Moonwalk One
Encyclopedia
Moonwalk One is a feature-length documentary film about the flight of Apollo 11
, which landed the first humans on the moon
. Besides portraying the massive technological achievement of that event, the film places it in some historical context, and tries to capture the mood and feel of the people on Earth
at the time when man first walked on another world.
gave the film a screening in New York City
for possible distributors, but it was considered to be too long, and subsequently failed to be picked up. To counter this lack of interest about 15 minutes was cut from the finished film at NASA’s direction. This failed to gain renewed interest from distributors, but the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival
in the summer of 1971, where it won a special award and was described as a “sleeper”. The Whitney Museum of American Art
in New York began a new film series called “New American Directors”, and Moonwalk One was placed in its first program. It received many favorable reviews and was thereafter screened in a selection of theaters nationally, capitalizing on the publicity due to the Whitney program.
For the next few decades Moonwalk One was practically forgotten, even the original printing elements were lost by NASA or Technicolor
. All that survived were a few 16mm copies of the cut-down version, from which some DVD’s were subsequently made.
. One of the producers, Christopher Riley
, tracked down the director Theo Kamecke
for help with his questions, only to find that Theo still had two large steel shipping boxes containing the only 35mm print of the original film, sitting under his desk. Over the next two years a consortium was put together to digitally restore the 35mm print and re-release this director's cut on DVD in time for the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. The DVD includes a director’s commentary, the story of the making of the film and other features. Discovery Channel
in the UK also acquired this version and transmitted it with additional material featuring producer Christopher Riley, first premiering on Monday July 20th 2009.
were at that time generally regarded as the best documentary
filmmakers in the USA, having won fame as the creators of the hit of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair "To Be Alive!
", a multi-screen film which played to overflow crowds and garnered the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject
in 1966
. The NASA film had the working title of “Man in Space”. It was to be a theatrical production of several million dollars at minimum, with funding and distribution supplied by MGM, and would have included a re-enactment of the moonwalk on a sound stage.
The Francis Thompson company even conducted preliminary shooting during one or two of the earlier Apollo missions, but in early 1969 because of reshuffling at MGM, the project lost its backing. Both Francis Thompson and NASA frantically sought funding elsewhere but nothing resulted, and Thompson began to turn his attention to another project. Six weeks before the launch of Apollo 11
, NASA called again and said that although the big-budget film was obviously dead, they didn’t want this event to 'slip through their fingers', nor did they want to make the kind of industrial film which was usually produced after each mission. NASA said they could scrape together $350,000 and wanted to know if Thompson could do anything with that. Already involved with another project, Francis turned to Theo Kamecke
who had edited To Be Alive! and had since gone on to direct other films independently. Bill Johnnes came on board as line producer because he had been involved with the ill-fated MGM production and was already familiar with many of the necessary contacts.
that the idea came to him to begin the film with Stonehenge
, which he had seen on a sunless dawn the year before while in England shooting another film. The two efforts, Apollo and Stonehenge, seemed inseparable.
At the moment of the Apollo 11 launch, Kamecke had asked his camera crews to resist the temptation to look at the launch themselves, but instead concentrate on the faces of the people watching. He himself was in Launch Control
with a NASA cameraman and was the only civilian ever issued a pass to the Firing Room. During the moonwalk he was in Mission Control MOCR in Houston, Texas. The remainder of the film was researched and planned out after the launch in July, and the treatment written and delivered just a short time before the trip to England to film Stonehenge.
.
The animated explanation for how the Apollo-Saturn rocket was put together, how it functioned and how each expended piece was left behind leaving only the Command Module to plummet back to earth, was intended to look like simple computer animation. In 1970 even the simplest computer animation was so expensive and time consuming to do that it was far cheaper to do cell animation, where each image was drawn on a clear acetate just like Mickey Mouse
cartoons.
In places throughout the film, telemetry sounds from spacecraft were integrated so that they themselves became the music. None of these telemetry sounds were from Apollo, because by that time telemetry was so rapid and of such frequency that even slowed down was inaudible to the ear. The telemetry sounds were taken from Mariner IV which flew by Mars many years before, the last time such sounds were audible.
The sound of the Apollo rocket launch is a mix of V2 rocket and atom bomb punctuated by slowed down struck metal which emulates cathedral bells, creating a thread with the slowed down brass in the Stonehenge music which bookends the film and the pipe organ score linking the Apollo 11 rocket flight with micro and macro universes.
, was selected because he was not a narrator but an actor who had not only the voice but the temperament to understand the feel of the film.
