Cold Fusion Film “The Believers” Up for Sale

by Steven B. Krivit

Chicago-area residents and part-time filmmakers Clayton Brown and Monica Ross of 137 Films have been on the “cold fusion” trail for a few years now, struggling to bring their film, a documentary about “cold fusion,” to market.

The film was originally titled “The Experiment,” but Brown and Ross have changed it to “The Believers.” With a title like that, I can’t be sure whether they are mocking the scientists or promoting religion.

They recently released a trailer; they also have a slightly different version of the trailer that is interesting to watch. The cast of characters includes, among other people, “cold fusion” theorist Irving Dardik, who was convicted of medical fraud but likens himself to Einstein. Experimentalist and “cold fusion” theorist Edmund Storms appears on camera saying that, sooner or later, somebody will make a breakthrough and be able to see the theory and the mechanism. No mention is made of the Widom-Larsen theory in the trailer.

Plot Summary from IMDB, written by Clayton Brown:

“In 1989, two University of Utah chemists announced that they had solved all of the world’s energy problems with some electricity and seawater in a jar. Ever since then, ‘cold fusion’ has been called pathological, voodoo science, and just plain wrong by the media, the government, and mainstream scientists. But no amount of debunking and bad press has stopped a group of contemporary cold fusionists from pursuing their goal of saving the world with clean, cheap, and abundant energy – if they can only make their experiments work! Now, on Oct. 4, 2009, 20 years after that first announcement, these scientists – amateurs and professionals from all over the world, working in government, universities, and homemade basement labs – are holding an international meeting in Rome, to share their experiments and make their own world-shaking announcements.”