Filmmakers are not antiscience, he said; often, they just do not know any scientists. His program has also offered grants at film schools and has scientists speak to film students.

''The idea is to get more work into the pipeline,'' he said.

''Broken Code'' is one of four projects related to the discovery of the double helix now circulating in Hollywood, and Ismail Merchant of Merchant Ivory Productions has signed on as executive producer.

Ms. Somerfeld confesses that science was her worst subject in school. What attracted her to Lamarr's story was not the technology, but her struggle to be seen as more than a beautiful woman. (''Any girl can be glamorous,'' Lamarr once said. ''All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.'')

Ms. Somerfeld called Lamarr ''a woman who was out of sync with her time.''

''Had she been born in another era,'' the writer said, ''she could have really gone for it and lived up to her potential.''

In her marriage to Fritz Mandl, the munitions maker, Lamarr sat in on his business meetings and learned that one of the elusive goals was to control weapons remotely by radio signals, what today would be called smart bombs. But radio signals can be readily jammed.

Lamarr's insight was to realize that continuously and randomly changing the radio frequencies would defy jamming. In early 1940, she and the composer George Antheil devised a system for airplanes to direct torpedoes toward their targets. Inspired by player pianos, Antheil conceived of a pair of paper rolls, one in the airplane, one in the torpedo, to specify the sequence of changing frequencies. ''It's the damnedest Rube Goldberg you ever saw,'' said David Hughes, a retired colonel and a communications expert who will be the scientific consultant to Ms. Somerfeld. ''But the seminal idea was there.''

Antheil and Lamarr patented their scheme, which they called ''frequency hopping,'' and donated it to the government. The Navy, doubting that the paper-roll devices could be built, declined to try to pursue it but nonetheless classified the idea.