Adam Savage

• 1. Introduction

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  Adam Savage once passed out in a high school math class because he was wearing a suit of armor. He and his father had built it together from aluminum roof flashing, held together with seven hundred rivets. When Savage woke in the nurse's office, the first thing he asked was, "Where's my armor?" That instinct to build something properly, then wear it into the world, runs through his whole career. Savage is an American special effects creator and educational video presenter. Television audiences know him best for a series that tested popular myths with explosions and experiments. Film audiences have seen his model work without knowing it. This documentary asks how the son of a children's television animator became a public face of hands-on curiosity. It asks what he learned in workshops and on sets, and how a skeptic and tinkerer built a following that reaches far beyond one show.

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• 2. A Family of Makers

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  Adam Whitney Savage was born in New York City on the 15th of July 1967. He grew up in North Tarrytown, now called Sleepy Hollow, in Westchester County, about 25 miles north of the city. He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985. His father, Whitney Lee Savage, lived from 1928 to 1998. He was a painter, filmmaker, and animator, known for his work on Sesame Street and The Electric Company. Both were nationally syndicated public television shows for children. The Clay Center in Charleston, West Virginia, holds some of his work in its permanent collection. He also directed an underground short film in 1969 called Mickey Mouse in Vietnam. Science ran in the family on the other side. His maternal grandfather, Cushman Haagensen, was a surgeon who pioneered breast cancer surgery. His mother, Karen, was a psychotherapist. Adam was the second youngest of six children, and the four oldest came from his parents' earlier marriages. He has two older brothers, two older sisters, and one younger sister. That younger sister, Kate Savage, is an artist. Long before any of that mattered, though, the family's youngest boy was already stepping in front of cameras.

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• 3. Hands Over Acting

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  As a child, Savage began acting, and he went on to five years of acting school. He voiced animated characters that his father produced for Sesame Street. He played Jimmy, the stock boy of Mr. Whipple, in a Charmin commercial. He also appeared in the 1985 Billy Joel music video "You're Only Human (Second Wind)", playing a drowning young man saved by a lifeguard. At age 19, he gave it up. "I had passed on that in favor of doing stuff with my hands," he said. The turn toward tools began at a local bike shop in Sleepy Hollow, where he took flat tires to be fixed. The staff showed him how to do the repairs himself. Savage later recalled, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard... I've been building and putting bicycles together since then." Danger also marked those years. On his eighteenth birthday, Savage broke his neck in a swimming accident. He survived without long-term consequences. Decades later he would describe his best-known job as "the perfect marriage of two things, performance, and special effects".

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• 4. Models and Cameos

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  Galaxy Quest, Bicentennial Man, The Mummy, and Space Cowboys all carry Savage's work as a model maker. So do Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. His resume covers far more than miniatures. He has worked as an animator, graphic designer, carpenter, projectionist, film developer, set designer, toy designer, and gallery owner. In the making-of material for The Matrix Revolutions, he appears as a special effects artist and discusses the miniature effects and their difficulties. He also taught advanced model making in the Department of Industrial Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Acting never fully left him, and it returned in small, playful roles. In 2001, he played a helpful engineer in Ever Since the World Ended. In 2011, he appeared as "Dan" in Night of the Little Dead, a short film directed by Frank Ippolito. In April 2017, he played a mission specialist in the Expanse episode Caliban's War. Months later, a Blade Runner 2049 short film, 2048: Nowhere to Run, cast him as a merchant selling blood bags. Two other appearances were shared with his future television partner. In the 2006 film The Darwin Awards, Savage played an army surplus store owner who sells a man a rocket engine for his pickup truck. His MythBusters co-star Jamie Hyneman was in the cast too. The two also appeared together in the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation episode "The Theory of Everything", broadcast on the 1st of May 2008.

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• 5. The MythBusters Years

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  Between 2003 and 2016, Savage starred in MythBusters, where the job was to confirm or disprove myths through tests and experiments at many different scales. His on-screen manner is animated and energetic. That made him a foil for Jamie Hyneman, whose reserved, straight-man persona balanced the pair. In the first season, the two were the only hosts. The second season brought in members of Hyneman's staff. Kari Byron, Tory Belleci, and the welder Scottie Chapman all appeared that year. In the third season, Grant Imahara, a robot-builder and model-maker, replaced Chapman. The show was filmed in San Francisco and edited in Artarmon, New South Wales. Across its run it aired 282 episodes before being cancelled at the end of its 2016 season. The story did not stop there. In November 2017, the Science Channel, a sister network of Discovery, revived the series with new hosts Jon Lung and Brian Louden. Savage has been frank about the partnership behind the original. He and Hyneman were not friends, he said, but they respected each other. "We didn't care to say the truth to each other, because we didn't care if we hurt each other's feelings," he explained. "It has to do with respect."

