SOURCE: "Carl Sagan's Guided Tour of the Universe," in American Film, Vol. 5, June, 1980, pp. 22-7.

[In the following essay, Cook examines Sagan's popular presentation of science and astronomy on the television program Cosmos.]

This fall, when PBS launches Cosmos, its most ambitious series to date, the total effect may be a little like a thirteen-week funding appeal. But there will be no ringing telephones or heartfelt solicitations. The new show is far slicker than that. In fact, it may just be the slickest production of its kind ever undertaken on either side of the Atlantic. And why not? The driving force behind Cosmos, the man who will smile at you week after week during this guided tour of the universe, is none other than Carl Sagan, television's top pitchman for science.

Sagan, no less than Carroll O'Connor or Mary Tyler Moore, is a television phenomenon. Still boyish, though now in his forties, this professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences at Cornell University (where he heads its Laboratory for Planetary Studies) has made frequent appearances on the "Today" show, "The Dick Cavett Show," and has practically graduated to guest host status on "The Tonight Show." Because of his fluency, articulateness, and ready wit, he has become the unofficial spokesman for the entire scientific community. If the American public elected the top scientist the way it does the president of the United States, then Carl Sagan would win hands down.

Sagan means to use every ounce of his considerable clout in the service of science. He sees the series as a grand opportunity to remind that vast taxpaying public of the importance of science, the grand adventure of it, at a time when the public seems to have lost its enthusiasm for the ambitious programs of space exploration he is advocating. Cosmos is so much bread upon the water. Only time will tell if this sort of soft sell-cum-audience education will really pay off. Sagan will only know it has paid off when the appropriations start rolling in.

Cosmos is so much Carl Sagan's baby that it may astonish his fans to learn that the putative father wasn't present at the precise moment of conception. That honor goes to a twenty-nine-year-old producer at KCET, Los Angeles's innovative public television station. Greg Andorfer had done some work on "The Age of Uncertainty," the series on economics with John Kenneth Galbraith, which was essentially a BBC project. He wondered why that sort of series—"the large intellectual landscape thing that television does best"—was always done by the BBC. Why, he asked himself, can't we do it, too?

He thought about the right sort of subject for such a series, recognizing that what he was after would have to be a so-called created documentary. It wasn't simply out there for the shooting a la Robert Flaherty. What, then?

"Astronomy!" Andorfer said, snapping his fingers, as he recalled, during a recent interview, the moment Cosmos was created. "It not only has to do with science but with the big questions that people ask in religion, et cetera." Practically in the same instant he thought of the subject, he began to consider who might be the right host for a show with such a broad subject.

At first, a number of science fiction writers came to mind—Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Fred Hoyle (who doubles as an astronomer). "Then," Andorfer said, "I thought of what should have been obvious right from the start—that Carl Sagan was the right one. I got together with him, and a couple of years later, here we are, finishing up the series."

"Well," he added, "it wasn't quite as easy as all that. We had to raise a $180,000 planning grant for the thirteen shows we had in mind. And then we did the serious business of going out and finding the money for the shows themselves. The entire series was budgeted at $8 million."

That makes it the most costly project ever undertaken by public television. It is being underwritten by the Atlantic Richfield Company, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Coproducing the series and contributing to it modestly are the BBC and West Germany's Polytel International. KCET, however, is shouldering the greatest part of the burden. Its facilities (formerly Monogram Studios in the Silverlake district of Los Angeles) and its staff are now being taxed to the limit by the project.

The show's shooting schedule, stretched out over a year, called for more than forty locations all over the world. For instance, a sequence was shot in the Cavendish Laboratories in Cambridge, England. Scenes were filmed in Italy for a segment on the life of Leonardo da Vinci, and in Czechoslovakia and West Germany for the life of Johannes Kepler. And so on, in Egypt, India, Greece, and in locations all around the United States.

By far the biggest single item on the production budget, however, is the one labeled "special effects." Even a movie like Star Wars offered only minutes of special effects. But Cosmos, because of its nature and length, will offer two and a half hours of movie magic metered out as needed through the series' thirteen hours. This will include computer animation handled at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Magicam miniature work at Paramount, and optics done at Motion Pictures, Inc. There, Jamie Shourt and Robert Blalack, who both worked on special effects for Star Wars, were involved in the production of a whole array of special effects for Cosmos—among them, and most spectacular of all, the so-called cosmic zoom.

