Contact: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are today's Mission Control of Minutia. I'm Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan Run Talk and Jordan's Today we're talking about another jewel in the great mid nineties run of sci fi space movies. We are talking about Contact. I didn't realize that we had programmed another outer space movie from the late nineties into the rotation so quickly after Men and Black and Bob Zamecha's who did Roger Rabbit? So we're really showing our biases here. Yeah. Um, it's a great movie though. It's a beautiful movie. It's a kindler, gentler version of space than Independence Day or Men and Black, and certainly more than Event Horizon, which, uh do you remember that movie vaguely where they take a space ship to hell? Um? That movie whips. But anyway, Yeah, it's a unique film in the genre. It's the like staring up at space when you're a little kid. It's Scott brings that kind of wide eyed innocence to it and us no death Rays was putting eggs in your chest. Um uh you know. All that being said, I missed this movie when I was a kid somehow. Yeah, really a kid's movie. Yeah that's true. Yeah, I mean it also came out in between Independence Day and Men in Black, which occupied like three straight years of my life, so I didn't really have room for this one. But we watched it again recent at some point I watched it. Then we watched it again recently, like during a pandemic freshman year, and I was just struck a new It's such a beautiful film. You know, I'm assuming you have much more history with it. Yeah. I was incredibly fascinated with space as a kid. I mean, I'm a veteran of Space Camp. Anything I had to do with space I eagerly watched. And this is probably one of the last ones I saw, because, I mean, compared to Men in Black and Independence Day and all these other movies, it kind of looked boring. The poster was just Joe Foster with headphones on outside of a big satellite dish. But good lord, this is the one that stuck with me the longest because, as you say, it's so different, it's so much more gentle, and it really has Carl Sagan, who wrote the novel that this was based on and spent the last seventeen years of his life trying to get this made. It has his sense of wonder the whole you know, billions and billions of stars, which I'm totally never actually said that. That's kind of like the catchphrase that everyone says when doing a Carl Sagan reference, but I don't think it actually said that. I think that was a Johnny Carson impression. Do you watch Cosmos years ago? Like back in this era, I was just so into this stuff. Yeah, I mean, he's just such a fascinating figure. And he once said by finding out what the other planets are like, by finding out whether there are civilizations on planets and other stars, we re established a meaningful context for ourselves. And I think that's such an important ethos for this movie. Jodie Foster called it a movie about people and their passions rather than an aliens movie, and it's true. The whole story of contact, it just captures this delicate intersection of religion, science, and politics, and I think it does it in a really beautiful way in a really challenging way. But yeah, this movie gave me my favorite online model when it comes to how I feel about being life on other planets. You know, if we're alone in the universe, sure seems like an awful waste of space. Such a great line. I just think this is it's such a beautiful way of illustrating that science and faith, however you want to define faith, aren't mutually exclusive. There are things that that we don't understand and don't know, and I think that's a beautiful thing. And you know, Carl Sagan was a man who lived his life by science, but I think he allowed for the i'll call it magic, you know, the things that that we we don't know about yet. And I think that that frightens some people, but I think other people are exhilarated by that, and I think that's a really cool way to live your life. You know, this movie, there will be many moments in this episode when I choked up, because I really do think it's a beautiful meditation on the mysteries of why we're here. Yeah. Well, from the whopping advance that Mr Sagan secured for the novel More, he was able to transform his incredible view of the universe. It's a cold hardcast they'll see lucre uh to the film's prolonged stay and speaking of event Horizon, the prolonged stay that this movie spent in development, hell to the truly out of this world filming locations that they went to for it. Here is everything you didn't know about contact Carl Sagan growing up in benson Hurst. In benson Hurst, Brooklyn, I like to imagine him rolling around with a baseball bat like weeping people's gus on the street corners, singing singing doo wop, played a spaghetti boxing stickball weather offensive Italian American stereotypes screen putting here. He had a number of formative experiences that shaped his life's work growing up. The first one was the nineteen thirty nine New York World's Fair, which he attended it four years old, and he would later speak of being very moved by the America of Tomorrow exhibit. And he spent a lot of time at the Museum of Natural History, but he quickly got off Earth and away from well you can only see the big polar bears so many times. But his interest in space was really sparked by science fiction writers, guys like H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Heinland, Isaac Asimov, Arthur clark Edgar Rice Burrows, and he wrote in The New York Times or told the New York Times for a peace in n science fiction has led me to science, which I love. Yeah, I mean, you think about it. So much of the joy and one that comes across in his work and particularly the show Cosmos, comes down to the fact that the sci fi dreams of his childhood, like space exploration and space travel, were becoming a reality in his young adulthood. Like how cool is that he was in his thirties when the Gemini and Apollo space programs began. So yeah, I mean this stuff just went from the realm of science fiction to reality in a few short decades. And his delight in this was so palpable in everything that he did, I think is what made him so popular. But in nineteen forty seven he discovered Astounding Science Fiction magazine, which coincidentally was the same year that Flying Saucers hit the national consciousness, and Sagan talked to the New York Times piece about sort of abandoning science fiction as he got older, as he learned more about actual science, saying that he could no longer make the leaps of logic and suspensions of disbelief that sci fi reading required. And so it's funny. He singles out a short story written by l Ron Hubbard, The End Is Not Yet. He read it first at nineteen and he loved it, and then he read it years later as an adult, and he said, I was so amazed at how it declined in the intervening years that I seriously considered the possibility that there were two novels of that title by the same author, of vastly differing quality. So I guess in the years that he started becoming interested in actual science, as NASA was formed and people were actually going this space, he starts to take a dimmer review on science fiction. Uh. He also doesn't really have nice things to say about Star Trek, but hey, he liked doing Yeah, he likes Martian Chronicles too, by Bradberry, which is cool. The piece is just so funny because like there's some things in there where he's just like, this is bulls science, and there's other where he's like, I don't know, though, it's well written. So I liked it. I like the I like little Nerdy. Carl just read an astounding science fiction magazine in between meetings of his doo wop group, But that disillusionment presumably fed into his desire to write his own work of science fiction, which has helped along by his third wife, who is a woman named Ann dreen Uh. They met at a dinner party hosted by Nora Ephron. This producer who worked on Contact, Linda Obst, has talked about how great Nora Ephron's dinner parties were, which is adorable. They may work, seems so much smaller back then many, especially if you're rich and white. Um back in four they met, so this was just a year after Sagan had become a really truly public figure celebrity with his first book called The Cosmic Connection. But she is a fascinating figure within her own right. She grew up in Queen's and attended the nineteen sixty four World's Fair as a teenager. Parents did too, and according to family legend, they went even though they didn't know each other. They went the same weekend. Might have made that up, but I think some of my family did from Harrisburg as well. But she also described that as a as a watershed moment for her interest in space. She attended NYU for three years but left and sort of spend some time is this interesting kind of creative gad fly around town. She was working at a bookstore and rubbing elbows with famous New York creative types like John Lennon and u Do Duke Ellington. She told the Chicago Tribune that she was friends with Duke Ellington and his family and he would drive around to black churches so that they could hear like gospel music, which is incredible. And she and Sagan they started out as friends, but he asked her for help with the Voyager space probes, which is, you know, quick rundown for anyone who doesn't know that. They're gold plated records containing a number of things that were deemed central to a prospect of aliens understanding of human culture. There's like whale songs, there's music, there's um the sound of people kissing, I think is on their different many many different languages too, I think. And these gold records were affixed to the side of these space probes, which were designed to be the I think, the first objects that were designed to leave the Solar system. UH and there was a little kind of gram that would show alien prospective aliens how to actually play this record makes some kind of device to be able to listen to really cool, like one of the cooler things we have done. As they should have sent a pono. Just Neil Young riding it along is the first thing that alien here's the piste off Young explaining, explaining bit rates. It's actually closest to the true master you get off of a vinyl anyway, on sixty minutes. What I love about Anne is that she advocated in particular for the notion of including Chuck Berry's Johnny Be Good because that song defined the music of motion, of moving getting to someplace you've never been before and the odds are against you, but you want to go. That was Voyager. I love that so much. There was a I think it was an SNL bit in the seventies where they talk about aliens making contact with Earth after coming into contact with Voyager, and