ABOUT THE PROJECT
LOGLINE
The search for gravitational waves, a story with a payoff that arrives thirty years later. It seems men began the journey, but women brought home the prize.
SYNOPSIS
COSMIC CODA begins in 1985 when Mary Jane Doherty, then a film grad student, made a cinema verité film called Gravity, about curmudgeonly Dr. Rainer Weiss (‘Rai’) and his grads dashing about, building a gravitational wave antenna at MIT. Back then, the idea of detecting an actual gravitational wave was only slightly more plausible than dancing on Mars.
Gravity is an UnDoc—process scenes laced together with cartoons and irreverent asides, concerned as much with the humanity behind the science as with the science itself. Mary Jane finished her film, received an award, and then stuffed Gravity in her closet: that story was over.
Except it wasn’t. Thirty years later, Rai detected the first gravitational wave; in 2017, he co-won the Nobel Prize. Mary Jane’s ancient film suddenly mattered—as the only case of an epic experiment’s earliest days captured on film and that by sheer coincidence.
By 2022 things have changed—technologically of course, but even more important, Rai’s protégés, many of whom are women, now run the show. In fact Lisa Barsotti, Rai’s former student, is about to launch an experiment promising to blow gravitational science wide open. COSMIC CODA tells both stories, Lisa and Rai’s, and does so in the present tense. So, whether it’s 1985 or 2022 viewers witness events as they unfold. This way the 2017 Nobel Prize comes as a surprise, only to be followed by yet another surprise, as a new set of players pushes the science forward. And with the same filmmaker and same main character (Rai, now 90, irascible as ever) spanning the decades, COSMIC CODA reveals what has not changed: it turns out that the film’s subjects—lovely, messy, gloriously complex scientists—are human beings after all.
PROJECT TYPE Documentary Feature
DIRECTOR Mary Jane Doherty
PRODUCER Mary Jane Doherty
WEBSITE maryjanedoherty.com/gravity
The Film Collaborative (TFC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to providing programs and services for independent filmmakers. TFC’s federal tax ID number is 32-0295081. All donations are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law.
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