What is it? Greg Andorfer describes it as a "sports car ride from one edge of the universe to the other." A voyage from here to eternity may not be possible in actuality, but its simulation will be at least technologically accurate. Carl Sagan and his staff have taken great pains to see to that. The idea was that the space vessel on which we travel with him through the universe must steer a course that is both feasible and reasonably direct. All told, it took about half a year just to plan. On screen it will occupy only twenty-five minutes of a single show.

Nowhere was this attention to detail and accuracy more evident than in the work I saw when I went with Greg Andorfer to the studios of Motion Pictures, Inc. In front of a wall of storyboards from the cosmic zoom sequence, my guide traced the course through successive shots. "We live on the upper edge of the third spiral arm of the Milky Way," Andorfer said. "It's four-and-a-half light-years to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri—nearest besides the sun. of course. But just look at all the stars there are!"

His hand swept in an arc at the renderings that surrounded us. Stars shone down from every side. "There are probably ten planets around each star in the universe," he explained. "Consider the number of stars. Why, it's almost impossible that there is not other life in our galaxy."

That would qualify in certain scientific circles as rank Saganism. And, indeed, Carl Sagan's philosophy and speculations have permeated not only the narrative portions of Cosmos, but also the thinking and talking of many of those connected with the series. This seems particularly the case with Andorfer, who quotes him often and in detail. Sagan, in fact, will seldom be offscreen during the show's thirteen hours. Even during the cosmic zoom, for example, the astronomer will be on screen most of the time pointing out the sights as they pass by. Galaxies will flash by in animation and by rear projection.

"We're shooting Carl on a huge Chroma-Key stage," Andorfer said. "On another stage we're shooting the background model. We can cut back and forth to Carl in close-up, too. That will work a lot better than just voice-over. As we go along, and he comments, we'll project lights on his face in close-up and get a real sense of drama."

On the way back to KCET, Andorfer talked about the role played by special effects in the Cosmos series: "The main point in the effects is not to get stuck on one process. We use one and then another and combine some. We're using a conventional animation stand, a horizontal animation stand, computer animation in multi-axis and multi-plane, and motion-repeating photography with models or artwork. In other words, it's a wide palette of techniques, and we're trying hard to use all the colors available to us."

Once back, we looked in on a sound stage where another, slightly more primitive sort of special effects shooting was under way, involving miniatures, models, and tabletop photography. Earlier Andorfer had shown me a miniature of a Martian canyon—"a tributary of Valles Marineris, the largest canyon on Mars." It had been done by artist Don Davis, who used the latest flyby pictures of the red planet to ensure accuracy. On the sound stage, a crew was filming a much more fanciful sort of model.

"This is a Martian city we're shooting," Andorfer explained, waving his hand over a big horizontal representation of a slightly dilapidated art deco city of the future. It would be used to present the ideas of Percival Lowell and others who were sure the "canals" of Mars confirmed the presence of intelligent life. "They were wrong, of course, but their notions provided a great incentive to explore space," Andorfer said. Why a dilapidated model? To represent, Andorfer explained, "that the ideas are discredited, so the Mars they envisioned is in a state of disrepair."

The crew shooting the sequence was also getting it all down on videotape beforehand, just to make sure it looked right before they shot the film. The playback of the sequence, however, didn't come close to satisfying the large Englishman who was in charge.

His name was Adrian Malone. As a BBC producer, he was responsible, along with Michael Gill, for the many "large intellectual landscape" series produced by the network. Between them they account for (among others) "Civilisation," "America," "The Ascent of Man," and "The Age of Uncertainty." The two are now out on their own developing projects. Malone himself, as executive producer, has been seeing Cosmos through from start to finish. As resident catalyst and all-around wizard on Cosmos, he was a very busy man, and an interview, it turned out, took weeks to arrange.

When at last I sat across the desk from him, Adrian Malone barely noticed me for the first few minutes, so intent was he on telling a telephone caller just what he thought of the quality of a sequence he had viewed. "It looked like a bloody carpet commercial," he roared. "When we wanted it out of focus, it was sharp as a wink. You knew what we wanted."

