Gary is a still a little sick, so I left him at home while I went to watch the new Apollo 11 documentary.
Summary: Do you get excited when you hear there are lost episodes of The Honeymooners or I Love Lucy? This is The Moon: the Lost Episodes. Remember that beautiful footage of rocket stages dropping away into space? Evidently NASA lost the equally stunning film of the Eagle docking with the command module, and Buzz getting out of the LEM, and now it’s all in this movie along with Kissinger greeting the astronauts and astronauts shaving in space and Michael Collins and his jaunty mustache. Dazzling.
Detail:
- I saw it on an IMAX screen, from a seat in the third row. That was actually great, because it filled my entire field of vision and all the coughing and germs stayed behind me in row six where the good seats were.
- It was a little exhausting because I had to keep looking left to right to catch everything. I gobbled that movie up with my eyes.
- I was also exhausted because every time there was a photo of a crowd of people I had to scan over every face for technical father Jerry. It sounds pitiful, but he could have been there. Really, he worked there at that time.
- I have always thought that when I was five, Jerry pushed me out of Mission Control during our tour of NASA, but my brother contends it was the computer room, and evidently he is right. There is an amazing dolly shot of Mission Control, and the exterior is not where I was told that girls were not allowed.
- Seriously, though, how do you LOSE film of a billion dollar space mission? Did you confuse it with the footage of all the other moon missions going on at the time?
That sounds so very cool.
(One option for losing the footage would be by "putting it in a very safe place" to make sure it doesn't get stolen - but, since this is an unusual thing, you don't have an *established* very safe place for it yet, and whoever it is forgets. *Or* that a random custodian finds the stack of incoherently-labeled boxes in the safe-place 2nd-sub-basement broom closet and moves them to a proper archival non-custodial storage space and they just get mixed in with the things that are catalogued - but never get catalogued themselves. That'd be my best guess. But yes: 1. make copies and 2. don't lose things like that!)
Posted by: KC | March 08, 2019 at 02:54 PM
KC - further research reveals that it was shot on 70mm film, and TVs can’t play 70mm film, and no one was planing on doing a documentary movie since it just happened, and then the technology became outdated and they couldn’t play it so it never came out of storage, and then everyone but one archivist forgot about it.
Posted by: TheQueen | March 08, 2019 at 03:15 PM
That is hilarious. :-) How long did it take them to think of asking all the NASA archivists if they knew where the footage was? (Archivists are magic.)
Posted by: KC | March 08, 2019 at 08:06 PM
KC- I had to hunt just to get that little scrap of detail on how they lost the footage. They made it sound like the NASA contact for the movie was the archivist who unearthed it. I still feel like they're hiding something.
Posted by: theQueen | March 09, 2019 at 05:19 PM
They probably are. Losing things is embarrassing; the precise mechanism by which something was lost is almost always more specifically embarrassing.
Posted by: KC | March 10, 2019 at 02:09 PM