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• 6. Skeptic on Stage

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  In January 2006, Savage first appeared at The Amaz!ng Meeting, the annual skeptics conference run by the magician James Randi. He became a regular presenter. He credits Michael Shermer with introducing him to the skeptical community, and Shermer interviewed him for Skeptic Magazine in 2006. In October 2009, he took the talk abroad to the first Amaz!ng Meeting London, held at the Mermaid Conference Centre in Blackfriars. His stage work ranged well beyond skepticism. He was a featured performer at three w00tstock v1.x shows in 2009 and four w00tstock v2.x shows in 2010. He also appeared as a guest on the 220th show of Diggnation. Since 2008, he has been a regular guest speaker at Maker Faire. There he has spoken on topics such as his obsession with the dodo bird and problem-solving, and taken audience questions about MythBusters. He hosted an episode of the Discovery series Curiosity that asked whether humans could live forever. It touched on limb regeneration, organ printers, and age reversal. On the 25th of November 2011, the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands, gave him an honorary doctorate for popularizing science and technology. The invitations kept coming. He was a featured speaker at the first Reason Rally in Washington, D.C., on the 24th of March 2012. On the 18th of May 2012, he gave the commencement speech at Sarah Lawrence College. He delivered a keynote at South by Southwest on the 10th of March 2014, and he is an occasional guest host for lectures at the San Francisco non-profit City Arts & Lectures. In 2017, he toured with Michael Stevens on the Brain Candy LIVE! tour. That June, the American Humanist Association named him "Humanist of the Year" at its annual conference. In 2018, he won the Heinz Oberhummer Award for Science Communication.

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• 7. Tested and Beyond

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  On the 5th of June 2012, Savage launched a weekly podcast called Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project. It is a conversation among Savage, the tested.com editors-in-chief Will Smith and Norman Chan, and Simone Giertz. Topics run from science and movies to do it yourself and work ethics, and episodes typically last 30 to 45 minutes. Savage is also a co-owner, editor, and contributor at tested.com. His platform Adam Savage's Tested includes a website and a YouTube channel. Television kept pace. Savage and Hyneman judged the game show Unchained Reaction, which premiered in March 2012. In April 2018, Discovery Channel announced that Savage would host and produce MythBusters Jr., a series about young scientists completing experiments with STEAM skills. In July 2018, he created and acted in a short film, A Farewell To Arms, in collaboration with Weta Workshop. He hosted MythBusters Jr. in 2019. On the 14th of June 2019, his own series, Savage Builds, premiered on the Science Channel. That year, he also published his first book, Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It, about his approach to making. In February 2020, SiliCon Valley Comic Con named him its Creative Director, succeeding Steve Wozniak. In 2022, he became godfather of the Discovery Princess cruise ship. In 2023, he made a box for Isaac Newton's death mask, held by the Royal Society.

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• 8. Private Life

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  In August 1990, Savage moved to San Francisco, where he still lives. Before that, in the late 1980s, he rented a place at Eighth Avenue and Carroll Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He then moved in with his parents for less than a year, working for a graphic design firm in Manhattan. A close friend living on Broderick Street in San Francisco asked him to become a roommate, and he went west. On the 11th of September 2004, he married Julia Ward. He has twin sons from a previous relationship. He wears hearing aids in both ears because of congenital otosclerosis. A lifelong love of costumes shaped his childhood. "I remember my mom getting me a Jaws costume when Jaws came out... and wearing a Batman costume," he recalled. "Back then, everyone dressed up as hobos." He still strives for authenticity in what he wears. In June 2020, his younger sister, Miranda Pacchiana, filed a lawsuit against him alleging serious sexual abuse when they were children. Savage responded publicly that he would fight what he called a "groundless and offensive lawsuit". Their mother defended him, saying, "Adam is a good man, and I support him completely." The suit was settled through mediation on the 24th of May 2021 and dismissed the next day. The terms of the settlement were not made public. On belief, Savage identified himself as an atheist in a 2011 interview and as an agnostic in a 2019 Twitter post. In a YouTube video dated the 14th of December 2020, he said he had married 20 to 25 couples over 25 years. He implied that he was an ordained minister with the Universal Life Church, whose only belief is "Do that which is right."

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