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That's fascinating.

The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy. That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring. Nobody ever made a biopic about Charles Wilson, head of defense production at General Motors during WWII, and later US Secretary of Defense. Hyman Rickover, who headed the 1950s effort to build nuclear submarines and warships, only has a low budget 2021 documentary. Malcom McLean, who converted the world to containerized shipping and made low-cost imports possible, never got a movie.

Those three people each changed the world more than any celebrity. They're well known in business history. MBAs study them. There are biographies. But no movie.

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> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.

Still issue (seriously).

He might be an expert at building organizations in real life, but there is no rule that a movie about him has to focus on that part. Movies are not documentaries.

Examples: Oppenheimer, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game, Jobs, Social Media, and literally every movie that sells tbh.

I really don't think your argument is very convincing. Some of your examples are downright ridiculous? "Jobs" Making a movie about one of the creation of some of one of the most famous companies on Earth is obviously interesting. That's not comparable at all.

> Making a movie about one of the creation of some of one of the most famous companies on Earth is obviously interesting.

That's not what "Jobs" is about. It's the setting of a character-driven dramatization of Steve Job's life and his personality. You do not grow a company like Apple merely by dominating rooms with your personality, dropping oneliners and speaking in absolutes. There's a lot of actual work involved, the details of which would make for a movie rather boring to most audiences.

"Jobs" is a movie about Apple as much as "Inglourious Basterds" is a movie about the US military in WW2.

If you actually watched Jobs you would know it has very little to do with how Apple was actually created in real life.

Of course a movie about Steve Jobs is inherently more marketable than one about Qian Xuesen. But one isn't inherently more boring than the other.

I'd love to see a movie about the "managers" Mervin Kelly and/or William Shockley. Less military oriented perhaps, but seems that period of Bell Labs just was something else for some reason, in terms of impact on the world.

Shockley? The guy whose employees hated him so much they went and founded a rival company which then gave rise to Silicon Valley?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

The more interesting the movie could be!

Never underestimate the lifelong inspiration of a bad boss.

Shockley might have been a better researcher/engineer than manager, still I'm sure a movie about his early days, including the alienation of some of the people he recruited later, would be an interesting watch :)

There are biopic films about people who founded or transformed businesses like Steve Jobs, Roy Kroc, Mark Zuckerberg, the founders of Blackberry, etc. Might not be everyone's cup of tea but I wouldn't describe that genre as boring. Probably the bigger issue is getting people to see a biopic about someone who isn't already a household name.

And if Qian is truly comparable to Oppenheimer, well...

Putting Steve Jobs next to Charles Wilson is an insult to Wilson.

But they did make a biopic about a Charles Wilson and a war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Wilson%27s_War_(film)

That one, about a member of Congress, has a sex scene in a hot tub. It had movie potential.

The Roy Krock movie worked because audiences understand McDonalds. Trying to explain the relationship between R&D policy and defense spending is much tougher. Although see Heinlein's "Destination Moon".

I don't deny that a lot of the examples given are either of people behind relatable everyday products and brands, or world-shaping historical events that every laymen has some inkling of. Or that in Congressman Wilson's case, a colorful and flamboyant personality beyond the potential 9/11 connection.

Certainly when it comes to WWII era technocratic bureaucrat-administrator types I'd be more interested in, say, a film about the National Recovery Administration's first Director Hugh S. Johnson, who was a bit of a crank and flame-out and perhaps had extremist views of modern day political salience. (I don't think he had anything to do with the alleged Business Plot, but a movie can easily evoke it and hey, Smedley Butler appearance as a character.)

But yeah, a movie about an administrator who was simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy does seem somewhat difficult to turn into a full-fledged biopic. Maybe a PBS mini-series?

> simply competent and important in an abstract systems-based way without personal drama or controversy

Seems easy enough to add in some personal drama and controversy and some science details about the system they're in charge of in order to make it a fully-fleged biopic. Writers have been embellishing stories since before there's been television.

True, given that he was a wartime administrator maybe they can just throw in a few battle scenes and military engagements to show the fruits of his labor. Start it framed as a WWII epic centered on a civilian, like The King's Speech, Darkest Hour, etc. Then it turns into Cold War intrigue. Maybe throw in some auto nostalgia for GM classic vehicles of the era.

> Business Plot[1] ... Smedley Butler

That's a movie it's time to make.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

A lack of a hot tub sex scene never stopped an enterprising Hollywood writer's room from adding a hot tub sex scene

They made a movie about Herman Kahn of the Rand Corporation, though. It was called “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”.

Well, that might have been a movie about Edward Teller, or possibly John von Neumann. Nobody is quite sure.

Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts? There are bombs scenes but majority of the movie is the supposed boring stuff

Fat Man and Little Boy was also about the process and story of the people in the program more than it was about the bomb.

A topic just needs a good writer to make the story interesting.

most of the movie is about his personal thoughts about making the bomb and the direction things go with brinkman ship. I disliked the movie because it spent so little time on on the building.

> Isn't the recent Oppenheimer about building organizations, politics, and courts?

The film tells two interwoven stories: one follows Oppenheimer's career, the other about how Oppenheimer's loyalty was questioned.

It is a character study and a moral reckoning, preoccupied with he guilt and dread of having created a weapon capable of ending humanity.

If people are wondering why the linked article doesn't contain the movie reference, the original article was https://danieltan.weblog.lol/2026/05/americas-greatest-strat... which specifically mentions that this is more than a "blunder" but a loss of empiricism and pragmatism during the McCarthy era, along with various caveats and historical detail around Soviet and Chinese attitudes around the methodology Qian brought.

> That's mostly because a movie about someone who's an expert at building organizations is boring.

Well, part of the Oppenheimer biopic is about J. Robert being thrust into that kind of role.

> Oppenheimer ... rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence at Los Alamos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Los_Alam...

they completely glossed over Graves in Oppenheimer, one of the many reasons I hated that movie. There's a great "scene" in "the making of the atomic bomb" that also appears in the movie that they botched. Something along the way of oppenheimer stressing over "how do we pick the right way to make the bomb" and graves saying "simple, we do all of them". There's so much interesting material there and they instead focused on bed sheets.

There are other movies about the Manhattan Project where Gen. Leslie Groves is the main character.[1] "Fat Man and Little Boy" is probably the most Groves-oriented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_the_Manha...

> The article points out that nobody made a movie about this guy.

What are you talking about? The article doesn't say no one made a movie about him.

There are at least three Chinese movies and a TV series about him.

Probably morden production. When I was a kid in the 90s he's a giant figure in the books taught often in school (his birthplace is very close to my city too which makes him a local national hero) and well known as model figure. But not anything in the media. Maybe even earlier times before me.

And one of them you can watch for free on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDXrDXuDp9E

The Americans didn't make a movie about him, because it's too humiliating.

> Hyman Rickover<snip>only has a low budget 2021 documentary

Rickover: The Birth of Nuclear Power (2014) www.imdb.com/title/tt3717180/

I tried to sit through this one, but it was such a chore to watch.

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