After a few more choice comments, he abruptly hung up. Then he smiled and shrugged. "Well," he said, "there you have me in action." Malone joined the Cosmos project after he decided to leave the BBC and come to work in this country. Andorfer called him and sent him the plans for the show. "Then," Malone recalled, "I met Carl Sagan and Gentry Lee, who is his partner, in New York, and they said great things. But when I realized that the whole thing was not formed, and they didn't want me to come in and just put their ideas down on film, but wanted me to contribute, then I was taken with the idea."

What got him interested in a scientific series was an incident during the shooting of "Civilisation." Malone recalled, "Sir Kenneth Clark was being filmed in the Rotunda room in Greenwich, going from a painting on one side of the room to one on the other. In the exact center of the room was one of the early instruments used in computing Greenwich mean time. He stopped a moment in mid-passage, looked at it rather blankly, and said, 'This seems to be a scientific object of some sort.' Well, I mean, really! This smug ignorance on the part of so many of the most cultured people about the things in this world that affect their lives most directly." How did he collaborate with Carl Sagan? "My practice is usually to write a lot of stuff in the way of notes, treatments, and suggestions," Malone said, "and then get together with the intellectual mentor—in this case, Sagan. What complicated this was the distance factor. We met again, though, a number of times in Ithaca, New York, and I would go tramping up and down the hills with him, back and forth between his office and the Howard Johnson's where I was staying. What we were doing, actually, was making stories out of the material. It's my contention, you see, that if you can't make something into a story, then you can't properly communicate it."

"In the end," he continued, "Carl wrote the right-hand side, and I did the visuals. Then I dictated the treatment, which went to 350 pages. The budget was done from this, the right people were brought in, everything was storyboarded, and locations were chosen."

The treatment called for millions of dollars' worth of special effects. Malone's BBC projects had required little in the way of movie magic, and this presented some problems at first. "When I first came into it," he said, "I was not up to Hollywood's standards on special effects. But I did know what we wanted and needed, and I was willing to be unpleasant if that was what it took to get it." In one instance, not satisfied with one outfit's work, Malone said, "I rebuilt their machinery and retrained their people. No doubt about it, though. This is where the best work is done, right here in Hollywood."

Adrian Malone is so satisfied with what Hollywood has to offer that he intends to make it his home base as he continues to work with Michael Gill on their many projects. These include two on the drawing board, a series on myth with the anthropologist Joseph Campbell, and another on the future of world energy with economist Daniel Yergin; and two screenplays, one a science fiction piece and the other about Jebe the Arrow, a lieutenant of Genghis Khan's.

At one point, I had asked Adrian Malone to characterize his relationship with Carl Sagan, and he brought up Jacob Bronowski, with whom he had worked on "The Ascent of Man." "Jacob and I were quite close, rather a father and son sort of relationship," he said. "Sometimes I didn't like him, but I always loved him. With Carl, however, it was quite different. We are, for one thing, in the same age bracket. There are rivalries and territories to be defended. The relationship is sometimes an acerbic and tense one, but it is creative tension."

"Carl is intellectually ambitious," he added. "One can see that from his books. What it's been like on Cosmos is having two fairly mettlesome horses put together to pull a carriage. We get going at a hell of a speed, but we're often out of step, and there's some danger the carriage may tip over. We have different styles. When I go at a canter, he may gallop."

Carl Sagan, in the judgment of his scientific colleagues, always seems to be going at a gallop. But they disagree on his direction. One of them, in Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr.'s New Yorker profile of Sagan, calls him "the greatest menace since the black plague." Another, in the same profile, offers this defense: "Someone has to propose ideas at the boundaries of the plausible, in order to so annoy the experimentalists or observationalists that they'll be motivated to disprove the idea. Otherwise, there is a powerful temptation for an experimenter to design experiments for just what he knows."

The point is that Sagan's views on the cosmos are controversial. But he is so boyish, so winning, so persuasive that an audience may not always make a distinction between Sagan's speculations and scientific facts.

