Other Projects

Sometimes You Get Lucky

How some of my most interesting non-book projects came to be.

“The First Artists”

National Geographic Cover Story

The Chautauqua Institution

Speech at the Hall of Philosophy

In 2013, the prestigious Chautauqua Institution chose Last Ape Standing as one of its featured books. Being a long-time lover of the Institution, I was honored. Only a handful of books each year are chosen for this program, which happens to be the nation’s oldest book club! (Another book chosen that year was The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Pretty good company.) As part of this, I was asked to give a talk at the Institution’s Hall of Philosophy.

Watch the Talk

“Affairs of the Lips” and “Why Do We Cry?”

Scientific American Articles & Cover Story

Around the time that Thumbs, Toes and Tears came out, I wrote two articles for Scientific American and Scientific American Mind magazines. One about why do we cry, and one about why we kiss. This was because I had chosen those two traits (and four others) as those that make us human. Both were tough to research because not many scientists had explored these subjects. Kissing is especially interesting because it turns out there are still some cultures where people do not kiss. (Though the number is dwindling fast.)

Exploring why we kiss and why we cry were very popular and among Scientific American most popular articles. Both have been picked up in other mainstream and peer reviewed publications around the world.

Read "Why Do We Cry?"
Read "Affairs of the Lips"

(Articles at Scientific American’s website and are for subscribers only)

Sunset Grill

Story and Screenplay

Sunset Grill was the first movie script I ever wrote. The premise was good (organs being harvested from illegal immigrants by bad guys in Southern Ca.). My script was bought by someone at Tri-Star Pictures and the director asked if I would rewrite it (rewrites are normal in Hollywood and he also wanted me to cut the budget). I had just started work on my first boo, Space Age, and told him I couldn’t, so someone else wrote the second script. It’s not terrible and it got made with some pretty big actors at the time: Peter Weller, Stacy Keach and Lori Singer (of Footloose fame). What can I say. It led to two more scripts being sold. One for Warner Bros entitled Newsboy, and another for Universal Pictures and Imagine Films (Ron Howard’s company) entitled Big Medicine. Though sold, neither of the scripts were ever produced, not unusual in Hollywood. Still, I learned a lot and loved the work.

I wrote, directed and produced Fires of the Mind for PBS while working at WQED-TV’s production offices in Los Angeles. This was after I worked on the Planet Earth series (which won an Emmy - see below). Fires was the first show to premiere for the new documentary series The Infinite Voyage (even though it is listed as third in the series). Infinite Voyage was the first to be shown on both PBS and network television. The series did very well and I was gratified to find that that Fires received excellent reviews.

I loved working on this doc, especially the segments in Tanzania with Donald Johanson (one if the world’s foremost paleontologists) and Bert Van Muenster, a fabulous documentary photographer (and quite a character) who later went on to create the hit TV shows Cops and Race Around the World. Another highlight was the segment with Dr. Michael Gazzaniga on the mysterious ways the brain and its two hemispheres work.

Planet Earth

PBS Documentary Series - Two Episodes of Seven: “Tales From Other Worlds” and “Fate of Earth.”

I began work on Planet Earth, just a couple of years after I decided to give up my job as San Francisco bureau chief for CNN. I wanted to work on more substantive media. Pure serendipity introduced me to Greg Andorfer, an executive producer for Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmos series. I had never produced a documentary but Greg asked me to join the Planet Earth team and I jumped at the chance. BBC producer Robin Bates, who later joined the team, and I, worked to develop the two shows.

The seven-part series won and Emmy in 1986 and Robin Bates and I were honored with a Christopher Award, the highest honor for documentary writing in the United States.

The travel associated with writing and directing all of these docs was one of the great joys of my career. They took me to parts of six continents and the remotest islands of the Pacific. For Fires I spent time on the Horn of Africa and in the heart of the Serengeti; for Planet Earth, a week in the Amazon Rain forest where no humans except the scientists we were working with had ever lived. Each evening I watched a full moon rise through the branches of the trees where we camped in our hammocks. In the outback of Australia I watched the sun come up in one of the hottest places on earth (not counting Death Valley), jokingly called the North Pole by locals.

Every experience was life-changing.

Here’s a brief summary of the two shows I worked on with Robin Bates drawn from summaries provided on Wikipedia.

"Tales from Other Worlds" (aired February 12, 1986) – Using special effects and footage from space to reveal the other worlds within the Solar System, the episode investigates the connections between the Earth and the cosmos. Topics include the formation of the Solar System, the Earth, and the Moon; the formation of impact craters and how study of the Moon's surface helps us understand the early history of the Earth; the surface of Venus as it appears beneath the planet's acid rain clouds and what it tells us about the early Earth before the beginning of plate tectonics; the surface features of Mars, evidence that water once flowed there, and the possibility that life once existed there; how the planet Jupiter is actually a failed star and the features of its atmosphere; Jupiter's moons Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, and the volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io; Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and the Oort Cloud; the theory that a large impact on the Earth caused the extinction of the dinosaurs; and the hypothesis that a hypothetical star dubbed "Nemesis" is responsible for a 26-million-year cycle of mass extinctions on Earth. The episode visits the Allan Hills of Antarctica; Meteor Crater in Arizona; the NASA Ames Research Center in San Francisco, California; the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico; the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona; the Scablands of eastern Washington; stromatolites in Western Australia; a quarry in Utah; and the town of Gubbio, Italy; and discusses the work of Gene Shoemaker, Peter H. Schultz, Percival Lowell, Nobel laureate Walter Alvarez, and Jack Sepkoski.

"The Fate of the Earth" (aired March 5, 1986) – The episode explores the role of life in shaping the Earth and discusses the planet's possible future. It discusses the first hydrogen bomb test and the recovery of the environment from its effects; the Gaia hypothesis; the beginning of life on Earth and the possibility that it began in tide pools; the way the first cells may have formed; the discovery of the earliest fossil bacterium; stromatolites; the carbon cycle; how chitons can chew away entire islands while feeding; the destruction of rain forests, their pharmaceutical value, and a study of how much of a rain forest must be preserved to protect its species; the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II; how the aftereffects of a nuclear war could create a "nuclear winter;" the Lucky Dragon incident and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; the pressure human population increases are placing on the Earth; work to improve agricultural outputs to feed the growing human population; the use of satellite imagery to study world vegetationpatterns and the expansion of the Sahara Desert; and humanity's future challenge of managing the world's resources both to meet civilization's increasing demand for energy and feed the growing world population while living in harmony with the Earth. The episode visits Eniwetok Atoll; Dedham, England; North Pole and Shark Bay in Western Australia; Kilauea in Hawaii; Palau; the Amazon Basin; the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado; India; the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines; and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and highlights the work of James Lovelock, Stanley Awramik, Michael McElroy, Thomas Lovejoy, Brian Toon, and Stephen Schneider.