurel Canyon to comprise, arguably, the Cold War's most prolific and influential film studio.

Building on the Army Air Force’s wartime work with Hollywood, Lookout Mountain drew heavily from a ready civilian labor pool in Hollywood, recruiting animators, sound engineers, musicians, prop builders, scriptwriters, among others. Of all Air Force photographic units, Lookout Mountain was closest in geographical proximity to Continental and Pacific atomic testing grounds, and eventually to significant strategic facilities such as Vandenberg Air Force Base and the Headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. These factors, and its organizational location within the Air Force’s globally networked Military Air Transport Service, combined to keep the facility operating at maximum capacity for twenty years, with most of those years devoted to serving the nuclear weapons program in addition to an array of other Air Force related activities.

During its two-decade history Lookout Mountain was responsible for producing at least 600 edited films about America’s nuclear weapons program, and many other films on other topics. Closed in 1969 amidst the ignominy of Vietnam, with little fanfare and no deliberate attempts to preserve its legacy, Lookout Mountain was nevertheless the film studio of choice for the Department of Defense and Atomic Energy Commission’s joint effort to document and report on America’s above-ground nuclear test programs. And for the Air Force, Lookout Mountain was among a small cadre of film groups used to document and report on its ballistic missile program, the early years of the space program, and Air Force activities in Vietnam. Working on a contract basis, the unit produced everything from high-speed scientific film documentation, to training films for missile operators, to journalistic coverage of minor Air Force events, to fully scored and acted feature-length films. Subject matter included not only nuclear weapons testing and missile tests, but experimental aircraft, flight safety, diplomatic missions, propaganda for Civil Defense, or even the global travels of comedian Bob Hope.

Technical innovations at Lookout Mountain included new film storage and archiving techniques, high-speed camera and film technologies for capturing detonations, three-dimensional photography, and experimental camera-mounts for filming from a variety of airborne platforms. Custom-mounted cameras peered out of bombers into atomic clouds, tracked missiles and later manned rockets into space, and recorded sorties from the bellies of planes over Vietnam. Lookout Mountain documented the construction of missile silos, the new Air Force Academy, and even the NORAD underground bunkers. Where other military photographic units made 16mm their mainstay for routine training and educational purposes, Lookout Mountain made heavy use of 35mm and even 70mm stock. They even helped test Cinemascope and Cinerama technologies. Through the Air Force’s film distribution network, the library of films stored at Lookout Mountain circulated through all levels of secrecy, from elementary school science classes to the Pentagon.

Lookout Mountain’s work was largely secret. The vast majority of its productions were minimally classified as Restricted. Nevertheless, clips from its films and short takes were widely circulated in Cold War culture: newsreels and later television news featured footage of military and NASA operations shot by Lookout Mountain; still photos from the studio worked their way into not only government publications, but magazines and newspapers; educational films produced by Lookout Mountain were distributed throughout the universities and schools of America; Edward Steichen’s famous “Family of Man” exhibit featured, as its only color photograph, an image of a mushroom cloud shot by a Lookout Mountain camera; and major film producers in Hollywood and beyond depended on Lookout Mountain for stock footage of Air Force jets and bombers. We see Lookout Mountain clips edited not only into pro-Air Force films like Strategic Air Command and A Gathering of Eagles, but such iconic Cold War films as Hiroshima Mon Amour and Dr. Strangelove. For its work, Lookout Mountain Laboratory was nominated for an Oscar from the Academy for Motion Arts and Sciences, while also earning patents, recognition and publication in technical journals for sound recording and scientific photography.

In addition to shooting motion pictures, Lookout Mountain’s work included creating, compiling, and storing data. The group produced and stored thousands upon thousands of feet of raw footage captured outside of planned scripts or features. Contracted by various government agencies as the only potential “witnesses” to nuclear experiments who possessed both the skill and the security clearance necessary for the task, Lookout Mountain constantly struggled to balance the demand for labor-intensive, highly-produced documentaries with the equal and sometimes unpredictable demand for ready-at-hand film crews at multiple points around the globe. The group also provided extensive still photographic services, as well as the design and animation of charts, graphs, and other visual illustrations.

As the chief agency responsible for visual representations of nuclear detonations—a critical component of the science, strategy, and politics of nuclear weapons development—Lookout Mountain was a major hub in a network of institutions organized around the development and production of nuclear weapons during the height of the Cold War. Beginning with the first Pacific tests in the Marshall Islands and the Nevada desert tests, Lookout Mountain was both witness to and part of a massive reshaping of the built environment, wherein a nation relocated whole peoples, leveled whole landscapes, and instrumented vast acres of indigenous territory as a single machine for detonation and recording. In their many documentary and educational films, Lookout Mountain scripted cinematic narratives about not only nuclear weapons development, but about Cold War strategy, the activities of Air Force and its partners, and various scientific and technical concepts integral to defense science. As such, the corpus of Lookout Mountain films offer together a chronicle of the transformations of the U.S. national security state from a World War II-style collection of citizen-soldiers to a complex network of men and machines.

The facility was slated for closure as part of a rash of reductions ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the unit itself would dissolve with the closure of the facility. The base was sold to private owners in 1969 and the work of the 1352nd relegated elsewhere for a short time, before the unit was discontinued and its voluminous archives dumped in an Air Force warehouse. Some of these archives were eventually transferred to Maxwell Air Force base; other items were sent to the National Archives. Finally a large cache of items—especially film reels—were eventually recovered by an official with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency Information Analysis Center and brought to one of its facilities at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, where they now sit, alas, almost all under “classified” status.