The finished film was assembled and printed by Technicolor
in California, using the same system that had produced all the great Hollywood color films from the 1930s through the 1960s. The process was called imbibition, in which black and white fine-grain masters were created for each of the colors, run through a bath of ink, and contact printed onto clear acetate, one after the other, just as books would have been printed. It was quite a bit more expensive than using light-sensitive film which would then be chemically developed, but the clarity and control was more exact and of better quality than light-sensitive stock. By the time when Moonwalk One was finished, light-sensitive emulsion film had become much better technically and was much cheaper than the Technicolor imbibition process. Moonwalk One was one of the last films created using that process, which was shut down forever shortly thereafter. The fact that Moonwalk One was printed with inks instead of with unstable dye emulsions probably accounts for its remarkable condition after 40 years.
reported that Moonwalk One was the first documentary worthy of the immensity of the moon launch itself, and Cue Magazine described it in 1972 as an extraordinary documentary of historical scope and time capsule worthiness. Archer Winsten writing in the New York Post in November 1972 declared that it deserved to be a companion piece to Stanley Kubrick's masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey
Apollo 11
In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
, which landed the first humans on the moon
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...
. Besides portraying the massive technological achievement of that event, the film places it in some historical context, and tries to capture the mood and feel of the people on Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...
at the time when man first walked on another world.
Original 1970 release
After the film was completed there was not much interest in it because the general public had been saturated with the US space program, especially with several other lunar missions which followed Apollo 11 over the next three years. NASANASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
gave the film a screening in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
for possible distributors, but it was considered to be too long, and subsequently failed to be picked up. To counter this lack of interest about 15 minutes was cut from the finished film at NASA’s direction. This failed to gain renewed interest from distributors, but the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
in the summer of 1971, where it won a special award and was described as a “sleeper”. The Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...
in New York began a new film series called “New American Directors”, and Moonwalk One was placed in its first program. It received many favorable reviews and was thereafter screened in a selection of theaters nationally, capitalizing on the publicity due to the Whitney program.
For the next few decades Moonwalk One was practically forgotten, even the original printing elements were lost by NASA or Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...
. All that survived were a few 16mm copies of the cut-down version, from which some DVD’s were subsequently made.
21st-century rediscovery of the film
In 2007 a group of film makers was researching film footage known to have originated with Moonwalk One for a film about the overall Apollo program called In the Shadow of the MoonIn the Shadow of the Moon
In the Shadow of the Moon is a 2006 British documentary film about the United States' manned missions to the Moon. It premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Audience Award. In March 2008, it was the first film to win the Sir Arthur Clarke Award for Best Film...
. One of the producers, Christopher Riley
Christopher Riley
Christopher Riley is a British writer, broadcaster and film maker specialising in the history of science. He has a PhD from Imperial College, University of London where he pioneered the use of digital elevation models in the study of mountain range geomorphology and evolution...
, tracked down the director Theo Kamecke
Theo Kamecke
Theo Kamecke is a sculptor, who previously worked as a film director during the 1960s and 1970s. Kamecke's best known film is Moonwalk One - a NASA commissioned documentary feature film to cover their Apollo 11 mission in the summer of 1969...
for help with his questions, only to find that Theo still had two large steel shipping boxes containing the only 35mm print of the original film, sitting under his desk. Over the next two years a consortium was put together to digitally restore the 35mm print and re-release this director's cut on DVD in time for the 40th anniversary of the first walk on the moon. The DVD includes a director’s commentary, the story of the making of the film and other features. Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel
Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...
in the UK also acquired this version and transmitted it with additional material featuring producer Christopher Riley, first premiering on Monday July 20th 2009.
History of the making of Moonwalk One
A year and a half before the Apollo 11 flight, NASA had approached Francis Thompson Inc about making a very ambitious film telling the story of the whole Apollo program, culminating with the landing on the moon. Francis Thompson and his partner Alexander HammidAlexandr Hackenschmied
Alexandr Hackenschmied was a leading photographer and filmmaker in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1938 and became involved in American avant-garde cinema...
were at that time generally regarded as the best documentary
Documentary
A documentary is a creative work of non-fiction, including:* Documentary film, including television* Radio documentary* Documentary photographyRelated terms include:...
filmmakers in the USA, having won fame as the creators of the hit of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair "To Be Alive!
To Be Alive!
To Be Alive! is a 1964 short documentary film co-directed by Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid. The film is notable for its use of a multi-screen format and for winning the Academy Award in 1966 for Documentary Short Subject....
", a multi-screen film which played to overflow crowds and garnered the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject
Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject
This is a list of films by year that have received an Oscar together with the other nominations for best documentary short subject. Following the Academy's practice, the year listed for each film is the year of release: the awards are announced and presented early in the following year.-1940s:*1941...
in 1966
38th Academy Awards
The 38th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film for 1965, were held on April 18, 1966 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California. They were hosted by Bob Hope....
. The NASA film had the working title of “Man in Space”. It was to be a theatrical production of several million dollars at minimum, with funding and distribution supplied by MGM, and would have included a re-enactment of the moonwalk on a sound stage.