their messages send more Chuck Berry, Yeah, it'd be weird. Of the aliens were like perverts, and they're like similar people kissing, just similar mouth sounds gross anyway. Their love story is adorable. Um Drean wanted a piece of Chinese music for the record, and she settled on a twenty five hundred year old song called Flowing Stream, which actually is in my vows. Yeah, it's a it's a famous piece of music because there's a very famous Chinese uh chin is the instruments has played on. I'm sure I'm butchering that pronunciation. But he had a buddy, this chin player, who I think is credited with writing the song, had a friend and they were just the best of friends. And when this guy died, the player broke his instrument a vow never done, never to play again, because no one would ever love his music and understand it the same way that this guy did. And so there's a phrase or word for close friend in Chinese that translates to someone who understands my music, and that's the composition that he is most associated with. Anyway, So they settled, they decided to put that song on this record, and she leaves a message for Carl at his hotel and he called back within an hour, and apparently by the end of this phone call they were engaged to be married, which good on your Carl. What is that game like? It became clear to two people who had never been alone together. That we were madly in love, she said later on, which and they were married for the rest of his life. Right, yeah, wow, that's really beautiful. But so by this point, during had already written and published a novel called A Famous Broken Heart. And then so she subsequently goes on to collaborate with Sagan Uh to co write thes documentary series Cosmos, which is Sagan also hosts at one, two Emmys and a Peabody. Has since been broadcast in over sixty countries and seen by more than five dred million people. As of two thousand and nine, he was still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. Pumping Wishbone in the second place. I'm imagining Wishbone in acute Sagan turtleneck, and I love it. I love in contact. When she's um when John hurt is watching her on TV, she's dressed in the turtleneck and blazer combo as a nod to him so much. Just finished work on an episode of Cosmos about Hypatia, the mathematician and leader of the Great Library of Alexandria, whose work on the Diophantine equations would later inspire Newton. I have no idea what any of those words mean, but unfortunately, for political reasons that I tried to learn about in paraphrase and are very long and complicated and related to primarily misogyny and religion. She was dragged from her chariot and torn to pieces and mutilated by a violent mob. So they wanted to write a narrative about a female scientist that wouldn't end in such a way. One of the more horrifying things I read about this that Drewrean talks about was supposedly, uh, this mob carved out Hypatia's eyes with either broken shells or um. I think what they supposedly used was abalone shells, and so consequently, and this is maybe kind of a weird thing, Sagan gave and a piece of abalone that she wore around her neck for the rest of her life because of the story of Hypatia, whose eyes were gouged out by the material. Anyway, that's what goes into the making of contact. The couple were staying in West Hollywood when another friend from Nora Ephron's dinner party, who I mentioned earlier producing named Linda opst ops. We gotta start asking and find out how these people's names are pronounced before I know, we're never going to do that. That's the too much information guaranteed, We'll never learn how to pronounce your name right. That woman has had a hand in Flash Dance, Adventures and babysitting the Fisher King, one of my favorite blesser known Robin Williams, Terry gilliam Joints, Jeff Bridges, Sleeps in Seattle, and Interstellar, among many others. She suggested that they write a screenplay, so they finished their treatment in nineteen eighty and the vulture oral history of contact is the gift that keeps on giving. There's so many stounding quotes in there, and is of course we were stoned right in contact, as if she's offended by then. And this gets into the hands of a guy named Peter Goober who is at the time head of Casablanca Records. He launched his career as a film producer with Midnight Express in He Is a Big Deal Um. He produced Rainman, Batman, The Color, Purple, Guerrillas in the Mist, which is of Eastwick, also Flash Dance. He also co owns The Golden State Warriors and the l A Dodgers among a bunch of stuff. He's a big mover and shaker. His partner for a long time was this guy John Peters, who was the guy that Bradley Cooper is playing in Liquorice Pizza. He was kind of an icon of clastic. Have you seen it pizza? Yah? Yeah? Oh yeah, dude, that monologue is so funny. I love it so much. You gotta there. I'm gonna choke him out, choke him out right in front of you. Yeah. Peters is Peters is wacky. Yeah, definitely a weird guy. I love how Carl Sagan basically refused to bend to any kind of like Hollywood script constraints. Every time this Linda Opes woman would try to suggest any kind of rules of conventional screenplay drama, Carl Sagan would say, is this an argument by authority or an argument of convention? He's amazing. I think she says at one point that Spielberg had been tapped to direct this and they said no because it would have been too much alpha male energy in the room between him and Carl, which is so damn funny to imagine the two of them is alpha males, Like just these two schnurdy dudes. But yeah, they both had very strong ideas about their art. So that tracks. Um okay, so ops, Linda, Sorry Linda. They brought Peter the one and ten page treatment. That's insane, Like you were, like, I went to screenwriting school and basically told I was literally told by my professor, these people don't read. Make your treatments. If it's more than five pages, it's probably too long. If if you're hitting ten, absolutely no way, I mean, granted I was not then, nor now am Carl Sagan. Way do you get to uh, Happy Feet director George Miller's two paid treatment, which is supposedly still out there anyway, Goober immediately begins with it in the time honored tradition of male producers everywhere, changing the plot to be about a woman scientist who abandons her son and has to go searching for him because this dude. Um, and he starts shopping it to what Linda calls all the wrong directors. Um. And she adds that Peter tried very hard to separate contact from Carl. Among the other changes that he wanted to push was having like this sort of cliched Native American character who becomes an astronaut, and I guess was spouting all kinds of like, you know, Native American by way of white Hollywood producer platitudes. Uh. This Peter Goober guy was really pushing for the Jodie Foster character, Ellie to having a strange son, because, in his words, here was a woman consumed with the idea that there was something out there worth listening to, but the one thing she could never make contact with was her own child. To me, that's what the film had to be about. Yeah, I would argue that that's lazy and also unfair to turn this woman's passion into a negative, But I gotta say a little bit of this sort of slightly misanthrollopic tendencies does show up in Jodie Foster's betrayal. She's this person who's desperately looking to connect, but she really doesn't get along well with other human beings. There's an interview that Tom Skarrett, who plays her boss David Drummond, gave, and that's kind of his observation that she was this uh gentle soul whose father died as a little girl and kind of left her calloused and really having a tough time connecting with people. It's much easier to try to look outward, out into the solar system, to try to connect with spirits out there. After dealing with Hollywood producers, can you really blame anyone for never having to want to deal with humanity again? Anyway? Uh So, with this thing hung up in this guy's greasy hands, greasy cocaine flecked hands, Carl and Ann decided to turn it into a novel, and before it's even written, Simon and Schuster PLoP down two million bucks for one, which I've heard that as a record for the largest advanced payout for a novel that was not yet written. Damn bumping the novelization of Wishbones in the second place, Wishbones. We gotta keep Wishbones as a running bit. The book doesn't come out until but Goober goes I think to Warner Brothers in two and he tries to bring the rights over there, And in this intervening time, it sells one point seven million copies in its first two years, but film version stays in development hell until when he splits from Warner Brothers to go co Heed Sony Pictures with John Peters. And this is what's so funny man Karma. I am don't necessarily believe in it, but when an examples of it pop up and I it does warm my heart. The rights to the picture stay at Warner. He tries to buy them for Sony, and Linda Oakes has landed at Warner as a producer and refuses to sell them. Warner Brothers apparently gave her this movie to develop without having any idea she had a hand in the original. They were like, hey, do you have any do any interested in space movie? We have the rights to called Contact, and she's like, you have no idea? Um. So they bring on writer James V. Hart, who wrote the screenplay for Hook bram Stoker's Dracula, the Coppola movie which put a bookmark by that name. Will come back to him later, and the attempted to cash in on the success of bram Stoker's Dracula, which is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. That is a misbegotten film if ever there was one. Uh. He said no multiple times. Um, he told Vulture, there have been seven screenwriters on this thing, and the most embarrassing thing, not one of them or any of the directors who had been brought on Border pitched ever, even contacted carl Or Ann about it. Just Hollywood horse Man. They ran through so many people trying to get this thing made. Roland Jaffee, who had done the Killing Fields and the mission he was attached to direct, he dropped out, and they bring in George Miller, who a bit of a problem child. George Miller did the mad Max films, UM, Babe Pig in the City, Uh too, Happy Feet movies, UM, and his vision for the film was much less mainstream than the final version. Um. People talk, is this script out there? Did you google it? I haven't been able to find it yet. But Jodie Foster likened it to erase her head. Yes, yes she did. Uh. And Lorenzo's oil, Um to dance is what I'm hearing, danse and inaccessible. He brought it a writer who remained uncredited on the film again named men O mayas Um to work with him on the script. And so Miller and May's craft this new