He is a self-described "carbon chauvinist." That is, he believes profoundly in the existence, somewhere out there, of intelligent life based on a chemical equation not totally unlike our own. With the intention of proving this, he has trained not only in astronomy (his primary field), but also in biology and chemistry. Cooper quotes one of Sagan's colleagues on the 1976 Viking mission as saying, "Sagan desperately wants to find life someplace, anyplace—on Mars, on Titan, in the solar system or outside it. In all the divergent things he does, that is the unifying thread…. People say, 'What a varied career he has had,' but everything he has done has had this underlying purpose."

It was during that mission, in which Sagan played such an important part, that he determined to make use of television in order to spread his ideas and advance the cause of science.

"I was working with Gentry Lee of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena," Sagan recalled recently. "We were both on the imaging team for the Viking lander. Gentry was in charge of engineering. And here it was, an epochal mission, and we were both very disappointed at the way it was presented to the public. We naturally thought about how we would do it ourselves. And this thinking got so serious that we formed a production company, intending to present something, a special or a series, not just on the planets but on the cosmos. And that's how we came here."

Carl Sagan was talking to me in his office at KCET, which he shares with his personal staff and two writers who assisted him on "Cosmos." ("Steve Soter and Annie Druyan did some ten percent of it. She did the Alexandria library sequence. It's good.") But Sagan himself was rarely in. He spent most of his time, when in town, on the sound stage.

But as production was winding down, he spent more and more time out of town, shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles and the East Coast, and hiding out wherever he could to write. He was finishing up the book version of Cosmos, which he insists will not be just a transcription of his scripts, but rather an amplification of them.

Sagan described the upcoming series as "a general view of the universe," moving from the atom to the cosmos. "We'll be treating historical things," he explained with characteristic enthusiasm, "and a great many of the big questions."

Such as? "Well, such as the likelihood of making contact with life on other planets," he replied. "What will such contact mean? Will there be a high level of technology? Can they teach us? Keep us from destroying ourselves? Politics becomes quite important in this. In fact, there's hardly a field of human endeavor that's not involved in the implications and ramifications of this single question." But he added, "Some things we're doing just because they're fun—or beautiful, or interesting. Yes, doing something to increase the audience's understanding—now, that's fun."

Had he found it a problem tailoring technical material to a general audience? "What my experience has indicated is that people are a whole lot smarter than they are given credit for," Sagan said. "For a scientist to explain what he knows requires a certain mind cast. You have to remember what your mind was like just before you understood what you now know. It's just a matter of getting it across with a little creative effort, with visuals and metaphors and asking questions. It's a particular kind of writing, certainly, but I don't find it much different from the kind of thing that I do off the cuff on the Carson show."

"We're not just presenting conclusions to the audience," he explained. "We're also trying to get across the method by which the conclusions are reached. In my opinion, the fun of understanding is built in to every one of us. Some have it beaten out of them in schools, but everyone is basically a scientist. It's how we understand the world. That's what we're assuming. That's what we're building on. I can't predict how successful we'll be in communicating these concepts to a large audience, but from my previous experience, I'd say we'll be very successful."

Sagan gave one example of the show's methods. "For instance," he said, "we discuss astrology as we lead in to astronomy—in this way, using what people know about to get them to understand what they don't. In the same way a lot of kids are turned on to science by science fiction in books and movies. This future-oriented aspect is vital for young people. They have to live in the future. They have to start thinking, What if?"

Cosmos hopes to get people to consider the possibilities in somewhat the same way that science fiction does. "One theme in the series," Sagan said, "is the playfulness and the sense of fun in science. A lot of science fiction films have this. Star Wars did. It was not the least bit pretentious, and it got a lot of science wrong. And every time this happens, they've lost an opportunity to teach, an opportunity to get across the tremendous, real possibilities of science. We're going to get it right. We're also going to keep that sense of fun and enthusiasm and get it across to the audience."

In this way, Sagan hopes to win an audience for science. "Real science," he said. "This is an area where individuals matter. Maybe out of all the millions of people we interest, a few thousand will choose careers in science. Maybe a hundred of those will make real contributions. Out of that hundred—who knows? An Einstein? A Kepler?" Or, at least, a couple of Sagans.