The Francis Thompson company even conducted preliminary shooting during one or two of the earlier Apollo missions, but in early 1969 because of reshuffling at MGM, the project lost its backing. Both Francis Thompson and NASA frantically sought funding elsewhere but nothing resulted, and Thompson began to turn his attention to another project. Six weeks before the launch of Apollo 11
Apollo 11
In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
, NASA called again and said that although the big-budget film was obviously dead, they didn’t want this event to 'slip through their fingers', nor did they want to make the kind of industrial film which was usually produced after each mission. NASA said they could scrape together $350,000 and wanted to know if Thompson could do anything with that. Already involved with another project, Francis turned to Theo Kamecke
Theo Kamecke
Theo Kamecke is a sculptor, who previously worked as a film director during the 1960s and 1970s. Kamecke's best known film is Moonwalk One - a NASA commissioned documentary feature film to cover their Apollo 11 mission in the summer of 1969...
who had edited To Be Alive! and had since gone on to direct other films independently. Bill Johnnes came on board as line producer because he had been involved with the ill-fated MGM production and was already familiar with many of the necessary contacts.
Stonehenge and Moonwalk One
Since the time was so short, Kamecke’s immediate challenge was to scout the location, determine what to shoot, and select the several film crews that were going to be necessary for capturing an event happening over a very short period of time. It was during this scouting trip to Cape CanaveralCape Canaveral
Cape Canaveral, from the Spanish Cabo Cañaveral, is a headland in Brevard County, Florida, United States, near the center of the state's Atlantic coast. Known as Cape Kennedy from 1963 to 1973, it lies east of Merritt Island, separated from it by the Banana River.It is part of a region known as the...
that the idea came to him to begin the film with Stonehenge
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, about west of Amesbury and north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of a circular setting of large standing stones set within earthworks...
, which he had seen on a sunless dawn the year before while in England shooting another film. The two efforts, Apollo and Stonehenge, seemed inseparable.
At the moment of the Apollo 11 launch, Kamecke had asked his camera crews to resist the temptation to look at the launch themselves, but instead concentrate on the faces of the people watching. He himself was in Launch Control
Launch Control Center
The Launch Control Center is a four-story building located at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida used for the supervision of launches from Launch Complex 39. In practice, this means that the LCC handles all American manned space flights...
with a NASA cameraman and was the only civilian ever issued a pass to the Firing Room. During the moonwalk he was in Mission Control MOCR in Houston, Texas. The remainder of the film was researched and planned out after the launch in July, and the treatment written and delivered just a short time before the trip to England to film Stonehenge.
NASA and Moonwalk One
In the weeks before the launch Theo Kamecke flew to Washington D.C. to meet the appropriate people at NASA, and get his bearings on the film. He was hoping that because they had come to Francis Thompson in the first place, they wouldn’t be wanting a laundry-list type of film. The man who ran Public Relations for NASA, Julian Shear, had come from a substantial career in television broadcasting, was very savvy, and knew that by the time the film was finished the public would already be saturated with media about Apollo, and that the film would have no box office appeal. He asked Kamecke not to worry about that, but just to make a time capsuleTime capsule
A time capsule is an historic cache of goods or information, usually intended as a method of communication with future people and to help future archaeologists, anthropologists, or historians...
.
Elements of the film
Aside from all the predictable footage available from NASA (16mm, video and stills shot during the mission, and views from space shot during other missions), there were huge pieces to be filled in. Stock footage researchers were set to the task of finding newsreel footage of the time, and beautiful and unusual footage from around the world to represent both the people and the planet as this event unfolded. The scenes of the making of the spacecraft and suits, and the testing of human endurance were shot in the months following the first moonwalk. The launch sequence itself, with all the slow motion shots of flame, smoke and falling ice were put together from engineering film shot by cameras on the launch pad and tower. In looking through a technical manual he obtained from NASA, Kamecke noticed that besides the 3 or 4 shots of the launch which had been allocated for media purposes, there were 240 film cameras automatically triggered at launch. He asked where that other footage was, and was told that they didn’t know but could find out. It turned out that after development, that film was sent down to the rocket research center in Huntsville, Alabama. Kamecke traveled to Huntsville and found that footage tossed into two cardboard cartons sitting under a workbench. The engineers were only interested in it if something blew up or if some propellant hose didn’t disconnect properly. After that, it was disposed of. Kamecke looked through it and selected several reels to box up and take back to New York. Most of them were on 16mm and were taken at such a high frame rate that they seemed to be hardly moving at all, so it was determined how much to speed them up while still seeming slow motion, and were sent to an optical house to be blown up to 35mm.Opticals
There were many “opticals” used in the making of Moonwalk One. The Earth rising over the moon, or the pan from the earth floating in space to the close surface of the moon, for example. There was no footage shot by the astronauts that was comparable. The “Earth Poem” sequence was composed of Hasselblad stills of the earth taken by astronauts on previous missions, and sent to an optical house to create very slow moves across the surface.The animated explanation for how the Apollo-Saturn rocket was put together, how it functioned and how each expended piece was left behind leaving only the Command Module to plummet back to earth, was intended to look like simple computer animation. In 1970 even the simplest computer animation was so expensive and time consuming to do that it was far cheaper to do cell animation, where each image was drawn on a clear acetate just like Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...
cartoons.
