{"id":13375,"date":"2015-09-19T05:00:37","date_gmt":"2015-09-19T09:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=13375"},"modified":"2015-09-13T11:40:46","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T15:40:46","slug":"10-starry-facts-about-contact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/?p=13375","title":{"rendered":"10 Starry Facts About &#8220;Contact&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/stallonezone.com\/zone\/2015\/z091915contact_trivia.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"430\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><b>Marc Mancini\u00a0and <a href=\"http:\/\/mentalfloss.com\" target=\"_blank\">Mental_Floss<\/a><\/b>\u00a0present <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/mentalfloss.com\/article\/68361\/10-starry-facts-about-contact\" target=\"_blank\">10 Starry Facts About <em>Contact<\/em><\/a><\/strong>.\u00a0\u00a0Here are three of my favorites for a movie that I really like and feel is totally under-rated&#8230; [Beware of Spoilers!]<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>1. ITS OPENING SHOT SET AN INDUSTRY RECORD.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EWwhQB3TKXA\" width=\"500\" height=\"246\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><em>Contact<\/em> begins with a close-up of our home planet. At first, a babel of &#8217;90s radio broadcasts nearly deafens the audience. But as the camera pulls back and Earth grows smaller and smaller, iconic audio clips that were recorded 20, 30, and even 100 years ago greet our ears\u2014only to fade seconds later. By the time our galaxy recedes into an endless cosmic backdrop, there\u2019s nothing left but silence.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">This is one of the most ambitious sequences in cinema history. The completely digital intro lasted for 4170 uninterrupted frames, making it the longest computer-generated shot that had ever appeared in a live-action film at the time. Great pains were taken to capture the look of deep space. On the special edition DVD commentary, visual effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum recalls getting started by gathering \u201cabsolutely incredible\u201d Hubble snapshots of \u201cdistant galaxies and stars and other interstellar phenomenon &#8230; We laid out what we liked and said, &#8216;Okay, how can we pass through some of this? How can we combine it together into something [that\u2019s] visually stunning?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Brilliant as it is, however, the moment ignores physical law. Just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson. If one could really overtake the radio signals, he argues, \u201cyou would hear them in reverse.\u201d Still, the good doctor acknowledges that\u2014for artistry\u2019s sake\u2014everything needed to sound intelligible. \u201c[They] couldn\u2019t have gotten it right and still had the scene work,\u201d Tyson concedes, \u201cso they had to do it the way they did.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>8.\u00a0MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY REFUSED TO DELIVER A CERTAIN LINE.\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>\nLate in the final script,\u00a0McConaughey&#8217;s character\u2014a self-described \u201cman of the cloth without the cloth\u201d named Palmer Joss\u2014says \u201cMy God was too small.\u201d Though Druyan really liked this line,\u00a0McConaughey called it sacrilegious and wouldn&#8217;t say it. Later on, the two talked at length about faith and became good friends (despite differences of opinion).<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><strong>9. NASA\u00a0FLATLY\u00a0DENIES ONE OF THE FILM&#8217;S INSINUATIONS.\u00a0<\/strong><br \/>\nIn the movie&#8217;s third act, a stunned Arroway receives a cyanide pill before entering the pod. According to Zemeckis, Sagan swore that this just-in-case practice was observed \u201con every single [NASA] mission.\u201d However, Apollo 13 veteran James Lovell has dismissed the idea, writing \u201cmany people have asked me \u2018Did you have suicide pills on board?\u2019 We didn\u2019t, and I never heard of such a thing in the 11 years I spent as an astronaut and a NASA executive.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marc Mancini\u00a0and Mental_Floss\u00a0present 10 Starry Facts About Contact.\u00a0\u00a0Here are three of my favorites for a movie that I really like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":912,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,54,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-celebs","category-movies","category-trivia","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/912"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13375"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13378,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13375\/revisions\/13378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/craigzablo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}