From the Earth to the Moon (miniseries)

• 1. Introduction

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  From the Earth to the Moon began its run on HBO on the 5th of April, 1998. It closed five weeks later, on the 10th of May, after twelve episodes. Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Michael Bostick produced this docudrama account of NASA's Apollo program. The story runs from the early 1960s through the early 1970s. Much of the writing draws on Andrew Chaikin's 1994 book A Man on the Moon. The series borrows its title from Jules Verne's 1865 novel of the same name, though it is not based on that book at all.

  A title borrowed but a plot left untouched sets up a puzzle before a single astronaut appears on screen. Hanks appears in every episode, introducing each of the first eleven himself. What does a project like this choose to dramatize, when other films had already told parts of the same story? And what does it take to rebuild the Moon itself, one hangar and one weather balloon at a time?

• 2. A Story Already Told

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  The Right Stuff already told Project Mercury's story on screen in 1983, so the miniseries only summarizes that program briefly in its first episode. Apollo 13, the 1995 film, had already covered its own flight from the point of view of the crew and mission control. Hanks, Howard and Grazer had produced that film themselves. For the episode 'We Interrupt This Program,' they shot the same mission again, this time from the perspective of the journalists covering it.

  Twelve episodes make up the series, each handed to a different director, each carrying its own viewpoints and themes. They move in sequence through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs rather than jumping around in time. That sequence let each episode build directly on the real chronology of the agency's climb toward the Moon. None of them had to double back and fill in gaps a previous episode already covered.

• 3. Thirty of Thirty-Two

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  Two of the thirty-two astronauts who flew, or trained to fly, the Apollo missions never got a credited actor to portray them. Jack Swigert, the Apollo 13 command module pilot, is heard but never seen in Episode 8. Ronald Evans, the Apollo 17 command module pilot, gets only a brief appearance during the liftoff scene of Apollo 17 in the final episode. The other thirty astronauts, along with many of their family members and other NASA and non-NASA personnel, all appear on screen.

  Lane Smith plays Emmett Seaborn, a fictional television newscaster invented for the series. Seaborn appears in nine of the twelve episodes, reporting on the American space program from its earliest days. He gives the story continuity across most of the installments.

  David Scott, the astronaut who flew on Apollo 15, served as the miniseries' chief technological consultant. Having a working astronaut inside the process meant decisions about accuracy did not rest on the writers' imaginations alone.

• 4. One-Sixth Gravity

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  Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida, hosted part of the production. The moonwalk scenes, though, were shot somewhere else entirely, inside blimp hangars on a former Marine base in Tustin, California. About half of that hangar space became the surface of the Moon, and the rest held production trailers. To fake the Moon's weaker pull, the production strapped weather balloons filled with helium to the actors' backs. They wore the rigs during the lunar spacewalk scenes. That rigging cut their effective weight down to one-sixth of normal. A rig built from little more than helium and rigging line was enough to let actors move as if gravity itself had changed.

• 5. Hardware and Friendships

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  Brett Cullen played David Scott, first as the Apollo 9 command module pilot and later as the Apollo 15 commander. Each time a new episode of his aired, the Scott family invited him into their home to watch it with them. Relationships like this were common; many of the actors got to know the real astronauts they were portraying.

  Two short clips from the real Apollo 13's final scenes appear in the episode 'That's All There Is.' One shows the splashdown; the other shows the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima. On screen, that ship is played by the USS New Orleans.

  In the episode 'Spider,' the score echoes the main theme from The Great Escape, a 1963 war film. Tom Kelly jokes about having a crew dig a tunnel out of the Grumman plant. That same episode features a real Apollo Lunar Module, LM-13, built for the Apollo 18 mission but never flown after budget cuts ended that mission. A lunar module built for a cancelled mission ended up on a soundstage instead of the Moon, playing the part it was designed for anyway.

• 6. A Different Frame

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  The original series was captured on Super 35 film, formatted for the standard 1.33:1 screens common on television sets of the era. As flat-panel widescreen televisions became common, the series was remastered into a 1.78:1 aspect ratio and rereleased in 2005 as a 5-disc DVD box set.

  Widescreen framing reveals extra picture on the left and right of each shot, but it cuts away the top and bottom of the original frame. Careful transfer work hides most of that loss, but not all of it. In the first episode, the Gemini 8 and Agena spacecraft tumble in space with a stuck thruster. In the new widescreen cut, that thruster sits just outside the frame, cropped off the top. Some on-screen captions were compromised the same way. Not every viewer who upgraded to a widescreen set in 2005 would notice what the reframing had quietly cost the picture.

• 7. The Final Reel

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  Blythe Danner narrates the twelfth and final episode, which drops the usual approach for a pseudo-documentary format instead. Woven through it is a reenactment of the making of Georges Méliès' 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune. That film, too, was inspired by Verne's novel. Hanks himself narrates and appears in these scenes as Méliès' assistant, while Tchéky Karyo plays Méliès.

  Méliès' own 1902 trip to the Moon, dreamed up decades before Apollo ever flew, gave the real astronauts' story a strange mirror to end on.

• 8. Recognition

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  The Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Miniseries named ten people. They were Tom Hanks, Tony To, John Melfi, Graham Yost, Michael Bostick, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Erik Bork, Bruce Richmond and Janace Tashjian. Hanks also picked up a separate nomination for Outstanding Directing, and Yost was nominated for Outstanding Writing. Composer Michael Kamen was nominated for the dramatic underscore, while Richard Pearson and Laurie Grotstein were nominated for picture editing. Cinematographer Gale Tattersall, costume designer Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko, and a visual effects team led by Ernest Farino rounded out the Emmy nominations.

  Jon Turteltaub received a Directors Guild of America nomination for his direction. The Writers Guild nominated Graham Yost again, this time for episodic drama television. The Producers Guild of America nominated the production for Best Long-Form Television and gave Tom Hanks its Visionary Award. Golden Globe voters nominated the miniseries for Best Miniseries or Motion Picture Made for Television.

  Satellite Awards nominations went to the miniseries itself and to Kevin Pollak for his acting. David Clennon and Rita Wilson each picked up supporting-role nominations of their own. Critics' Choice Awards nominated it for Best Picture Made for Television. Smaller guild nominations came from the Art Directors Guild, honoring Richard Toyon, Kitty Doris-Bates and Seth Reed. The Cinema Audio Society separately honored Joe Foglia, Kevin Patrick Burns and Todd Orr, and the Costume Designers Guild separately honored Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko.

  The American Cinema Editors separately nominated Richard Pearson for editing a two-hour movie for non-commercial television. The Television Critics Association listed the miniseries among its nominees for Program of the Year and for Outstanding Achievement in Movies, Miniseries and Specials. The Online Film and Television Association nominated it across a long list of categories, from Best Miniseries down to Best New Theme Song. The Artios Awards nominated Meg Liberman, Marc Hirschfeld and Deborah Brown for casting.

  Among all these nominations, the Young Artist Awards placed the miniseries in the category of Best Educational TV Show or Series. None of its other honors used that label.