Cosmic Perspective: An Interview with Ann Druyan
By: Dale DobsonThe intelligent, articulate Ann Druyan, CEO of Cosmos Studios, graciously gave digitallyOBSESSED.com some time recently to discuss Cosmos, the landmark TV series she co-created with her husband, the late Dr. Carl Sagan. The complete Cosmos series has recently been remastered and released on DVD. Our conversation has been edited slightly for continuity and clarity.
dOc: It's great to see Cosmos back in circulation on DVD.
Druyan: I have a favorite episode—Episode II is my absolute favorite. I just think it's—first of all, it's so amazing that, after twenty of the most eventful years in the history of science, this episode on the search for life and the origin of life and the search for life elsewhere holds up so well. It's such a testament to Carl.
dOc: I watched the series with the "science update subtitles" turned on and was impressed by how little updating you had to do.
Druyan: Isn't it amazing? Every time I think about how much abuse Carl took for being so speculative, I just, like, mentally—I don't believe in the afterlife at all, but I'm saying mentally, in my heart, "Really, Carl—nice work!"
dOc: Tell us about your involvement with Cosmos.
Druyan: We co-wrote the series with Steve Soter, an astronomer with whom I still work; in fact, Steve and I—I don't know if you've been to the glorious new Hayden Planetarium in New York at the American Museum of Natural History, but it's said by many to be the absolutely unparalleled virtual reality site on the planet. Steve and I had the honor of writing the inaugural show [Passport to the Universe] for this three-dimensional tour through the entire visible universe. So we wrote that together, and Steve wrote the Cosmos series with Carl and with me.
The way that we worked was essentially together—although much of what Cosmos is is a distillation of Carl's thinking and writing career, which certainly predates my involvement in the subject, and of course he brought, too, something very special as a scientist—he actually did original work.
But what we did was discuss all of the themes of Cosmos, writing them on a giant board, then went through a kind of thrilling and agonizing winnowing process of thinking of what the most important elements of the series were, and finding the story in all of these subjects, which I think was key to its success. Then we just divvied up the sequences—that's how Carl and I always wrote together. We wrote the story for Contact, which began as a 100-and-something page treatment, which we co-authored long before it ever came to the screen or even became a novel.
And the way we always did this—we also wrote one of the scripts for Contact—was to take the chapters, or the sequences, and put them all up on—usually a whiteboard, which was easy to erase—and put a little A or a C next to each and every one of them. And the idea was that next time we saw each other we'd begin chipping away at the A's and C's until they were complete. Then we exchanged the manuscripts and each of us did our own suggestions. By the time we'd finished any book we wrote together, or television or motion picture project, there had usually been at least 25 separate iterations of scripts or manuscripts. And by the time we were done, it was invariable that one of us would say to the other, "You know, my favorite part is that part you wrote in such-and-such" And the other would say, "No, no—you wrote that!" And it went back and forth, and we just had such a fantastic, joyful odyssey together on all of these projects.
dOc: One of the things that always comes through is Carl's...Dr. Sagan's—
Druyan: Please, he wouldn't have let you call him Dr. Sagan—he would have insisted you call him Carl.
dOc: Carl's ability to communicate on a deep level with his audience. I have a friend who was 12 or 13 when the series originally aired, and it was a life-changing event for him; he's a teacher now. Do you get a lot of testimonials of that sort?
Druyan: A huge, huge amount. And it never ceases to thrill me, every time. It's worldwide, it's global. It comes from all different kinds of people. There seems to be no demographic women as much as men, which I find—others tell me, it's very unusual for the subject matter.
dOc: Cosmos in many ways took that for granted
Druyan: Precisely. You're so right. In fact, one of the things I'm most proud of in contributing to Cosmos was that when I came onboard, it was in the very earliest days, before even the "reccies," the reconnaissances, had begun to be done in any of the areas, places we hoped to shoot; in the very beginning, before the bible for the show was written, and it was called Man and the Cosmos. And one of the first things I said was, "Hey, fellas, better get rid of that 'Man and the'—you're gonna feel really stupid in 20 years!" And I'm very proud of the fact that that proved to be correct. And relieved, actually.
dOc: Did you have any idea what the impact of Cosmos was going to be during the production process?
Druyan: I have to say that, from Day One, from the first meeting which involved, I'd say, between thirty and forty people hired to work on Cosmos, from the gofers to the people who were directing and producing and writing it—and Carl, because he was a very religiously non-hierarchical person, and actually was authentic in that regard. He wanted to hear from each and every single person of what their expectations were for the what they most wanted to see the project accomplish.
And that was a religious experience, because what was clear was—first of all, that everyone was saying everyone who works in television has had the experience of being forced to work on something that they had absolutely no conviction about, and maybe even were a little ashamed of what it was. And here were 40 people who felt an almost sacred sense of the opportunity to be actually doing something that they would do with all their hearts, even if nobody—if they could afford to, if nobody was paying them.
So as we went around this very, very long table which was set up in a perfect square, from person to person, it was clear that everybody really felt like they were participating in something that would really change our civilization in some way. I guess that's a common feeling on lots of projects, and some of them actually do. But with Cosmos, I guess we felt that the need for this kind of consciousness was so urgent and that for us it was—from Day One it was a completely spiritual undertaking. Because when we were reviewing the great scheme of cosmic evolution as revealed by science, which for many of us really is the defining—the fact that we've been able to grasp this to the extent, to the limited extent that we do is for me the defining spiritual event of our epoch. We've reconstructed our past, which is mostly obliterated. That science can do that is such a holy thing.