different vision for the film. And it was Jodey's quote about it, she said that it was stranger than the version that was ultimately made. Quote, because that was the idea, The universe is strange. There were scenes with like road kill that you wouldn't think we're right on the path of the story, but which I felt had the power to expand the viewer's consciousness. Sure, why not sounds lynch into ma Drean said Miller had seminars with military experts and social scientists to get a handle on how the world react in an actual first contact situation. I think I don't know if I put this in here, but I think I remember reading at one point that this script was two hundred pages long. That sounds about right. Yeah, I mean, how society would react to being contacted by aliens is to me the most interesting point in the whole movie. The complex ways that would impact culture and all the different responses from all sides, I mean, religious, political, even down to the late night comedians. They had Jay Leno in this, and the movie does a really good job. The final movie, I should say, there's a really cool job of illustrating this in a pretty economic way. They just have like four TV screens and they go through and just show all the channel flicking through TV news anchors and crossfire type political commentator shows and late night stand up comedians, and they have Rob Lowe as this like head of a conservative coalition complaining this is another example of science intruding into matters of faith, which I feel like is probably something that would be said if aliens actually did contact us. I just think it's such a cool way of illustrating all the how pedestrian we would make it, how partisan we would make, how much we would just it would almost turn us all against each other. It's like the opposite of Watchman. It's hilarious. And also Jodie Foster character, probably one of my favorite scenes is when she's driving through the desert on the way to uh, the very larger Red Quarters. Yeah, the very large array with all the satellite dishes, and there's this basically a giant tailgating party, and you see the spectrum of reactions firsthand. You've got partiers, You've got prayers from the devout and choirs. You've got neo Nazis, you've got Elvis fans. I saw one review where they described it as part tent revival, part grateful Dead concert, which I think is perfect. I don't know. I just think the whole reaction to getting contacted by aliens is so much more nuanced than say, like an Independence Day when people are just like having a giant rooftop party before the Aliens blow them up, Like it just seems so much more like that's so fast, right, Well, you're right, that was l a but just yeah, every other Alien Encounters movie either has like a close encounter style just like mouth a gape reaction, or the War of the World's like the nation is gripped by fear type of response. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's funny that CNN is the principal news outlet in there because twenty five plus news reporters from CNN whoever rolls in there, um, Larry King Live and Crossfire in there, And then a few years later, CNN bans the use of its logo in fictional movies and CNN reporters are not allowed to do movie cameos, with the exception of Larry King, who does what he wants. He's the gig baby. Yeah. I guess it was an ethics thing because CNN were owned by Time Warners where Warner Brothers parent company, and Warner Brothers made the movie, so they didn't want to make it seem like these impartial journalists were being manipulated by a major media company. H I think there was a statement at the time that it quote blurred the line between fact and fiction and erohods the credibility of journalists by having them appear in these movies. So yeah, future cameos had to be cleared by an ethics officer at CNN. But just getting back to the scene where Ellie's driving through the big party in the desert, I just think that's such a cool scene. Apparently required three thousand extras who answered ads in a local paper seeking UFO enthusiasts, And one of my favorite little bits is that they're driving by there's a big banner that says UFO Abduction Insurance. Uh, that's a real company. I actually saw a table for them when I went out to the do that ridiculous area fifty one raid thing a couple of years ago, and Warner Brothers paid them to use their idea in the movie, which is hilarious. Yeah, you know what, I actually know this offhand. I believe it's twenty five dollars flat fee, and then if anything happens that you can prove you get I think it's either tenderly or twenty five million, you get a size shay out. Yeah, right, so right, but this does a scene is also I believe the first scene when Jodie Foster's character sees that truly terrifying blonde Zell a guy who ends up I mean spoilers, you have a couple of seconds to passport to this part. Okay, who blows up the spacecraft? Initially, Uh, he's so creepy, and you know, it kind of makes sense. His name is Jake Busey. He's Gary Busey's son. So that intensity, that that Bausey family's intensity that is there. He also plays a serial killer, I think in The Frighteners, which is Peter Jackson movie starring Michael J. Fox Um, which is I also think from this exact span, so I think you're so yeah. He playing to type yes yes, And speaking of murder of Cell said, you know that Contact was the last film that fashion designer Johnny Versacci ever saw. He saw in the theater night before he died, before he got assassinated the next day. The more you know. Um. Supposedly Jody and the studio didn't like the Maya's and Miller's script, although she diplomatically told Vulture that she liked both versions. Uh so they bring in Michael Goldenberg, who had actually done a draft before Miller brought Maya's on board. How many versions this go through. That's why it took set and teen years to get made. And uh, what Goldenberg called it was right a draft for the studio to make them happy and Jody happy to get it back on track. It was just a lot more complicated this earlier version and just really, like I said Inaccessible. Miller, for his part, believes that his version of the movie would have been a lot more like Interstellar than Contact, which is interesting to say both star Matth McConaughey. Uh. George Miller has said that he's never seen the final Contact movie, which ouch, but he read the screenplay and said that it quote basically regressed into a much safer and more predictable kind of thing. Um. Jodie Foster again with these, I think she's trying to be diplomatic, but there's definitely an edge there. Described George Miller as quote the kind of director that would make a two and a half movie about an eye blinking and it would be the most extraordinary, deep and beautiful film. Um, not totally related, but want to hear a fact, but Interstellar that will make you cry. Just learned it like an hour before we hopped onto this call. I learned this from the film Facts Twitter account, which is very good, uh. For Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan asked Hans Zimmer to compose the score, which is the one page story about a father who leaves his child to do an important job. It contained only two lines of dialogue. I'll come back when it's a great soundtrack. That's maybe my favorite Hans Center score on the pipe organ. So good. Yeah, I've complicated failings about that movie. I think it's got a lot of cool shit, and I think it's got a lot of dumb stuff in it. To the fourth dimension being love like you're gonna talk about it, it's funny to me that they're setting on this producer's idea that this woman has to go find her strange daughter or whatever, and then that's the plot of Interstellar where father transcends space and time and goes through a wormhole to get back to his daughter. The wormhole thing is funny too, because Sagan, i think, initially wrote that he wanted to have her go through a black hole in the first draft, and then he called a guy from cal Tech who later won a Nobel Prize for his astrophysics work. And the guy was like, no, you don't want a black hole, you want a wormhole. And with an Einstein Rosen Bridge. Uh whatever the hell that man cigar shopping executive out wormhole in UM and as you may have gleaned, Miller in the studio start budding heads around this point. UM Entertainment Weekly does a feature on end which includes the details that Warner wanted a big Close Encounters style ending and various pitched ideas that included the aliens giving the Earth a laser show. From Wit it was like seventies styles like pink Yeah, aliens just start broadcasting roller skating blue oyster cult into everybody's brain in the world at the same time. Uh. And a wormhole swallowing Earth and transporting it to the center of the galaxy, which sounds like a movie exects idea Earth at the center of the galaxy. And what were they gonna make Hollywood the center of the galaxy too? Just gonna say, oh boy, oh yes. And Miller was supposedly angling for a lengthy subplot involving the pope enter a cigar shopping executive, don't help me on this. I know what the kids are into these days. Gave me some white sheets and gold chains. So Linda Hope says, the studio organized quote a really big dumb to dumb kind of meeting to give Miller essentially the ultimatum that he had to get committed to getting this film on track or kick rocks. And uh. She recalled that his partner back in Australia was saying to him there, they're just bluffing, and she kept saying, George, they're not bluffing. So he's fired and he does sue them for breach of contract, and she says they got Zemeckis to come on board the very next day, which is good turnaround time. I mentioned earlier that Steven spiel we could turn this film down, and actually they had offered Zamechis the film before Miller, but he was more interested in film about making a move about Harry Houdini, which he would then exit in favor of contact. I don't know of this now, I don't know, but basically what happened in the intervening amount of times at Forrest Gump became the world beating phenomenon that it that was and guaranteed zemeckis the leverage to secure final cut on everything that he ever made since. And he believe still has that, and he had it on he has it on this, So good on him. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Friend of the Pod. Bob zameckis Lord, he of Roger Rabbit fame. What an insane run this guy had. I mean, I just to think about it. The love that I have for most of the movies he's made. I think I might have the name of my favorite director is Romancing the Stone classic. The Back to the Future movies might be my favorite movies of all time. Very you know, I love them. Roger Rabbit, of course for his gump. Of course, Death Becomes Her, What Lies beneath? Castaway and Contact, and I think either was first or a second movie was called I Want to Hold Your Hand and it's about kids trying to sneak into the Beatles hotel room Sweet when they're gone on at Sullivan. So he's definitely a Beatle nerd too. I love this guy. I know he made the Polar Express and some other stuff. But but let's let's forget about that for a while. You kind of have to pretend that a whole latter phase of their career doesn't exist. I mean, most most great artists probably, but yeah, Robert Sebecca said that at least at the time, Contact was his most challenging movie ever because the book spans years and countries and planets and parts of the universe. Was just the biggest span across the board that he'd ever had the tackle before. So this was that's a tough one for him. Yeah. So Linda said that Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman were both floated for the role of Elliot air Away. Goldenberg said that every actress in Hollywood one of the part. Foster has a one of the better mic drop moments in that Vulture history. She says, quote, I didn't have to audition, pretty sure I had already won two Oscars by then. She had. Oh my god, this reminds me of that incredible story. I'm pretty sure I've told more about Shelley Winters dropping the Oscars on the table. Yeah, She's like, you don't ask people of that calibert audition, But I guess they whoever was making this movie. I don't even know what movie wasn't assisted she come in and uh, she comes in with a big bag and reaches in, slams one oscar on the table and says, here's my head shot, reaches in, slams the other oscar on the table, and here's my resume. Any quite Jen's She doesn't talk like that. I don't know why I made a sound like that. I'm sorry, Shelley, wherever you are. Oh, I just googled it. I don't know if that's true. What? No? Oh? What? Tony Curtis of all people, in the introductory to his autobiography, said, I'm not interested in the Shelley Winters approach. There's already enough bullshit around she maybe maybe she made it up, didn't that she donated her first oscar to the Anne Frank House. Oh yeah, because she wanted for playing um the van anyway, possible, possible, Possibly an apocryphal story from she flew to the n Frank House retreating her oscar. Further thought, she just to make a point. Um So. The character of Ellie is named after Eleanor Roosevelt and Voltaire um Arroway is an Americanized phonetic transliteration of Voltaire's actual last name, which is Arroway. And also she was going to fly through the cosmos like an arrow, according to Dula. It has been frequently reported, including by The New York Times, that the character is based on Jill Tartar, who's an astronomer who worked on the real life SETI that search for Extra Trust your Own Intelligence. She met with Foster while Foster was researching the role, but Drian told Vulture that is not explicitly the case, and that she had not herself met Tartar until after she finished writing the character. And uh, Foster met with a few different women scientists to get a handle on how tough it was for them in the field, including a woman named Caroline Porko. I guess to get all the technical jargon right, Joddie Foster asked for Q cards for the first time in her career, which is understandable. But these real life scientists, yeah, like you said, share their experiences as women in this industry which was and probably still is predominantly a boys club, and they were really just undermined and questioned and not taken seriously. And ellier Away has been cited as a landmark character for portraying a strong female scientist. I mean, you had your Sigourney Weaver and the Alien movie is and Lynda Hamilton's and the Terminator movies and Karen Allen and Indiana Jones. I guess she's not really a scientist, but but go with me here. But Jodie Foster's character had so much more depth. She's lonely and isolated. We talked about this earlier. Everyone in a professional life has given up on her. She's going off chasing little green men and they are so incredibly condescending to her, especially Tom Skarrett's character Scarrets also addck to Sigourney Weaver and aliens. Oh my god, you're everything bad that happens in the Alien movies is Sigourney Weaver telling men not to do things, and they're like a quiet lady, and then terrible things happened to them. Um, it's also silent to Lambs. It's like the exact thing that Clarice has in signs lambs every man around hers. She had, um no segue for this next one. The character that William Fitner plays, Kent Clark, is based on a real life set he scientist Kent Colors, who was blind actually, and uh. He said that he originally was supposed to play himself in the film, but that as the part grew bigger and expanded drafts, it required the skills of a real actor. But he's kind of like the secret m v P in the movie because it's his hearing that's able to hear that there's another tone, because the aliens communicate through these tone frequencies that are sent over the radio, and he's able to hear things that people with you know, average hearing, are unable to hear. And I guess the implication being is because he's blind, and you have all these stories about people who I think I heard a story about Stevie Wonder being able to tell the denomination of a coin by the sound that it made when it clinked on the floor or something. Yeah, I mean, it's your brain has the different areas of it that are marked for I'm sure I'm getting all the science of this all wrong, but if you're unable to see, then the auditory area starts to take over that section of the brain as well, and you develop a really really acute sense of hearing. It's just like some kind of evolutionary tactic for lack of a better term, Well, I don't know how blind you'd have to be to actually pull out the tones from the sety thing. Then the website, they had a thing that came out after this movie, and um, they said, Project Phoenix examines twenty eight million channels of audio simultaneously. So they say, we can't afford that many earphones, let alone the graduate students required to listen. So computers scanned for the signals, and then they I guess they're automated to paying researchers when interesting deviations occur. So the whole nonation of you being able to hear anything on headphones to begin with is kind of a cinematic construction, but necessary evil. Speaking of speaking of cinematic constructions, the romance between l A and Matthew McConaughey's character of Palmer Joss not in the What a Stupid Name, not in the book. I have two qualms with this movie. Mcconaughe's character's name is one of them. Uh, you know, not in the book. But it's Tinseltown baby, And McConaughey was hot, still is hot, but it is hot, hotter than I don't know what am I saying Time to Kill was a big hit, and so he was. Han Event July Stevie Wonder Callback, Comedy Works and threes. UM. Sasha Sagan, who's Carl and Annie's daughter, had this to say about being next to nineties. McConaughey on that film Proxy to him, I think expedited my puberty. Um. George Miller had apparently approached Raye Finds for the part Yeah to to sinister, to quietly sinister. Ah. McConaughey said that it took Hm a really long time to read the script for Contact because he quote kept running upstairs to my attict to get my old college papers on technology and society. I love that. Robert Sebeka's I guess always thought of Ellie Arraway and Palmer Joss as the classic movie romance, two people who were physically attracted to one another but separated by their ideologies like you and me. McConaughey has some also great quotes natural history. He told Vulture, I had spent time in my life considering becoming a monk. I believe that, yeah uh, And then he said I went on a little spiritual walk about for twenty two days with myself in Peru too, I guess deal with the aftermath of time to kill being hit uh. And he came back and he accepted the role. He also did not audition, but met with Zamakis and Jodie Foster, who had approval over who's going to play the character. My favorite part is that he wanted to play the role with a giant lumberjack beard, and Zamakas was like, no, you're like a media expert. You don't look like a Beauni bomber on TV. And I think kind of was like, damn it, here's a goofy little casting. Aside, the brief role of Major John Russell, who was the guy who was gonna get the gig to go on the spacecraft until he dropped out. Was that like really heartbreaking news conference when he's standing there with his kids and they're like, don't go, Daddy, don't go. That guy. He's played by Stephen Ford, who's the son of former Press Ssident Gerald Ford, And this is some inspired casting because Gerald Ford was a member of the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration and he helped draft the original Space Act that gave Nassett's Charter, so kind a full circle there. Um. Yeah, this guy was an actor. He was initially cast to be the dopey jock that Olivia Newton John hangs out with in Grease to make Danny Zuko jealous, but he dropped out the last minute due to stage fright apparently, and Fernando Lamas's son, Lorenzo Lamas got the gig instead. This has been your Stephen Ford update of the episode. Uh, speaking of presidents, they initially wanted to cast Sydney Potier as the president of the film, but he dropped out in favor of the Jackal he chose poorly, which supposedly McConaughey turned down in favor of Contact. So you know, the we're takeaway from all of these is that there's only like six things happening in Hollywood and like two dozen people making them in any given to I'm uh well before streamers anyway. But fortunately they luked out because in August of NASA announced that had maybe found signs of life in a Martian meteorite, and so President Bill Clinton gave a speech on it, and Zamaica said Clinton gave his Mars Rock speech, which a little dismissive, but sure, he says, and I swear to god, it was like it was scripted for this movie. When he said the line, we will continue to listen closely to what it has to say. I almost died. I stood there with my mouth hanging open. So they basically just used that speech in the film with some you know, movie magic to make it look like he's saying the contact relevant stuff. Right. Executive party dropped out, get me, Clinton, you gotta do this, Chopping said, yeah, I mean, Zamica's has a history of manipulating footage. I mean, in addition to doing all of the stuff that he did for Roger Rabbit that was crazy, and the stream he also made for a scump or he has Tom Hanks hanging out with JFK and Dick Cavin and John Lennon and all those people. But this Clinton thing was different because there were no