The music and sound effects
The composer selected for Moonwalk One was Charles Morrow, who had developed a reputation for very flexible, avant garde, and stirring compositions by the late 1960s. For the “Earth Poem” sequence he came up with heartbeat, breathing, and a very moving cello line.In places throughout the film, telemetry sounds from spacecraft were integrated so that they themselves became the music. None of these telemetry sounds were from Apollo, because by that time telemetry was so rapid and of such frequency that even slowed down was inaudible to the ear. The telemetry sounds were taken from Mariner IV which flew by Mars many years before, the last time such sounds were audible.
The sound of the Apollo rocket launch is a mix of V2 rocket and atom bomb punctuated by slowed down struck metal which emulates cathedral bells, creating a thread with the slowed down brass in the Stonehenge music which bookends the film and the pipe organ score linking the Apollo 11 rocket flight with micro and macro universes.
The narrator
According to the film's director Theo Kamecke speaking on the director's commentary of the 2009 film release the narrator, Laurence LuckinbillLaurence Luckinbill
Laurence George Luckinbill is an American actor.-Life and career:Luckinbill was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the son of Agnes and Laurence Benedict Luckinbill. He graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1956 and The Catholic University of America in 1958.He starred in the 1976 Broadway play...
, was selected because he was not a narrator but an actor who had not only the voice but the temperament to understand the feel of the film.
Production of the finished film
Because the footage for the film originated from so many sources – 70mm, 35mm, 16mm, video, stills – it was necessary to settle on a format very early in production that would accommodate all these sources without making it obvious that the film was jumping from one source to another. The original specifications for the film, left over from the MGM co-production concept, were for it to be filmed in 70mm. There was not time before the launch to reconsider this, and so the launch crews were working with a few 70mm cameras and some 35mm. After the moonwalk Kamecke went to the people at NASA and explained that the film really couldn’t be done in 70mm for the budget allowed because of the cost of film and processing, the unwieldiness of the equipment, and the slowness of the lenses which would require more lighting and thus larger crews. It was decided to shoot and release the film in 35mm in the traditional 4:3 screen ratio which would accommodate not only the footage shot by the astronauts, but all of the stock footage as well. The 70mm footage would have to be carefully scanned to 35mm masters, selecting the optimum part of the 70mm frame.The finished film was assembled and printed by Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...
in California, using the same system that had produced all the great Hollywood color films from the 1930s through the 1960s. The process was called imbibition, in which black and white fine-grain masters were created for each of the colors, run through a bath of ink, and contact printed onto clear acetate, one after the other, just as books would have been printed. It was quite a bit more expensive than using light-sensitive film which would then be chemically developed, but the clarity and control was more exact and of better quality than light-sensitive stock. By the time when Moonwalk One was finished, light-sensitive emulsion film had become much better technically and was much cheaper than the Technicolor imbibition process. Moonwalk One was one of the last films created using that process, which was shut down forever shortly thereafter. The fact that Moonwalk One was printed with inks instead of with unstable dye emulsions probably accounts for its remarkable condition after 40 years.
Reception
Critics gave the film very positive reviews. ABC NewsABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
reported that Moonwalk One was the first documentary worthy of the immensity of the moon launch itself, and Cue Magazine described it in 1972 as an extraordinary documentary of historical scope and time capsule worthiness. Archer Winsten writing in the New York Post in November 1972 declared that it deserved to be a companion piece to Stanley Kubrick's masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...
External links
- Moonwalk One - in the public domain on youtube - made available by Public.Resource.Org
- Moonwalk One - in the public domain on The Internet Archive - made available by Public.Resource.Org
- Moonwalk One - the Director's Cut - Official Site (UK)
- Creative Match - The Attic Room partners Moonwalk One DVD & restoration
- Guardian - The moon shoot: film of Apollo mission on show again after 35 years in the can
- Mid-Day - report on Moonwalk One
- Birmingham Post - Theo Kamecke and the filming of Apollo 11's mission
- California Chronicle - Long-Lost Film Resurfaces in Time for 40th Anniversary of Man on Moon
- Khaleej Times - Moon tales - One Giant Leap
- Pocket Lint - Moonwalk One - documenting the Moon Landing