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If you went to school in the US, Canada, or really pretty much anywhere else, you probably saw the Bregman Stargate Documentary. It’s one of the most famous pieces of documentary filmmaking ever, and was an early insight into the Stargate Program during a time where its activities were classified from the rest of the world. 

The Bregman doc, filmed by journalist Emmett Bregman, was an early attempt at gentling the world into the existence of the Stargate and extraterrestrial life. Nowadays, where the documentary is played to hordes of bored middle schoolers doing their school ET unit, it seems less extraordinary. Just another fact of life. But at the time, it was something that had never been done before— a true groundbreaking moment in its field. 

Yet, here I sit with Marsha Quan, director/editor of Stargate: Revisited, a new take on the footage from the Bregman doc. It is also, she says, an important view into the real history of the Stargate Program and the people in it. 

Kehewin: Thank you for taking the time to sit with me. 

Quan: I ought to be thanking you! I find a lot of people are really skeptical at the idea of messing with the Bregman stuff. I’m just glad anyone’s willing to publish it, much less listen to me ramble. [Laughs]

Kehewin: To start out with, do you want to tell us a little bit about your project, Stargate Revisited? 

Quan: Of course. Essentially, I’m redirecting Bregman’s direction. There was a lot of footage that didn’t originally make the cut. There was a lot of stuff that probably should have made the cut but didn’t. And, of course, no matter how impartial you’re trying to be, every single documentary has a point of view. I’m trying to show a new one. 

Kehewin: That kind of goes back to what you were saying before. A lot of people really love the Bregman doc. To them, it’s like, I don’t know, recutting Star Wars. 

Quan: I know, I know. It’s sacrosanct to some people. But man, I don’t really care. 

As I sit with Quan in a cluttered editing room— where she does all her work— she looks like the exact opposite of Bregman’s generation of filmmakers. Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, her electric pink hair messily in a ponytail, and a smattering of tattoos along her arms, she looks more like a film student than anything. 

But Quan tells me this is just what the documentary needed. A fresh look, and fresh ideas. 

Quan: It’s certainly not that Bregman’s work was bad. 

Kehewin: Did I detect a pause there? 

Quan: No! I mean, there are obviously some dated parts. I think we can all laugh at the little American flag graphics as rousing military propaganda plays in the closer. But Bregman was sponsored by the US Government and was directing at a very different time. They didn’t know about Atlantis, back then, or Langara or, you know, the Outposts. 

Kehewin: Right. So you’re building off his work, is what you’re saying, not trying to erase it. 

Quan: Exactly! Okay, look, it’s hard to say in hindsight what he should or should not have done. He was being stonewalled at every corner, and no matter how bad you want footage of something doesn’t always mean you can get it.

Kehewin: Can you tell me about your process here? 

Quan: So, all the footage from the documentary, literally hundreds of hours of it, is all available at the Smithsonian. When I got access to it— by the way, super thanks to Mr. Mikkels over there!— I pretty much started drooling. Obviously what I was most interested in is what didn’t make the cut in Bregman’s version of the story. 

Kehewin: Very interesting, like deleted scenes? 

Quan: Yes, kind of. Obviously some of it was tossed for legitimate reasons; redundant info, or bad audio, or just really boring and uninteresting stuff. But you know what, a lot of it wasn’t. 

Kehewin: Any examples? 

Quan: So, here’s why I hesitated when you asked me if Bregman was good at his job. He was! He definitely, definitely was. I mean, the man won a Pulitzer! It really can’t be overemphasized how groundbreaking his stuff was. He was great at his job. He made a lot of impactful works and the Stargate documentary, probably his finest, showed a real compassion and insight. 

He also wasn’t the most ethical documentarian out there. You know all those scenes where he’s seriously talking to his interviewees, wearing a suit, asking cutting, perfectly-timed questions? Fake. He went back in and filmed over his own questions later. 

Kehewin: No way. Is that normal? 

Quan: It’s not unheard of. Usually people just cut the question portion out entirely. But if we don’t see the questions honestly, then the answers don’t mean as much. 

I think the guy just liked looking smarter than he was. It was to great effect, but maybe at the expense of the truth. 

Kehewin: Did you include any of that original footage in the new cut? 

Quan: Of course! Like I said, context matters. I used a lot of his interviews with SGC staff. I made my poor editing assistant go back in and put Bregman back where he was supposed to be, you know, asking questions, reading off his notes with his glasses pushed up. I didn’t do that just to be a jerk, but you know what, it didn’t hurt. 

Kehewin: What kind of interviews did you include? 

Quan: Oh, I’m so excited to talk about this. Dr. Samantha Carter’s interview time in the original finished product was like, six, seven minutes. There were hours in there! I ended up using about fifteen and a half minutes. And let me tell you, I had to force myself to stop there. The woman was amazing. 

Kehewin: Oh, so we’re going to be seeing new stuff? 