actors dubbing voices or special effects at play, really, so his own words were what we're being manipulated. And this caused a bit of a firestorm, I guess. Three days before Contacts, Premier, the White House issued a letter on formal White House stationary and everything. The whole bit addressed to Robert Zemeckis, condemning the use of the footage, calling it quote inappropriate because parody and satire are protected on the First Amendment, but you can't make someone appear to say something they didn't actually say. No legal action was threatened, but it was basically seen as a shot across the bottle the war in Hollywood against taking other liberties with the president's image. The whole thing blew over, But it started this whole debate by copyright and fair use lawyers about digitally recreating people's images on screen. And the technology for this wasn't really advanced back but now you get things like there was gonna be a case of James Dean starring in a Vietnam drama called Finding Jacks something like sixty five years after he died, something like that. I think that was canceled, but yeah, it was pretty bad. And then the actor Peter Cushing returned to life twenty two years after he died for a cameo in two thousand and sixteen's Rogue one, the Star Wars movie, and they did they did Carry in that one too, like Young Carry. It's gotten so bad that um when she died Disney put out a statement that was like, don't worry, We're not going to digitally recreate her for the next you know, piece of Star Wars branded excrement. They shoved down our throats, but we'll see how long that holds. It was like that commercial where Audrey Hepburn was selling like Dove chocolates. It's bad. I mean it comes down to the estate, which is the thing about it, Like if your kids are greeny heads and they want to you know, resurrector corpse, they're going to do it. Yeah. It was like they even get started on the hologay am stuff, but TUPAC forgot about two we forgot and I think someone recently, yeah, boy, look it up if you want to get really bummed out. But speaking of people who were sort of pissed at the makers of Contact, let's talk about NASA. According to the DVD commentary track, the scene where Jodie Foster is about to get into the spacecraft and she's given a cyanide pill in case of emergencies caused a rift between Carl Sagan and NASA's adviser on the film, a guy by the name of Gerald D. Griffin, and this guy as they say, was a serious ham sandwich. He was working for NASA during the Apollo program, where he was a flight director for Apollo thirteen, among others, among others. Um in the eighties, he was the director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and he insisted that NASA has never given any astronaut a cyanide pill, you know, just in case, uh, and that I don't know if this makes it better or worse. If it asked to not truly wish to commit suicide in space, all they would have to do is cut off their oxygen supply. However, Carl Sagan, who I think was a consultant on these same space programs in the sixties and seventies, insisted that NASA did indeed give out cyanide pills, and it did it for every mission that an astenau has flown. So I don't know, maybe they didn't want that secret out or what. Yeah, I don't know. I did some googling about it, and it seems like Carl Sagan was like the only person who like is advocating for that. It seemed like one of those things that's kind of appeared on like the IMDb trivia page and people are like Carl Sagan said this, and Carl saying, I don't maybe pitch for it once, but yeah, I would cut off my oxygen before I took a Cyanide pill. Sianide seems painful. Oxygen is kind of like black out right? How would you kill yourself in deep space? Jordan's Well, let me ask um. David Kerradine commercial break. I'm not sure if he's keeping that. Oh man, I was unable to verify this, but preparedly. The sound of the alien transmission makes that Ellie hears is a variation of the sound made in Doctor Who that the doctors ship Tartess powers up in the original nine series. Oh my God, Wow. Yeah, I saw a really great or really dumb or both video on YouTube where they have the whole scene of Juddie Foster hearing something in her headphones and running back to the headquarters and getting all the equipment set ups that she could play whatever it is. It's coming through the frequencies to all the gathered dignitaries and all the people that are there, and then they're trying to, you know, get all the monitors hooked up because they're trying to figure out what frequency it's on doing all this stuff. It's just dragged on and on and on, and then they finally get it to play, and it's Rick Astley, never going to give you up, and you love you love roll. You're trying to rick roll me on this. No, but you're trying. You pitch that for us, the son of a bitch. I think we're shod for April Fools. We should like claim that it's going to be about some other topic. They start listening and it's just us talking about the history of rick rolling. Uh. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were a number of experts brought onto the set to help the cast get to grips with this you know world that they were inhabiting. Above the average actors intellectual rigor um. Sagan was increasingly ill at the time of the disease that would eventually kill him my ello dysplasia. Uh. Delivered a slide show lecture about space to the cast while they were in d C, which McConaughey remembers as follows, let me see if I can do the McConaughey voice. Um. Uh, it's a hard quote to say in his voice. I was on the edge of my seat the entire time. Everything he'd say was filling me up and making me more of a believer now already was. He got to the very end and goes, and therefore God doesn't exist, and I went, wait a minute, you have I mean believe in God existed more than ever and that's your punch. He lives more on God God. But because now we're getting into like true detective, like crazy crazy maccamaughey, he was like, yep, I'd love to discuss. It just kills me, saying it tells you God doesn't exist, and you're like, you just blew my whole world, and saying goes, yep, debate me, coward. Jodie Foster's this great memory from this Q and A that she said went on for hours and hours, and I guess Carl was eating at one point, probably because it's coming off for six hours. He was starving. But he was so engrossed in the discussion that he held a fort full of food in his hands for twenty minutes as he spoke. And he was just so caught up in the conversation that he didn't either didn't think two or didn't have a moment to just stick the fork in his mouth. I love that. God bless Carl Sigon. Perhaps obviously they watched two thousand one, A Space Odyssey on the set to help get them in the mood. I want to say, I'm just imagining McConaughey just like baked his and his trailer watching, uh, watching two thousand one and be like, wow, Carl's that. What's really like? Carl Sagan's over there, like feeling his turtleneck. Ah, this is excellent weed, Matthew, much better than what Anne and I have in the seventies. Uh. Speaking of research, Samaica's and the team made several visits to the Kennedy Space Center in kate Canaveral, Florida, where they were brought onto launch Pad five prior to launch the Space Shuttle to get a handle on the mechanics of the elevator in the gantry area the loading arm of the craft. Among the many locations that they've shot at was the what we mentioned earlier, the Very Large Array or v l A, which is the field of twenty seven linked dish radio telescopes located in the desert of Socorro, New Mexico, um and they actually had to uh coordinate with the facility because they wanted to you know, they're the dishes all move and they wanted to shoot them when they were closest to one another because it would provide a better visual And the producer named Steve Starkey uh very early online promotional site for the move. I think it's called Contact the Movie dot com, but you have to get it on the way back machine. He says. Shooting at the v l A was, of course spectacular, but also one of the most difficult aspects of our filming. It is a working facility, so in order for us to accomplish shots for the movie, we had to negotiate with the National Science Foundation for Dish Control in order to move the dishes in the direction we needed for the most dramatic shot for the story. They did scenes for the v l A Control Center on a sound stage. I guess they built not one, but two replicas that were so exact that they had the same wall posters and carpet color and they even borrowed photos of researchers family staff on That's weird. Um. Yeah, Jody said, we were able to jump the line and do this shot in eight months ahead of schedule, but then the weather picked us and we were behind. Um. She's referred to this production as weather cursed and for good reason. Yeah. They spent a week in Arecibo, Puerto Rico shooting the largest radio telescope in the world. Uh, and terrible storms happen, mudslides. Um, you have much to say about the Radio telescoop and Arasibo, Puerto Rico. It's so cool. It's built into the side of this mountain crater. It's it's supposed to be. It's it's where it is because it's far away from radio interference. It's basically like the audio equivalent of light pollutions. It's easier to hear things that are coming in from out of space. But apparently I was devastated to learn that this dish is in the process of being dismantled after it started to fall apart in December. Main structure of the ant and a collapse due to poor maintenance in recent years, especially after Hurricane Maria in and the steel cables that kept the platform in the air dropped and it crashed against the dish and it just destroyed it in the fall. And um. Yeah, the National Science Foundation, who owned the radio telescope since the sixties. I think um, I just decided that it it was going to be closed and dismantled after fifty seven years of active service. So that's a real bomber. You look at pictures of it now and it's all being ripped out. Oh that's a bummer. Um. Not the only weather issue though. Second unit photography in Newfoundland at gross More National Park. Ken Ralston, who's a BFx supervisor, explained we were shooting in helicopters and the weather turned really ugly. It started snowing like crazy. You could barely see what was happening. Imagine being up in a helicopter shooting second unit photography. It starts snowing. Good. You're not even doing You're not even with Jodie Foster. You're just shooting landscapes. I'm gonna I photographing for second unit. Um the extras, seeming, the extras in the desert. This is my god, this is more. I got secondhand embarrassment for this guy. They went to change a film