Star Stuff: An Exploratory Case Study of the Cosmos Television Franchise

Ann Druyan's Work After Sagan's Death

You are now situated in the section of this project devoted to Ann Druyan’s work after Carl Sagan’s death. Despite Sagan’s optimism about his two-year battle with myelodysplastic syndrome, the weakening of his immune system brought on by chemotherapy therapy led to his death from pneumonia on December 20th, 1996. Below is an article announcing his death on CNN’s website.

Sagan’s reflections on his battle with the disease are chronicled in the final chapter of his last book, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium. The book, which was released in 1997, served as a collection of essays that ended with an epilogue from Druyan. The epilogue described their final moments together and her subsequent grief after his loss. Some of what she said was further recounted in a passage from the 2020 Cosmos: Possible Worlds companion book. I've added the quotation from the pages here.

Carl made me want to be the best human being I could be. Every loving thing that one of us did made the other want to go higher. My writing, which had been precious and agonizing, became liberated from my often crippling self-consciousness. I no longer strived to impress. I only wanted to communicate, to connect with the reader. And from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage onward, my work became a daily love offering to Carl. When we wrote together, I would watch him read my day’s output. Sometimes he would burst out laughing, or gesture as if tipping his hat to me, and my heart would soar. I know he felt the same way about my joy in his work. … We had 20 years until his death made me a permanent exile from that world we discovered together. I was suicidal. But our children were still young and as their mother I had no choice but to live. So I carried what I learned with Carl inside me and have done my best to keep his flame burning. I rededicated my life to continuing the work we had done together (Druyan, 2020, p.354-355).

Less than a year after Sagan’s death, the film adaptation of his novel, Contact, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, was released on July 11th, 1997. The book was originally conceived as a film by Druyan and Sagan in the early 1980s. They co-wrote the screenplay together, and Sagan presented a lecture on the science behind the story to the film crew. The movie’s portrayal of a nonviolent alien encounter founded on realistic scientific concepts divided critics and audiences alike. I have included a two-minute trailer for the film below, which you are welcome to check out.

Druyan’s renewed dedication to Sagan’s legacy began with the founding of Cosmos Studios in 2000. One of the first projects by this new production company was, called OneCosmos. OneCosmos is a multimedia project that attempts to bring science communication into the ‘.com’ era. For this project, Druyan partnered with an eccentric Silicon Valley entrepreneur named, Joe Firmage. In 1990, Joe Firmage left the $2 billion company he co-founded because of concerns about his belief in a government conspiracy to hide UFOs. It’s hard to ascertain how the OneCosmos website worked from what little remains on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. However, I was able to find a rather eerie final blog post on March 2nd, 2001, by Firmage after the project folded in less than a year. The post begins with Firmage reminiscing about the first time he entered the OneCosmos office and racially profiled an African American pedestrian from his window. His assessment of the man’s inadequate lifestyle, income, and intelligence is then used as a segue to discuss his short-lived hopes of educating the public. The post concludes by discussing how problems acquiring investors, due in part to Firmage’s controversial beliefs about UFOs, led to the project’s demise. The full post is available for you to read below at your discretion. 
After OneCosmos, Cosmos Studios would go on to work on two other major projects. The first was a documentary titled, The Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt. This documentary follows an expedition to discover a new species of dinosaurs by a team of paleontologists. The documentary was narrated by Matthew McConaughey and premiered on October 8th, 2002, through the A&E network. It was also accompanied by the release of a companion book. You can view the first two minutes of the documentary below.
After the Lost Dinosaurs of Egypt was released, the other major project Cosmos Studios worked on was an attempt at private space exploration. They planned to launch their own spacecraft in collaboration with an organization co-founded by Sagan in 1980 called, the Planetary Society. The ship would utilize solar sailing technology to gain propulsion from the rays emitted by the sun. However, it failed to reach orbit after takeoff. This ship was called, Cosmos 1, and a host of multimedia projects were planned around it. One such project was an interactive web page that was created using the now discontinued Adobe Flash platform. The page serves as a comprehensive overview of the project’s objectives. Users could select a topic by clicking on any of the ship’s eight solar sails. There is also an interactive timeline at the bottom to learn about all the scientific advancements over the decades that made the mission possible. The only way to currently view this page is to use a Flash emulator. I have gone through the process of emulating the page and capturing it for you to view below as an unlisted YouTube video. You can pause the video to read the text of any parts you are interested in. What you see in the video is every part of the page that is still viewable. All links to other pages and the interactive timeline at the bottom do not work properly in this version. If you would like to browse the project yourself, you will need to download your own Flash emulator and go to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine link in the video’s description.
Following the loss of the Cosmos 1 spacecraft, Druyan continued to make media appearances throughout the latter part of the 2000s. The bulk of the appearances was spent promoting renditions of her earlier collaborations with Sagan. For example, here’s a minute-long promotional video she did for a Science Channel marathon of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. This concludes the section of this project devoted to the work of Druyan after Sagan’s death. If you would like to continue to the section on a new Cosmos series with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth MacFarlane, you can click the blue button at the bottom of the screen. You can also explore whichever sections you are most interested in by returning to the Launch Point or using the drop-down menu at the top of the screen.

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