Member-only story
CONTACT WITH CARL SAGAN ON THE FLIPSIDE
This essay, CONTACT WITH CARL SAGAN ON THE FLIPSIDE is in honor of the 25th anniversary of the film “CONTACT.”
PUTTING THE ATOMS TOGETHER JUNE 29, 2022
‘No Aliens, No Spaceships, No Invasion of Earth’ An oral history of Contact, the sci-fi movie that defied Hollywood norms and made it big anyway.
By Rachel Handler — June 29, 2022
The article about the history of the film CONTACT begins this way:
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan — a world-famous astronomer and a former creative director at NASA, respectively — could never have anticipated the bliss and chaos that lay ahead when, sitting by a pool one night in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, they decided to co-write a movie about a “spiky” female scientist journeying to the center of the cosmos. What would it look like if we made definitive contact with aliens, they wondered, but only one person experienced it? It took Sagan, Druyan, and a litany of writers, producers, and directors nearly two decades to answer the question. Much like humanity’s interminable search to find intelligent life beyond Earth, the quest to make Contact was marked by heartbreak, hubris, meddling suits, and moments of sublime.
The problems were myriad. At the time, Hollywood was accustomed to journeymen and this was a story about a…