cartridge and exposed it, losing an entire days of work with the what did you say extras? Ruining The entire day's work had to be redone uh, and he was fired. Oh oh, I'm just imagining it like cartoonishly, like dropping out and rolling down like a whole row affirmation. And because everyone turns on Mass and looks at this guy, he's like, I'm fired, aren't I? And they're like, yeah, buddy. Um. Jodie Foster remembers continually hitting her head take after take for a shot in which she has duck into a plane. She also says she got stung by a bee during a scene, and she claims in the final films she can see both what she calls the goose egg on her head from bumming her head and a red spot on her neck from being stung by a bee. Just think that's hilarious. As you met at tight on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. In the book, the message is received over a long amount of time, but in the movie it's crunched. So production contacted advisers from City NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab and Caltech to ask them how this time frame could be adjusted for the Big Scream. Who sent them seven pages of calculations about how that would work, and they duly forwarded that just Carl Sagan, who approved it sure, whatever do have buty pot left? You? Remember in the movie, the aliens send back a transmission of Hitler opening the nineteen thirty six Olympic Games in Berlin, which obviously left scientists and politicians horrified. We know why these people, why our alien life forms sending us back a pick or of the greatest mass murderer of the twentieth century. Uh. And then they realized that this was the first television transmission that had enough strength to beam out into the cosmos. So the aliens sent back as a way of saying message received, We hear you. However, in real life there is some debate about this and some of the research that got really granular about like radio waves and stuff that I won't bore you with. Uh. They say that the transmission of this broadcast was only strong enough to be received no further than the suburbs of Berlin, but still made a very impactful moment in the movie. They should have sent Nixon saying, soccer to me on laughing now we miss talk, as we inevitably do in times like this, A man's thoughts turned towards the pod, not the podcast. Early conceptual designs of the pod were based as in the novel on one of the primary shapes in geometry do decahedron or twelve sided figure. Um. Eventually that was modified into a spherical capsule. In cases the traveler designer Steve to miss this guy's last name, so it's no, it's not if is out there listening. Designer Steve pod Contact Terminator to Google this is this guy's name, could just say the desire I know, okay, whatever, I'm not gonna find that right now. Um. The guy who designed it was also working on He had been working on Terminator too, and he based his design for Contact on one that he had already done for Terminator two that didn't get used in the film. The concentric ring design for it and Sony image works. Designers working there lifted visual references from physics like the nucleus supposed to look like the nucleus the son of an Adam, and nature like the pollinat Shan that occurs at the center of a flower for the design of the machine. The actual physical construction of the pod, the interior of the elevator of the gantry took almost four months to build, and then they digitally composited the rest of it. In this movie was Jody's first time filming in a blue screen situation. It took two to three weeks of just her in that Joan of Arc inspired space suit. As not me editorializing, they said they based it on actual armor. Uh and that thing, by the way, was bolted into the chair. And they trained her for this experience by sending her to Magic Mountain for what she calls like ten rides back to back with no time in between, talk about running. They couldn't send her to Nasada train, so like just go to Disney. Magic Mountain was the Six Flags, which is owned by Warner Brothers who were making this movie, so they got her camped. Also, very early in the production of this they were considering making a contact i'd which kind of would have been I can kind of see that, like you know, they have the like the little pod on like a slingshot and the thing they fired. I can almost see them doing the opposite of that for this, like the like the big machine. But yeah, they apparently had Jodie Foster filmed the scene in the pods six different times, with a different expression each time, one of joy, one of fear, one of sadness, et cetera. And then the visual effects crew morphed her face from one take to the next. Uh, you'll notice, I mean some of them. When she's like, I don't know what she's doing for astral projected through space, her face just kind of something weird happens to it. I guess that's how they did it. They just superimposed all these faces of her again and again. Someone on the internet. I don't really have any any more information on that, Yeah, exactly. Um has noted that she screams Oh God, over and over and over again all on the pod, which some have theorized as kind of an Easter egg, considering this was the moment when she had a breakthrough in regard to faith. She's kind of rejecting all of Matthew McConaughey's characters talks of God throughout the movie, but this is the moment that really changes her. So I just thought that was an interesting observation. She keeps the mantra I'm good to go becomes it's like the actual Mount NASA call sign, but it becomes her like accepting her situation and comedy terms with the fact that she might die horrifically. So I was like that part. Um more prosaically, there was an electrical fire burned down one of the film's sets. Jodie Foster's stunt double was bolted into this thing. Oh my god. Oh, I mean that sounds like the Apollo one fire when for the first Apollo mission in nineteen sixty seven, the astronauts were doing a run through just on the launch pad and it was very oxygen rich environment and I think, just like a there was some electrical problem and a fire broke out and and yeah, and they all died. Good lords. So I mean, that's terrified, angly close to that. I'm sure a lot of the people involved with the production would have been very aware of the Apollo one fire. Wow, that's horrifying. The whole beach scene with Jody and David Morrise, that was a way shoot at Leo Cardio, I don't know, Carrillo Beach and Malibu. Rest of it is VFX. The interesting thing about that is the elevint the waves are rolling in the wrong direction and the trees leaves are swaying too fast, kind of out of sync with that. Um Zamka said he wanted to make it sort of we'll get to the bid in the end about this about how they made the ending ambiguous. He said he did that because he wanted to plant the idea that maybe Elliott had a mini stroke or something and was hallucinating the whole thing. Fun The art on that is so cool. I mean, it reminds me when we were talking about The Truman Show. There's just this like hyper reality to the point where it looks unreal, like the beach is glowing white but there's no visible light source. Yes, it's all slightly off. It's so cool. I'd read that they did most of that seen in three sixty Green Scream, which is one of the first times that they had ever done on anything like that. But they also filmed the backgrounds on a beach in Fiji, so maybe they did some in person pickups at this Leo Carrillo beach in Malibu. In fact, I'm going to hope that they did, because I have a lot to say about this go on. I was looking up stuff for Grease just for my own amusement the other night Grease the movie, and the beach where they apparently filmed this father daughter scene in Contact was the same beach where Danny met Sandy. The beginning of Greece, the scene that opens the movie, and the producers of Greece chose that beach because that's the scene of the famous beach kiss from Here to Eternity with Burt Lancaster and Debora care You know, the waters coming up on the shore and they're in the sand. Very famous classic movie kiss. So that is our second grease connection of this episode. Damnit, Stephen Ford being Sandy's we should degrees, we should degrees. Um. Also, it's the same beach where the Dude and Walter subject spread Donnie's ashes is at the end of The Big Lebowski and John John Goodman doing is I love to serve from the beaches too? Lahoya oh man? Yeah? Um, very historic beach, yeah, Moore said, instead of being in Fiji, Jodi and I spent three days downstage in front of a green screen. Ah. That's so funny. Anyway. So the film's opening scene, that three minute computer generated sequence that begins with the view of the Earth from the exosphere and then Kareem's out through the Solar System out to the Milky Way. Eventually the whole thing terminates in the Iris of Baby Ellie. That general alone at that point or she just comes like in her eye. At that time, that was the longest continuous computer generated sequence and a live action film, eventually surpassed by the opening of The Day After Tomorrow in two thousand four. Anybody remember Day After Tomorrow? That opening is so mind blowing to me, much more so than the psychedelic freak out part of Do That as I want to space. Honestly, this scene was inspired by the short documentary by Charles and ray EAMs called The Powers of Ten. Have you ever seen this? It's like a famous Little Kids documentary. It's like nine minutes long. I say little kids, I mean like an elementary school documentary. The subtitle kind of gives it away. It's a film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero, which is a bit on the nose. But it starts with this view of a couple having a picnic, and it zooms out at a rate of one power of ten every ten seconds until the field of view is a hundred million light years, and it just gives you this incredible perspective of you know, both both mathematically and also just for the cosmos, and then zooms back in, and then it zooms in and in and in and in and in at a rate of you know, negative ten per ten seconds until you're looking at quirks and a carbon and adam in this man's hand. It's really cool. And so the whole zooming out, zooming in thing was I think what was what inspired this opening scene for Contact and the ending credit scene of men in Black. Oh, that's right, which I love. I love so much. Yeah, speaking of extremely difficult shots, there's this one that's baffled cinephiles for years. I have to admit I had never really noticed it because I just take things at face value in movie magic and don't really think about how they do things. I'm the worst film student. It's the famous medicine chest mirror shots, a scene when Ellie's father, David Morris's