Milgram’s close-up

Jim Dobson/Indie PR

View full image

In 1961, in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, ordinary people delivered what they believed were excruciating electric shocks to other ordinary people, all because a researcher in a lab coat told them to do it. This famous Yale study of obedience gets the big-screen treatment this fall in Experimenter, a feature film about the work of psychology professor Stanley Milgram. Written and directed by Michael Almereyda and starring Peter Sarsgaard (above, with the movie’s recreation of the ostensible “shock generator”) as Milgram, the movie opens on October 16. Don’t look for any familiar campus scenes, though; the film was shot in New York City, and Lehman College stood in for Yale.