Quan: Very much so. Bregman’s approach to Carter seemed to be, you know, she’s beautiful, she’s a scientist, how interesting. He really focused in on that angle. But she was such a genius, like, such a genius. 

There’s this part where he’s interviewing her about the way the Gate works and you can just see everything flying totally over his head. But what she manages to do is give a concise, perfectly factually accurate explanation of wormhole travel. In 2004! Imagine seeing old footage of Marie Curie confidently talking about how to build a large hadron collider controlled by a supercomputer. That was what it was like. 

Kehewin: Genius in its infancy. 

Quan: More like, she’s the reason we understand science like it is now. The rationale she gives is perfectly simple nowadays, you know, the stuff you learn in science class. But she discovered it. 

Kehewin: You know in the year after the Stargate Program went public, the usage of Sam, Samantha, and Carter as baby names went up something like 27%? 

Quan: There’s a kid named Teal’c in my little brother’s daycare, I love it. 

As we speak, I can see pictures plastered all over the walls; both screenshots from her new film, as well as apparent inspiration pics— official Air Force photos of Stargate greats like Carter, Sheppard, Mitchell; stills of Jaffa councils, specs of the Cheyenne Mountain bunker. 

What Quan’s doing with the new cut of the documentary is both groundbreaking and nothing special. While she’s using the footage gathered by Bregman himself, that’s where the similarity begins and ends. 

Quan attributes this to the differences in societal knowledge of the Stargate and space travel. I can’t help but wonder, though, if she’s not also thinking of what she mentioned above; Bregman’s disinterest in certain aspects of the story, as well as downright manipulation to get a better one. 

Quan: Bregman was trying to talk about what the Stargate is, who’s running it, what the program’s like, all that. We already know that. 

What I’m interested in, here, is what were the people in the program like? How was it for them? Truly the early days of the program were the Wild West. Early Stargate explorers jumped through without advance scanning, without knowledge of other species, without protective gear. I really wanted to look at how that affected the people there and what it was like. 

Kehewin: How do you showcase that? 

Quan: Okay, like, I don’t want to give the whole documentary away. Dr. Daniel Jackson was a very prolific documentarian of his own, with a little digital camera he brought with him in the field. Bregman had access to his tapes, I don’t know if the military made him hand them over or Jackson gave them himself. But Bregman didn’t use any of them except, you know, the one. 

Kehewin: Frasier’s death. 

Quan: Yeah, that one. I watched it when I was going over footage for this. I cried. It’s even worse in the long cut, my god. I’m not including it. 

Kehewin: Some say that’s the most impactful moment in the whole documentary. 

Quan: Maybe so, but, you know, she wasn’t JFK. She might be famous now— how many Frasier Hospitals and Frasier Elementaries are there in the world?— but she wasn’t a president going for a press tour when she died. She was a woman doing her job trying to save people. She wasn’t trying to be filmed doing it, she was just doing it because it needed to be done. She had a daughter back home. It’s not— it was important. But it’s not something we need to see to know the moment was important. Does that make sense? 

Kehewin: Kind of. 

Quan: Well, anyway, I went back through Jackson’s footage. Bregman didn’t use any of it, because Jackson rarely caught the action. You know, he was busy with his gun and the zats and whatnot. 

Jackson’s footage is hilarious! Okay, there’s this one clip, you know, where he’s walking around some kind of ruins with SG-1 [original: Jackson, O’Neill, Teal’c, Carter] and filming these teeny tiny frescoes in a wall. Like little shards of glass making little triangle patterns. Totally boring. 

Offscreen you can hear Teal’c and O’Neill arguing about a rom-com movie they apparently watched the night before. They’re like, totally getting into it on who the lead should have ended up with. And Jackson swings the camera around to them, like, you know, guys, stop, and you think he’s going to put them back on track. And instead he says, do you remember that play we saw at the Jaffa camp? That was totally a rom-com.

Which then gets everyone else all upset and up in arms, and Carter jumps in because apparently she knew it was a rom-com, and Teal’c keeps arguing it was an epic love story… Man, this is just a long-winded way of saying it was so ordinary and yet tells you so much. You know? 

Kehewin: That’s fun. 

Quan: There’s a lot of that. Silly moments, little moments. General O’Neill— Colonel at the time— did not want to be part of the documentary, and he also had quite the potty mouth on him. Bregman caught some airmen on camera placing bets on which silly mythological name they were going to encounter from the Goa’uld next. 

Kehewin: Did they get any right? 

Quan: You know what, I do think there was a Goa’uld named Tefnut? 

Kehewin: I like all that. But you can see why he left it out of the original. 

Quan: Yes, of course. But I’m trying to make a documentary with an agenda here, I think I already said. It’s different. And I’m trying to show that little moments matter, that the small details are just as important as the big ones. 

Kehewin: There’s, of course, a lot of media surrounding the Stargate Program and particularly the early days. Were you influenced by any of them in particular? 