character dies. Young Ellie runs upstairs to try to retrieve her father's medicine, and it looks like she's running straight towards the camera, but then the shot resolves to show that this was a reflection in the cabinet's mirror, and so then they pull back and have Ellie opened the cabinet and get her father's medication. And when the mirror door swing shut, you see a reflection of a photo of her and her dad in the background. It's a brilliant bit of filmmaking, both technologically speaking and just economically. It says so much. And also just the absence of her father in that scene is so much cooler too, because they're originally going to do a bit where they were going to have almost like bullet time and the matrix. When Ellie's dad starts to have a heart attack, he was he was just going to kind of freeze as he dies, which is horrifying and understand Yeah, which is both horrifying and I don't really understand how that was supposed to look. And apparently neither did Robert Semacus, because as they started the production they just weren't happy with the results. So yeah, the scene where you only really see the look of this frightened child, it's so much more arresting emotional, like really really gripping scene, but in a sunny your anecdote in the movie, Young Ellie's father affectionately calls her Sparks. You know, a name for a radio operator. Uh Coincidentally, gentle Alone, the actress who plays Young Ellie is from Sparks, Nevada. I did not know that. And yet another uh large plane air Force one connection. She was the one who was supposed to play Harrisonford's daughter in Air Force One, but she turned it down because she thought the role was boring. It basically consisted of crying the whole movie, so she wanted to do something else, which I think is cool. But before we move on, we have to talk about by far and away, my favorite character in this movie. S R had Yes, John Hurt had no business going this hard in this movie, but hot damn. He is the slightly malevolent, seeming eccentric billionaire who's basically Ellie's guardian angel. He helps her solve some of the alien engineering problems and assists with helping her score funding. Uh. He's basically Howard Hughes with Keith Richard's voice. According to Robert Zemeckis, Hadden was based on what would happen if a Bill Gates type lost his mind? I think that was his almost direct quote. But yeah, this Hadden character, he's endlessly quotable. You know, first rule and government been spending. Why build one when you can have two for twice the price? But you said you were working on a John Hurt. I had a long time to make enemies, doctor, so many governments, business interests, even religious like you have to like put air in it, and you gotta like I'd like to see me to park this earth. I'm just remembering. I'll grant them my wish soon enough. I am not an animal. I am a human being. Uh. Yeah, let's see. There's there's a line when he says something. He says something that I kept using from via Vendetta, which was, we are being buried beneath the avalanche of your inadequacies and sparse your professional annotations, Mr Sunday are relevant. See me that it sounds like a slightly more sober Keith Richards like, that's what that sounds like. Uh, that's one of the ones that um Steve Coogan does in one of the trips, right, Oh, you're right, yes, yes. Jodie Foster first meets Hadden on his private jet parked on an airport tarmac. This is Van Nuys Airport in Burbank, which is where Casa Blanca was filmed, very famous historians. Yeah. Now, in the book, Hadden is in his fifties and in perfect health, and he decides to go into space orbit to extend his life, and at the end of the book he fakes his death, is cryogenically frozen and sent off into deep space, and hopes of becoming immortal when an advanced civilization comes upon his spaceship, which rules. But in the movie he has cancer and goes to live aboard the space station Mirror in order to prolong his life. Yes, Mirror nineties Russian space station Mirror making his first appearance on the pod Who remembers Mirror a friend of the pod? Mirror exactly? I mean, as I said, as an attendee of space Camp, I was very fascinated by Mirror, even though by many accounts it was kind of a trash heap. It literally caught fire in orbit at one point. So yeah, my main memory of Mirror is back in two thousand one when it was de orbited, which is a fancy way of saying that they were done with it and just let it fall back to Earth and to integrate upon re entry. Taco Bell put a giant floating forty by forty target in the South Pacific and if any fragments from the space station hit it, they said they would give everyone in the US a free taco. And this is per their VP of brand Communications, quote, Taco Bell is capturing the imagination of millions of people as they eagerly await mirrors returned to Earth. It's very optimistic way of phrasing it. If mirror rings our bell, we will offer a free taco to everyone in America. Sadly it did not. That is incredible, Yeah, no, it's that's incredible bit of marketing. But anyway back to contact. Mirror is where hadden't went to live at the remainder of his days, and in the scene when they have a a video conference call and when Ellie comes home to her apartment, it finds that somebody broke in and set up a satellite phone in her living room, which she's not as freaked out about as I would be. And they talked to Hadden and he's floating in his room up in mirror. It looks like really terrible c g I as he's floating around, but it's apparently real. They filmed this weightlessness by putting a camera on the floor pointing it up, and they had John Hurt hanging down from like a bungee cord. Cable and they moved them around and had him float around. I don't know why it looks so bad. It's always bothered me. This and Palmer Joss are the two parts of this movie that I love so much that just really annoyed me. Oh that's funny anyway. So we talked earlier about how the film is changes the ending of the book. In the book, it ends with the capsule returns to Earth with a small amount of sand on the floor, So that Sagan and Ann's unambiguous pitch to make sure that people knew that this thing actually happened. Now for the movie, the guy who wrote the first draft, how many drafts? Yeah, I was gonna say, one of the many differen drafts. He said that Sagan told him Carl was very specific to me when we were working that he absolutely wanted faith to be an issue, but ultimately what really happened to Ellie and the galaxy could be proven and it was real. Then Goldenberg, who does he had another one of the drafts, said there were a number of versions of this ending. He says he met with Steven Spielberg about it, and at one point Spielberg was considering doing the film because he wanted to make it. I guess the third of his trilogy about aliens close encounters, et and then contact and uh yeah. Zamachez ultimately got his way with making it an ambiguous ending. He said, I wouldn't dare to make it anything other than ambiguous, because it would just be false. I never got the sense that it was an ambiguous ending, though everybody on Earth sees her fall. Her raft just fall into the water, doesn't go anywhayer, doesn't visibly leave the planet. It all takes place in a matter of seconds. But the footage from her body camera, which is just static so it didn't actually capture anything, had hours and hours and hours of it. So I thought that was pretty unambiguous to me. No, because remember the Congression they formed the Congressional Committee is like, oh, they said it was a hoax designed by Hatton, right, so right. But then at the very after the conference is over, Angelabasas character has the National Security advisor into her office and was like, yeah, well we looked at the camera. You're right, it was static in it, but fourteen hours of it, how do you explain that? And that to me, I thought meant she went somewhere because the whole movie. I don't know. I mean, have you ever had like a mislabeled file on a camera that says it was recorded? I mean, I don't know. I mean I would agree with you if it wasn't for the fact Jodie Foster math McConaughey keep talking about Einstein's theory of relativity, about how if Ellie traveled X number of light years, she would come back four years older, but everyone on Earth will be fifty years older. So there's a lot of discussion about travel in the nature of time and how it gets the stored when you're going long distances and stuff. So if that hadn't been such a major theme in the movie, I would agree with you. But I have to assume because they laid the groundwork for that in so many scenes in the movie that this whole nature of it looked like a blink of an eye for us and I, as in the image that opens the movie. Every act of this movie starts with a close up on our ways I and then zooms out in the cosmos. So blink of an eye. Maybe that was some kind of an analogy. There was actually something that was a lot longer a lot more profound for Ellie. I don't know. I'm just we're just spit on here. No bad ideas in brain starring first up, best thought. Um, yeah, so you know, I don't know. You you think it's ambiguous. I don't know. I don't really care. I really know, because I think it's I think it's it's supposed to be all things to all people, right right. I mean, I do think that this whole movie, and I know I touched on this at the start of the episode, is such a beautiful depiction of the nature of faith. And that's faith and whatever you wanna call it, call it God, call it an experience, as Jodie Foster's character does when she testifies, she's I don't I don't know why. I can't explain it, but I had an experience. You know. There's that great bit of debate Socratic logic, I don't know what you want to call it, where Matthew McConaughey and Jodie Foster are arguing about the nature of faith at the beginning of the movie, and uh, and Jodie Foster's character says, you know, I only want to believe in things I can prove and McConaughey's character says, did you love your father? And you know she's kind of taken aback. Well, yeah, yeah I did. And he says, we'll prove it. And what do you say to that. I just thought that was such a brilliant way of illuminating that which can't be proven or quantified um. And that's such a part about this whole movie that I really like. Is somebody who again dedicated their life to science, and so many people think that science and faith. I won't call it religion. I'll say faith and science are diametrically opposed, and I think this movie argues against that. I think it gets back the way I said at the beginning of the episode. I think that you allow for things that that you don't know and can't explain. Yeah, I don't know. I never thought it