Bill Nye: Science Guy | |
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Directed by | David Alvarado Jason Sussberg |
Produced by | David Alvarado Seth Gordon Kate McLean Nick Pampenella Jason Sussberg |
Starring | Bill Nye |
Production companies | Structure Films Exhibit A Complex Corporation The Redford Center |
Distributed by | PBS |
Release date |
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Running time | 101 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Bill Nye: Science Guy is a 2017 American biographical documentary film produced and directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg [1] [2] of structure films, and produced by Seth Gordon, Kate McLean and Nick Pampenella. [2] [3] The documentary concept was pitched to the film's subject, Bill Nye, by Alvarado, Sussberg, and Gordon at a hotel bar in San Francisco in October 2014. [4] Upon release, it was selected as a NYT Critic's Pick . [1]
The film documents the personal life and career comeback of Bill Nye, the star of PBS children's show Bill Nye the Science Guy . The documentary, which filmed from November 2014 through September 2016, follows Nye as he retires his kid show act in a bid to become more like his late professor, astronomer Carl Sagan. In his role as the CEO of The Planetary Society, an organization founded by Sagan in 1980, [5] Nye sets out to accomplish Sagan's dream of putting a solar sail into space. [6] In his more mature persona, Nye reaches out to a wider audience using his trademark enthusiasm for science advocacy and education, but he is pulled away when he is challenged by evolution and climate change contrarians to defend the scientific consensus. [7] [8]
Bill Nye: Science Guy premiered on March 12, 2017, at the South by Southwest film festival [10] in Austin, Texas. In April 2017, the film made its West Coast premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival, [11] followed by an international screening at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival [12] in May 2017, and another May screening at the Montclair Film Festival [13] in New Jersey. On October 26, 2017, the film was reported to be a NYT Critic's Pick . [1] It also has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 26 reviews. [14]
Ann Druyan is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning American documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series.
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, science communicator, author, and professor. His best known scientific contribution is his research on the possibility of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. He assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, which were universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. He argued in favor of the hypothesis, which has since been accepted, that the high surface temperatures of Venus are the result of the greenhouse effect.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage is a thirteen-part, 1980 television series written by Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, and Steven Soter, with Sagan as presenter. It was executive-produced by Adrian Malone, produced by David Kennard, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, and Gregory Andorfer, and directed by the producers, David Oyster, Richard Wells, Tom Weidlinger, and others. It covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe. Owing to its bestselling companion book and soundtrack album using the title, Cosmos, the series is widely known by this title, with the subtitle omitted from home video packaging. The subtitle began to be used more frequently in the 2010s to differentiate it from the sequel series that followed.
The Planetary Society is an American internationally-active non-governmental nonprofit organization. It is involved in research, public outreach, and political space advocacy for engineering projects related to astronomy, planetary science, and space exploration. It was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman, and has about 60,000 members from more than 100 countries around the world.
Kenneth Alfred Ham is an Australian Christian fundamentalist, young Earth creationist, apologist and former science teacher, living in the United States. He is the founder, CEO, and former president of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a Christian apologetics organisation that operates the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.
Steven Weldon Squyres is an American geologist and planetary scientist. He was the James A. Weeks Professor of Physical Sciences at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His research area is in planetary sciences, with a focus on large solid bodies in the Solar System such as the terrestrial planets and the moons of the Jovian planets. Squyres was the principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission (MER).
Bill Nye the Science Guy is an American science education television program created by Bill Nye, James McKenna, and Erren Gottlieb, with Nye starring as a fictionalized version of himself. It was produced by television station KCTS and McKenna/Gottlieb Producers and distributed by Buena Vista Television with substantial financing from the National Science Foundation. The show aired in syndication from September 10, 1993, to February 5, 1999, over the course of six seasons and 100 episodes; beginning in season 2, a concurrent run was added on PBS from October 10, 1994, to September 3, 1999, with the show's first run remaining in syndication. After the show's first run was completed, Nye continued to portray the Science Guy character for a number of short interstitial segments for the cable television channel Noggin, which aired during rebroadcasts of Bill Nye the Science Guy. A video game based on the series was released in 1996, and a subsequent television show for adults, Bill Nye Saves the World, was broadcast two decades later.
The Eyes of Nye is a science program that aired on public television in the United States in 2005 and featured Bill Nye. The show had an older target audience than its predecessor Bill Nye the Science Guy, aimed more toward adults and teenagers than children. The creation of the show was motivated by the success of Bill Nye the Science Guy, as well as a widespread contempt among scientists for scientific journalism in the media. The program was based in Seattle, Washington, produced by Buena Vista Television, and broadcast during primetime by KCTS, the local PBS affiliate.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator. Tyson studied at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. From 1991 to 1994, he was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. In 1994, he joined the Hayden Planetarium as a staff scientist and the Princeton faculty as a visiting research scientist and lecturer. In 1996, he became director of the planetarium and oversaw its $210 million reconstruction project, which was completed in 2000. Since 1996, he has been the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City. The center is part of the American Museum of Natural History, where Tyson founded the Department of Astrophysics in 1997 and has been a research associate in the department since 2003.
Timothy Ferris is an American science writer and the best-selling author of twelve books, including The Science of Liberty (2010) and Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988), for which he was awarded the American Institute of Physics Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report (1997), a popular science book on the study of the universe. Ferris has produced three PBS documentaries: The Creation of the Universe, Life Beyond Earth, and Seeing in the Dark.
William Sanford Nye is an American mechanical engineer, science communicator, and television presenter. He is best known as the host of the science education television show Bill Nye the Science Guy (1993–1999) and as a science educator in pop culture.
The Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science is an award presented by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) to individuals who have become “concurrently accomplished as researchers and/or educators, and as widely recognized magnifiers of the public's understanding of science.” The award was first presented in 1993 to astronomer, Carl Sagan (1934–1996), who is also the award's namesake.
Jon Lomberg is an American space artist and science journalist. He was Carl Sagan's principal artistic collaborator for more than twenty years on many projects from 1972 through 1996. In 1998, the International Astronomical Union officially named an asteroid in recognition of his achievements in science communication. He was NASA's Design Director for the Golden Record on the Voyager spacecraft; the cover he designed is expected to last at least a billion years.
David H. Grinspoon is an American astrobiologist. He is Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute and was the former inaugural Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology for 2012–2013.
The Symphony of Science is a music project created by Washington-based electronic musician John D. Boswell. The project seeks to "spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through musical remixes." Boswell uses pitch-corrected audio and video samples from television programs featuring popular educators and scientists. The audio and video clips are mixed into digital mashups and scored with Boswell's original compositions. Two of Boswell's music videos, "A Glorious Dawn" and "We are All Connected", feature appearances from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Stephen Hawking. The audio and video is sampled from popular science television shows including Cosmos, The Universe, The Eyes of Nye, The Elegant Universe, and Stephen Hawking's Universe.
Derek Alexander Muller is an engineering physicist, science communicator, and television personality, best known for his YouTube channel Veritasium, which has 14 million subscribers as of August 3, 2023.
Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation is a 2014 book written by Bill Nye. It was co-written and edited by Corey S. Powell and discusses advances in science in support of evolution. The book is Nye's extension of the Bill Nye–Ken Ham debate that took place in 2014.
Structure Films is an American documentary film production company with a focus on science, health, information, and technology. Founding filmmakers Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado met in a documentary filmmaking program at Stanford University where they both earned their MFA degrees in film.
Jennifer Kroot is an American filmmaker whose films include the documentaries It Came From Kuchar (2009) and To Be Takei (2014).