THE STORY BEGINS in 1985: I was a grad student in MIT's Film/Video Section, getting ready to shoot my thesis film, called GRAVITY, about an MIT experimental astrophysics lab.
The scientists asked me, "What's the story?" I said I didn't know since I hadn't started filming yet. This seemed to satisfy everyone, so I carried on for five months, filming four grad students:
Dan Dewey and Jeff Livas,
building a prototype gravity wave antenna,
and
Andy Cumming and Lyman Page,
preparing for their general Phd exams.
And, finally, I filmed Rainer Weiss (known, familiarly as 'Rai') dashing around the lab, overseeing the whole operation.