ReAction! Chemistry in the Movies

Academy of Tobacco Studies Vice President Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) spins support for cigarette smoking.

Tom Van Allen (Val Kilmer) enters the meth world as Danny Parker seeking revenge against the masked men who killed his innocent wife.

Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) is an Edinburgh heroin addict whose parents force him to quit; after the misery of withdrawal is over, he leaves for London to get away from junkie friends but they find him anyway.

Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) pops pep pills to maintain his creative flow until he meets the angel of death.

LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie) disrupts THX 1138’s (Robert Duvall) depressant SP5 intake.

Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) score big on a drug deal and then travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of America, picking up George Hanson (Jack Nicholson) along the way.

Three young women enter different parts of show business, begin using drugs, rise to the top, and then fall.

Television advertisement director Paul Groves (Peter Fonda) is divorcing wife Sally (Susan Strasberg) so he takes LSD to get in touch with his feelings.

In this documentary, Stan and Iris Ovshinsky’s nickel metal hydride battery is the only suspect not guilty of killing the electric car. (At Architecture Library not Love)

Professor Phillip Brainard (Robin Williams) creates a flying rubber called flubber.

At 1:20 a.m. on Saturday, October 26, 1985, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels back 30 years in Dr. Emmett L. Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) plutonium-powered DeLorean DMC-12 automobile time machine.

Double agent Patricia Fowler’s (Doris Day) search for the water-repellent hairspray formula leads her to inventor Madame Piasco (Lilia Scala).

Dr. Linus Tyler (Jack Kruschen) develops the alcoholic mint named VIP while advertising executives Carol Templeton (Doris Day) and Jerry Webster (Rock Hudson) compete for new accounts while engaging in a battle of the sexes.

Accident-prone Augustus “Red” Purdy (Red Skelton) invents an unbreakable elastic glass. Hi-jinks ensue as his business associates attempt to steal his formula.

Biography of Thomas Edison (Spencer Tracy) that builds up to the invention of the light bulb.

The camera is fixed in one position as Thomas Edison moves from one side of the screen to the other in this 20-second reality short. He weighs something, adds it to a flask, and pours the solution into another flask. Part of the More treasures from American film archives, 1894-1931 DVD set

Characters from late Victorian fiction unite to defeat the evil Fantom in 1899; the vampiric former nurse Mrs. Harker (Peta Wilson) uses inorganic qualitative analysis to identify the traitor.

Arson detectives Donald “Shadow” Rimgale (Robert DeNiro) and Brian McCaffrey (William Baldwin) investigate a series of arson/murders involving magnesium and a liquid called trychtichlorate.

Thug Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson) is disfigured in a vat of chemicals, so he uses cosmetics to cover his face; he creates a poison named Smile that forms when certain personal care products are mixed.

Brother William of Baskerville (Sean Connery) investigates mysterious deaths in a Benedictine abbey while the monks are convinced the apocalypse is coming.

Dr. John Watson (Robert Duvall) tricks Sherlock Holmes (Nicol Williamson) into meeting with Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin) in Vienna to confront his cocaine addiction.

A small team of experts determines the biology and chemistry of deadly alien material; elemental analysis determines the composition of its two parts.

Chemical analysis of a deadly poison dart shows traces of ingredients for bouillabaisse, so Derek Flint (James Coburn) searches for the perpetrator in the restaurants of Marseilles.

Accountant Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) has been poisoned with a deadly dose of luminous toxin; he has only a short time to find out why because there is no antidote.