Quan: Oh, one hundred percent. I did my thesis on the Eli Wallace Kino Footage. 

Kehewin: I feel like things start to make sense! 

Quan: I know, I know. Wallace was all about the little moments. To me, that’s what made his stuff so incredibly special. 

Here he was, twenty-four years old, in the middle of another galaxy, on an unpiloted alien ship, and what he’s filming is baby showers and silly pranks! You know, we see all these sweeping shots of planets literally untouched for billions of years. And then we also see a bunch of very bored people making up a new sport with wadded-up socks and some alien rocks. 

Kehewin: Definitely seems to be a theme. 

Quan: Yep. People are always people, no matter what kind of crazy, otherworldly adventures they’re having. 

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a larger story to tell, of course. I mean, the SGC was fighting a whole war— three wars, in all, really. And everyone knows what happened with the Destiny. 

Kehewin: Yeah. 

Quan: Wallace didn’t just capture the footage, of course, he also edited it almost in real time. Pretty much daily. He was a man who not only knew that he was preserving footage of an extraordinary time, but also a man who knew that in all likelihood it would reach Earth before he did. Which I think makes it more extraordinary the things he chose to keep in. You know, all the personal interviews he did, all the greenhouse footage, all the crying, all the… sorry. I get really emotional about this. 

Kehewin: I guess now is not the time to reveal I actually really enjoyed the movie they did recently about the Destiny expedition. 

Quan: [Laughs] That’s okay, I can forgive you. There’s nothing wrong with a mindless action drama. But I can’t help my opinions. Casting Wallace as a chiseled 35-year-old, Scott and [Chloe] Armstrong as a supercool, supercompetent battle couple— and all those cinematic explosions!— misses the mark. Life exploring through the Stargate was messy, and tragic, and, usually, boring. 

Kehewin: We should get back on topic. As much as I like talking about Kino stuff. 

Quan: Oh, I know, I could talk about any of my projects all day. But yes, Stargate Revisited has truly become one of those one-in-a-lifetime opportunities. 

For this new documentary, I wanted to look at the footage filmed all the way back then and recontextualize it. Not modernize it, but show it from a modern point of view. Does that make sense? There were people left behind, back then. It doesn’t seem right that that could happen. 

Teal’c, for example, was very recalcitrant in his interview, but if you look at Jackson’s footage, or some of the candid stuff… That guy shines. I mean, his whole story is amazing, but you can tell there was something special about him. It’s a shame Bregman never dug deeper into that. I think he could have done better in his interviews, gotten better answers, but it’s easy to say that in hindsight.

I added in a lot of footage, too. I talked to all sorts of survivors, family members, aliens, computers… everyone had something they wanted to say. It’s really hard choosing what stays in and what you keep on the cutting room floor. 

Kehewin: Maybe in a couple years someone will dig your stuff up from the Smithsonian archives and remake it again. 

Quan: Oh, I hope so! 

Kehewin: We should probably wrap this up. Your recut of the Bregman doc is already getting a lot of buzz. If the critical reception is good, is there another Stargate project you’d like to work on? Something with the Kinos? Atlantis? The Daedalus Skirmish? 

Quan: Oh, I’d do anything if I could get the funding for it. I’m one of those people who heard about the Stargate and started immediately dreaming about going for a dip in it. I’d love to do Atlantis, like the early expedition, but there’s not a lot of video footage for that. Besides the Goodbye Vids, of course, but those, man, are so personal and some of the people and estates involved in those I’m sure wouldn’t like everyone to hear their loved ones saying what they think is their final goodbye before the [First] Wraith Siege. 

Maybe some kind of multimedia project with art from Lorne or Biro or something. They were both pretty prolific. It’s fun to dream about, anyway. 

Kehewin: Anything else you’d like to say before we wrap up? 

Quan: I hope I haven’t made all this sound boring! Really, the documentary is telling the story of one of the greatest adventures of all time.

It cannot be overstated how many lives that original Stargate program changed. It can’t be overstated the effects of overthrowing the Goa’uld, or fighting the Ori, or a million other things. It really is one of the most extraordinary stories ever. 

But the thing is, to me, that big adventures are made up of a hundred thousand little ones, big and small. And I hope that I did some justice to that idea. 

Kehewin: One last thing; the tattoo on your arm looks pretty fresh. Seeing as it’s right next to the symbol of the Earth point of origin, I can assume it has to do with the Stargate? Is it a Wallace quote? What does the whole thing say, under your sleeve? 

Quan: Actually, it’s a quote from the late and great General G. Hammond. It’s from the original Bregman footage, but it was left in the cutting room because it was caught kind of off-hand and the audio isn’t great— Hammond was saying it to a random airman first class, a nobody.

It’s the end of a longer saying. It says, We have to always look up to the stars. But we have to remember, too, that the stars are full of people. And in the end, that’s all we are, is people. All of us.