Well, it is a week full of premieres, it seems, all with a little personal flavour for me, but possibly of wider interest. I’m talking about two TV shows and a movie.
The movie is going to be out in theatres at the end of the week, and it is called “Being Elmo”, co-directed by Phillip Shane and co-written by Phillip Shane and Justin Weinstein, two friends of mine who are flying into LA for the premiere. It is about Kevin Clash, the guy who operates the Elmo muppet. In short, it is a film that people seem to be really enjoying (it won the special jury prize at Sundance, and was a finalist for the Humanitas prize), and I can’t wait to see it! I worked with Phil on a two hour Einstein special that aired on the History Channel a while back (see Equation Wrangler), and so I know his working style a bit, and the results are great – so I think this’ll be really good!
The new Nova mini-series based on Brian Greene’s second book “The Fabric of the Cosmos” begins this week. They do a very good job, working closely with Brian to produce a show of rather high quality. I hope they do a good job (as you can see from the picture, they’ve got Brian to reveal his superpowers on screen – we’re not supposed to do that Brian!). It should be interesting to see, I think. I can’t recall if I mentioned, but I filmed some contributions for it last year, and some of that will be in the first episode (and I think the fourth). (You may recall that they extracted some of my interview where I was talking about Multiverses and made an online segment. See here.)
Finally, I heard from the History Channel that the first of the season 7 “The Universe” episodes will air tonight on H2. It is the one entitled “Nemesis”. I did a segment for it some time back in the Summer where I was working with firefighters, getting up insanely early in the morning, and lighting fires… I hope it is a good episode! (See Firestarter.)
By the way, I think Nova is launching a new blog as well, with contributions from several physicists (myself included), but I do not know when it premieres. I’ll update you when it does since I think there’ll be some interesting material there. I’ll be doing one or two pieces of an unusual nature…
Enjoy!
-cvj
🙂
Sorry as you said earlier his operator Kevin – good cook!
Just watching Elmo and his creator on an episode of Ina Garten’s Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics. Good food – love Elmo all over again!
Go on, cvj, show your superpowers!!! I hope it was enjoyed by one and all and hope they air in the UK soon! Looking forward to it. cmj+
Brian Green obviously belongs to the X-men 😉 …
I could name some others who to not use their power that spectacularly in the public 🙂 …
It`s better for them to stay in the background behind the scene.
It is well known that ordinary people usually dont understand the kind of the X-men leading them to be jaleous or afraid of them etc …
Cheers
Well, in addition to letting me set fires, they let me build a time machine one time (http://asymptotia.com/2010/07/11/tales-from-the-industry-xxxii-a-matter-of-time/), and also adjust the local laws of physics so that the top speed on a bike was the speed of light (http://asymptotia.com/2008/11/25/tales-from-the-industry-xxvii-light-speed/), and so on and so forth… so they are very flexible…. 🙂
(Seriously, the filmmakers/writers come up with ideas, sometimes based on suggestions or at least working with the regular scientists on the show, and it goes from there… they have a budget, and the History Channel has a budget, and they work it out amongst themselves….)
-cvj
Well, Nemesis is actually the 2nd and the 1st called Catastrophes that Changed the Planets aired a week ago. Anyways, I appreciate these kind of documents and work you scientists put into this science popularization. One question If I may ask. I assume they give you a couple of questions/problems which you have to explain and demonstrate for the “casual” viewer of that show. Have you ever been rejected with your explanation/demonstration? I mean if you wanted to fly to Antarctica to demonstrate something and they told you we do not have so much money etc ;). Or they allow you to do what you want without any complains?