'Radium Girls' tells the 'invisible history' of the fight for workplace justice
It’s taken them nearly a century, but "Radium Girls” will have their story told on the big screen.
A group of young women who were pioneers in the fight for workplace safety and public health are at the center of the gripping new drama "Radium Girls," now playing in select theaters and as a virtual cinema offering.
Co-director and co-writer Ginny Mohler first discovered the story of women in the mid-1920s working factory jobs painting glow-in-the-dark watch dials with radioactive paint and falling mysteriously ill in 2012, when she was an archival researcher for a Manhattan Project documentary.
“I just couldn’t believe I had never heard that story before," says Mohler. "I couldn’t believe how cinematic this story was in this really haunting way, where you have the dark and the light, the glow of the radium paint and the decay and the teenage dreams.”
Mohler's next question was simple: “How is this not a movie?”
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Co-directed by by Mohler and Lydia Dean Pilcher, from a screenplay by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, "Radium Girls" is setting the record straight.
“I am very passionate about untold history," Mohler says. "The (story of) 'Radium Girls' is a perfect example, but it’s not just untold history – it’s invisible history. You can drive down the street where the U.S. Radium factory was, it’s been demolished, but you can drive past and go past the fenced (area), it almost looks like a meadow now. You can go past and not know what happened there.”
The U.S. Radium Corp.'s radium processing plant in Orange extracted radium from carnotite ore, processing about a half-ton of ore every day from 1917 to 1926, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency's background on the Superfund site. That radium was sold for medical purposes and as an additive to luminescent paint for watch and dial faces.
As detailed in "Radium Girls," women working with radioactive paint in factories were instructed to lick their brushes, unaware of the toxic materials they were ingesting. By 1927, more than 50 women had died from radium paint poisoning, according to a 2014 NPR report.
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The D.W. Gregory Play "Radium Girls" debuted 20 years ago, and by 2018 had reportedly been performed more than 800 times. In 2017, author Kate Moore released the book "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women."
When Abby Quinn, who co-stars as one of the titular "Radium Girls," initially read the film's screenplay, it was her first time finding out about this troubling chapter of history.
“I had never heard of this story, which kind of horrified me and made me really upset," says Quinn.
Quinn, who appeared in a 2017 Jodie Foster-directed episode of "Black Mirror" and Greta Gerwig's 2019 adaptation of "Little Women," co-stars alongside Joey King in "Radium Girls" as Jo and Bessie, sisters exposed to radium by their factory jobs.
"I just wanted this story to be heard to shed some light on these women and the horrific events they went through,” Quinn says.
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The film originally was supposed to arrive in theaters in April, only to be delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The themes of the movie are hauntingly parallel to the world that we’re living in right now," says Pilcher. "The idea that there are governments looking in a different direction, corporations burying research that has public health implications, the idea that people are getting sick and dying, asking the question, ‘Is it safe to go back to work?’ "
“It does really speak to what is happening," Quinn says. "In the same way there are people denying science and saying, ‘You’re going to be OK, don’t wear a mask, only some people die.’ It’s like this false hope and not really what’s happening, which is what was going on with the girls.
"People were brushing their teeth with radium toothpaste and drinking water with radium in it; they were being told it was this magical substance and it had no harmful effect. Meanwhile, people behind closed doors, the people in charge, knew what was going on.”
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"Radium Girls" is a personal story with global resonance, sitting at the crossroads of history.
“Unfortunately, it’s been buried with a sadly too-large portion of history of women in our country, and that’s true for all voices who have been conventionally underrepresented," says Pilcher. "There are selections and choices that get made about what goes into the history books and that’s what we learn in school, and those choices are seen through a particular lens that tend to be from a more sort of homogenous, powerful demographic of our culture.
"But I think we’re in a real moment right now where we are stepping back and we’re seeing our institutions a little bit differently, we’re seeing that there actually is a cultural narrative that we’ve been given that in some ways now we have the sort of insight to take back and to really start to tell stories that we think are important that may not have seemed important to the people making those decisions.”
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