was ambiguous. I always thought it was very clear that it was unexplained how that occurred, how it looked like a blink of an eye on Earth. But to her it had, however, many hours of footage of static that she had with her. But I, yeah, I don't know. Maybe again, maybe it says more about me in my view of space and faith and aliens and all that stuff. But well, I mean, regardless in pure movie the sense of the movie. Uh. And didn't like it. She said, I would have preferred the Yeah, Andrew, she said, I would have preferred the ending to be different. I think it's beautiful. But if Carl and I had been all powerful and Carl was healthy, if Carl and I had been all powerful, then I would have made it differently and he would have too. And that is sadly where we have to come to, um Man. You know, Carl went home. Um he on December six He died at the age of sixty two, literally working in providing notes on this film until about two weeks from his death. Um And it was, as you said, it was a miracle that he hung on as long as he did. Yeah. He was given I think something like six months to live when he was diagnosed in and he underwent bone male transplants, which are extremely painful, but they extended his life so that even though we didn't get to see his passion project completed, he got to see it in the final stages of it coming to get there, and he knew it was going to happen, which is you know, I think something that is loved ones took a lot of comfort from. Did they. I know they they blasted some of Geene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Treks Ashes into space. Did they do that for Carl Sagan? Oh that's a good question, no, because I mean they had a funeral for him. Um. Yeah, But I think they only took a little bit of rodenberries up in a later date. I don't know. Oh, there's blue marbles on it because of the the Perl blue marble. That's so sad. No, on his gravestone, people leave blue marbles there you go up to in Ithaca. Oh, man, I guess he was supposed to have a cameo in the movie in Contact as a member of the committee selecting the occupant for the space machine, but he died before the scene was filmed. But there's a photo of Sagan in Ellie's apartment. It was like a little tribute to him. And as you said earlier in the episode, the outfit that she wears while are you going for funds in the boardroom for for more money to uh, you know, to continue her work at CT is based on Carl's famous blazer and turtleneck, but Yeah, his widow Andreien had a cameo as one of the guests on the TV show Crossfire. So that was funny an insult, okay. So we mentioned earlier at the top of the episode the virial villain of Contact, Francis Ford Copa. Just days after Carl Sagan died, Dream was served court papers after getting back to their home in Ithaca after his funeral. H God Coppola was suing Sagan posthumously, along with Warner Brothers, who claims that he had the idea for Contact in nineteen and approached Sagan about collaborating on TV program for the Children's Television Workshop justifiably so and was pissed. Yes, she told e w all I can say is when a man writes a complaint with his lawyer while your husband is dying after a third bone marrow transplant and then waits for him to die so we can file it. It's outrageous. Also, it was for two d and fifty dollars, which seems like peanuts for Hollywood types. Like that's unless he was like still paying off Apocalypse now or so. Yeah, well, it's like it's like the the dr evil thing. He's like, we're going to sue him for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and they're like, for inces, you're you're the wine makes two thousand dollars like a quarter anyway, And would also later say I couldn't believe anyone could be so heartless. She said, I was deposed many times by his lawyers, and I'd be sitting there in the months following Carl's death, when I was just barely holding it together in such pain and despair. They would show me manuscripts of Carl's with his beautiful little Brooklyn Public School handwriting in the corners, and I would just start weeping at the sight of it. Oh, this really makes me hate Coppola. That's just furious. May we all have a love supure that our loved ones weep at the sight of our handwriting. That hurts? Yeah, Ope, said said. Nobody took it very seriously, but it was very vicious. Um he sued and lost. I was dismissed in the judge. This is really weird. The judge actually agreed that Carl Sagan had violated some terms of the contract with Coppola, but he also said the couple had waited too long to file his suit, and it's believed that the root of all this involves Pinocchio. Couple really wanted to make I guess it was his childhood dream to do a live action film based on Pinocchio because this was the period. But he was just going hard on literary classics. He'd done Brams Focus, Dracula, Secret Garden, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He either directed or produced the and so a movie version of Pinocchio was the one that he really wanted to do, but Warner Brothers said they owned the rights and prevented him from making the film in another studio. That's a gross oversimplification of this not very interesting contractual wrangling, but that's the gist. Couple wanted to make Pinocchio and sued Carl Sagan's widow when he couldn't. It's that's that's just Graham, especially when you think of Copple as someone who's like a tour like art above all else. It's like you he's seen Godfather three? Well, uh or Jack, I said, Jack bumped me out. Anyway, we have to get out of this somehow. The crew literally raced to the last minute to finish this movie. U s f X supervisor Ralston said that when it premiered in August of it had shots in it that weren't finished, but he said no one could tell. The movie nearly doubled it's ninety million budget the box office, although it did come into second to Men and Black and Uh. Linda Hopes in particular was upset that it was upstaged by Independence Day. She has a tremendous quote. We all talked about Contact, wanting to beat the stupid version Independence Day, which had come out of here earlier and been a big hit. It's a movie that I irrationally despised for this reason. I hated them disproving Coral Carl believed that if you gave somebody entertainment that stimulated their cerebral cortex, made them have to think in a thrilling way, it would be more successful than appealing to their reptilian brain. I wanted Contact to be number one. Then it opened against Men and Black and came in second. It made me really angry for a long time that the stupid movies won, which I don't think is entirely fair. Independence Day is stupid. Men and Black is much less stupid. Yes, us they called men and Black Independence Day for smart people, So I will stand by that. Yeah. While we're on the topic of snubs. For this movie, Jodie Foster failed to receive apparently much anticipated OSCAR nomination for her performance as Ellie air Away. Some have speculated that this is because she was pregnant at the time and refused to name the father, which was viewed by many as confirming that she was a lesbian, a fact which she had not corroborated at that time. So there's the possibility that this stigma was the reason why she was snubbed. I really hope that's not the case, but I wouldn't put it past anybody. Yeah, I have no I did some googling around on that thing. I was not able to find anything about that, but I'm sure somebody said it at some point in Hollywood. Yeah, but there is still a happy coda to the story of contact. Nearly fifteen years later, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California was hit with some budget cuts both federal and on the state level. Basically had to stop operating in April two eleven, but they put out a public camp pain for funds, launching their website and with a goal of two dollars, and they received two three thousand dollars in donations from just over one of whom was Jodie Foster. She really was good to go. Oh God, that I mean, they'll look good to go. That voice coming through the static and the noise just I'm good to go, I'm good to go. It just gets mean. She should have gotten an oscar for that scene when she's finally out there and this look of I don't know how to describe it. It transcends childlike wonder when she's just experiencing space and these other galaxies. It's beautiful, and she has that incredible choked line. You know, no words should have sent a poet one of our favorite lines from this movie, right, Yeah. I love that line, and I was trying to find where it may have actually come. I don't think that it did. There's a message board thread with a couple of different things. You know, Walter Cronkite may have said it at one point, referring to the first manned space flights. He said, uh, those of us on Earth wondered how it looked the poets. I there's a book by Nancy Friedman called Joshua, Son of None, which is a sci fi novel from Entree with a contains the line of dialogue astronaut. That kind of job, astronaut is for the technician type without the imagination to be scared. Another character replies, you're wrong. What better place for a poet than space? Uh. There's a short story called a Rose for Ecclesiastes from nineteen sixty three by Rogers Lasnie where they send a poet to Mars. Oh, here's one. Here's an unattributed claim for Um. Sergei kora Leev, who is the chief designer and scientists behind the Soviet space race, once remarked they should have sent a poet and not a pilot. So I don't know. I could see Carl Sagan wanting to bridge the space race, you know, American Russians, but incorporating that quote. That's interesting. Well, folks, if you can pin down the exact origin in that phrase, we'll send you five bucks. There's I just want to end with um, a line that Karl Sagan said at one point said sometimes to me, I feel like this sums up the generous, imaginative spirit of the right kind of scientist. He said, science is sometimes attacked for supposed arrogance, but I think it's the most humble occupation and discipline around because instead of trying to impose our preconceptions on the universe, we are open for the universe to see what the universe has to offer. Go outside and look up at space tonight. Yeah, everyone should just do that, and uh, you know, use that to try and fight the miserable pool towards our that the rest of your work, the rest of your work week will impose upon you. Yeah. I don't know. This is an uncharacteristically sincere episode from US. I have nothing snark you to offer. And when you do come back inside, watch this movie again. It holds up man. Yeah, well, folks, thank you for listening. As always, this has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Wes Bendenton, at Last, Baston and