From ‘A-Team’ to A-Bomb : Movies: Dwight Schultz portrays : J. Robert Oppenheimer as a brilliant man torn over his role in building the bomb. Critics say this is “an ignorant distortion.”

Was J. Robert Oppenheimer, builder of the world’s first atomic bomb, the tortured, morally divided soul depicted in Roland Joffe’s new film “Fat Man and Little Boy”? Or was he a man intently focused on succeeding, having made peace with his role at the helm of the top-secret $2-billion Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, N.M.?

In his film debut, actor Dwight Schultz portrays Oppenheimer as a brilliant but weak man whose ambition overshadowed his inner doubts about the morality of building an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, says director Joffe, “is Hamlet as Shakespeare would have written him if he was alive now.” This Oppenheimer is readily manipulated by the gruff military man in charge of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, played by Paul Newman.

But Schultz’s portrayal has drawn criticism from other quarters. Richard Rhodes, author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” which won the 1987 National Book Award, calls this depiction “an ignorant distortion of the man. . . . The Oppenheimer of wartime was not a divided human being. He was not Hamlet-like. He was focused and centered on making this thing happen.”

Critics too are divided on Schultz’s performance. When the film opened last month, The Times’ Sheila Benson, for example, wrote that Schultz managed to create “a believably complicated figure.” But Newsweek’s David Ansen wrote that “neither Schultz nor the script gets inside the man’s edgy, haunted soul.”

Schultz became a contender for the part of Oppenheimer when Joffe--determined to cast an unknown--asked his casting director to round up all the actors on American stages who were currently portraying Valmont in “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” a character notorious for manipulating and objectifying human beings. He found Schultz in a production at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theater Festival. Schultz may be not be a familiar face in Hollywood circles, but millions of TV viewers know him as the zany “Howling Mad” Murdock on NBC’s former series “The A-Team.” His stint on the “The A-Team”--from 1983 to 1987, when the series was canceled--followed a long career on stage, but Schultz had never appeared in a feature film.

Executives at Paramount were reticent about hiring someone without name recognition with movie audiences. But Joffe persisted. “He has a volatile, interesting mind,” Joffe says of Schultz.

Schultz, ironically, also had an affinity for physics. In fact, he says, it was Heinz Pagels’ “The Cosmic Code”--an attempt to explain quantum physics to the layman--that added important new perspective to his life.

The transformation came in 1982, at age 35, when Schultz was struggling, sleeping on couches and barely scraping out a living as an actor. He was close to giving up on show business. Pagels’ book taught Schultz to look at the world in more relative terms--and not to take himself, or his profession, so seriously.

“For example,” Schultz says one afternoon as he picks up a copy of Pagels’ book from a coffee table, “in the micro world of particles, when scientists view photons, if they want to view photons as a wave, it’s a wave. If they want to look at it as a particle, they behave as particles. . . . There was a lot of philosophical discussion about this: Is it what I want it to be at the moment?”

Schultz applied these philosophical meanderings to his own life. “When someone props you up and another tears you down, it’s not a question of wrong or right,” he says. “And for you to try to beat yourself on the breast and say you’re a terrible person--or say that you’re a wonderful person because everyone loves you--is probably going a little too far.”

His acting career up until then had been a struggle. He graduated from Towson State University in Maryland and formed a touring company, the Baltimore Theater Ensemble, with a couple of friends. Later he appeared in regional productions before landing roles in Off-Broadway productions.

He made his Broadway debut in “The Water Engine,” which began at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre before being transferred to the Plymouth. He also starred on Broadway in “Night and Day” with Maggie Smith and “The Crucifer of Blood.” He played opposite Charlton Heston when the production moved to L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre.

But in between stage work, Schultz struggled to make ends meet with odd jobs. The financial hardship came to an end when Schultz swallowed his stage actor’s pride and auditioned for “The A-Team.” Again, Pagels’ book taught him the value of not taking himself so seriously.

“It’s the way you want to see it,” Schultz says of TV shows like “The A-Team.” “If you want to see it as the epitome of art, it will be. If you want to see it as the height of exploitation and degradation, it will be. Neither of them is true. The truth is you’re simply scratching out a living: I’m a song-and-dance man. That’s the truth and there’s a relaxation that comes with that.” After reading Pagels’ book, physics became a minor passion for Schultz.

Joffe looked at nearly 30 other actors before hiring Schultz to play Oppenheimer. As Schultz recalls, he was cast the day before production began and was forced to leave his daughter’s 1-year birthday party to fly to Durango, Mexico, where shooting was about to begin. There he continued discussions with Joffe and Newman about how to portray Oppenheimer. “Being the typical actor,” Schultz says, “I wanted to be very accurate (in the depiction of Oppenheimer). When I told Roland this, he just rolled his eyes.”

The reason for Joffe’s reaction is that Oppenheimer spoke in a “clipped, affected voice that at times was graceful but at other times had a tendency to explode,” Schultz says, doing his best Oppenheimer impersonation. “His voice also had a Mr. Rogers quality to it.” Joffe didn’t want Schultz to impersonate Oppenheimer’s affected, often arrogant manner. “In a film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, you could,” says Schultz. “But in this film, we wanted to make him more accessible, more of a human being faced with a dilemma rather than a man who spent his life putting himself above other people.”

Says Joffe: “I wanted our Oppenheimer to be as true as possible to the inner Oppenheimer. We wanted to get at the inner truth, to feel the real tensions inside these people (at Los Alamos). In public, Oppenheimer was a dominant, powerful scientist. But he was also a vulnerable, weak man.”

But Rhodes rejects the notion, forwarded in Joffe’s film, that Groves played the devil to Oppenheimer’s Faust. After the war, Rhodes says, more moral doubts did creep into Oppenheimer’s thinking. For example, Rhodes notes, two years after American military planes dropped the code-named “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer said to President Truman: “Mr. Truman, I have blood on my hands.” During and after the war, the government viewed Oppenheimer as a security risk for his leftist views.

Schultz calls “Fat Man and Little Boy” “an impression of reality, not reality. The attempt to make this human dilemma accessible was paramount, and anything that detracted from it had to be chipped away.”