Moonwalk One

• 1. Introduction

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  Moonwalk One is a 1971 documentary film about Apollo 11 that almost did not exist. Six weeks before the most watched rocket launch in human history, NASA called director Theo Kamecke and asked if he could make a film for $350,000. The original plan had been a theatrical production of several million dollars, backed by MGM. That deal had collapsed. The big-budget version was dead. What Kamecke managed to build from the ruins of that plan became something critics would compare to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yet for years after the film was finished, almost nobody saw it. The distributors passed. The public, by then saturated with lunar missions, had lost interest. How a film born from a last-minute phone call and a shoestring budget ended up at the Cannes Film Festival, lauded as a "sleeper" and praised as a time capsule for the ages, is a story as unlikely as any of the footage it contains.

• 2. The Collapsed Deal

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  A year and a half before the Apollo 11 flight, NASA had approached Francis Thompson Inc. with an ambitious proposal. Thompson and his partner Alexander Hammid were widely regarded as the best documentary filmmakers in the United States at the time. They had earned that reputation by creating To Be Alive!, a multi-screen film that played to overflow crowds at the 1964-65 New York World's Fair and won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1966. The NASA project carried the working title Man in Space. MGM was to provide funding and distribution, and the production budget was to run to several million dollars at minimum. The concept was sweeping enough to include a re-enacted moonwalk filmed on a sound stage. Thompson's company even began preliminary shooting during one or two earlier Apollo missions. Then, in early 1969, a reshuffling at MGM pulled the funding entirely. Thompson and NASA scrambled to find backing elsewhere, found nothing, and Thompson turned his attention to other work. It was only six weeks before the launch of Apollo 11 that NASA called again, explained they could scrape together $350,000, and asked what could be done with that. Thompson was already committed elsewhere, so he turned to Theo Kamecke, who had edited To Be Alive! and had since built an independent directing career. Bill Johnnes came aboard as line producer, drawing on his familiarity with the contacts left over from the failed MGM production.

• 3. Making a Time Capsule

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  Julian Shear, the man who ran public relations for NASA, had come to the agency from a substantial career in television broadcasting. He understood, even before filming began, that by the time the documentary was finished the public would be saturated with Apollo media and the film would have little box office appeal. His instruction to Kamecke was simple: stop worrying about that, and just make a time capsule. That framing shaped every creative decision that followed. Kamecke flew to Washington to meet the right people at NASA and get his bearings. On the day of the Apollo 11 launch, he asked his camera crews not to watch the rocket rise, but to keep their lenses on the faces of the people watching it. Kamecke himself was inside Launch Control with a NASA cameraman. He was the only civilian ever issued a pass to the Firing Room. During the moonwalk he was stationed in Mission Control MOCR in Houston, Texas. The research and planning for the rest of the film came after the launch in July; the treatment was written and delivered only a short time before a trip to England to film Stonehenge.

• 4. Stonehenge as Opening

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  The idea to open Moonwalk One with Stonehenge came to Kamecke during a scouting trip to Cape Canaveral. He had seen the stones at a sunless dawn the previous year while shooting another film in England. Standing at the launch site, the connection struck him as inseparable: the ancient structure built to mark celestial events and the Saturn V rocket being prepared to carry humans to another world. The two efforts, Apollo and Stonehenge, seemed to belong in the same frame. That pairing was not merely visual. The film's sound design wove a deliberate thread between them. The score for the Stonehenge sequence featured slowed-down brass, and the sound of the Apollo rocket launch itself was constructed from a mix of V2 rocket and atom bomb recordings punctuated by slowed-down struck metal that emulates cathedral bells. The pipe organ score linking the Apollo 11 rocket flight to both micro and macro universes drew the bookends together. Stonehenge appears at the start of the film, and its music returns at the close, anchoring the documentary in something older than the space age.

• 5. Hidden Footage

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  While reviewing a technical manual obtained from NASA, Kamecke noticed a detail that almost no one had acted on. Beyond the three or four camera angles allocated for media use, 240 film cameras had been automatically triggered at the moment of launch. Nobody seemed to know where that footage had gone. After some inquiry, the answer came back: it had been sent to the rocket research center in Huntsville, Alabama. Kamecke traveled to Huntsville and found that footage sitting in two cardboard cartons under a workbench. The engineers had kept it only to check whether something had blown up or whether a propellant hose had failed to disconnect properly. After that review, it was disposed of. Kamecke looked through the cartons, selected several reels, and brought them back to New York. Most of the film was shot on 16mm at such a high frame rate that the images seemed barely to move. The team calculated how much to speed each reel up while still preserving a slow-motion quality, then sent them to an optical house to be enlarged to 35mm. The slow-motion shots of flame, smoke, and falling ice that make the launch sequence so striking came from those discarded engineering reels.

• 6. Music and Sound

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  Charles Morrow was selected as the composer for Moonwalk One because he had developed a reputation for flexible, avant-garde, and stirring compositions by the late 1960s. For the "Earth Poem" sequence, which was built from Hasselblad still photographs taken by astronauts on previous missions, Morrow composed a piece built around heartbeat, breathing, and a moving cello line. Telemetry sounds from spacecraft were woven throughout the film so that they functioned as music in their own right. None of those sounds came from Apollo 11. By that time, telemetry had become so rapid and of such high frequency that even when slowed down it was inaudible to the human ear. The sounds used were recorded from Mariner 4, which had flown past Mars years earlier, during the last period when such transmissions were slow enough to be heard.

• 7. Technical Decisions

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  Because the footage came from so many different sources, 70mm, 35mm, 16mm, video, and still photographs, the production team had to choose a common format before a frame was edited. The original MGM-era plan had called for 70mm. There was no time before the launch to change that plan, so Kamecke's crews went to Cape Canaveral with 70mm cameras and some 35mm. After the moonwalk, Kamecke explained to NASA that 70mm was simply not workable within the available budget. The slow lenses required more lighting, which meant larger crews, and both the film stock and processing costs were far higher. The decision was made to release in 35mm in the traditional 4:3 screen ratio, which could accommodate the astronaut footage and all the stock material without obvious jumps between sources. The 70mm footage was reduced to 35mm masters, with the best portion of each frame selected. Printing was handled by Technicolor in California, using the dye transfer process that had produced Hollywood's great color films from the 1930s through the 1960s. In dye transfer, black-and-white fine-grain masters were created for each color, run through a bath of ink, and contact-printed onto clear acetate one layer after another. The process was more expensive than light-sensitive film stock but delivered greater clarity and control. By the time Moonwalk One was completed, light-sensitive emulsion film had improved enough and become cheap enough that the Technicolor process was no longer commercially viable. Moonwalk One stands as one of the last American films made using it.

• 8. Reception and Revival

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  After its completion in 1969, Moonwalk One found no takers. NASA screened it in New York City for potential distributors, and the verdict was that the film ran too long. About 15 minutes were cut at NASA's direction, but that did not revive interest. The film finally reached a wider audience when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the summer of 1971, where it won a special award and was called a "sleeper". The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York then launched a new film series called "New American Directors" and placed Moonwalk One in its opening program. Favorable reviews followed, and the film was screened in a selection of theaters across the country. ABC News reported that it was the first documentary worthy of the immensity of the Moon launch itself. Cue Magazine, writing in 1972, described it as an extraordinary documentary of historical scope and time capsule worthiness. Archer Winsten of the New York Post, also writing in November 1972, declared it deserved to stand alongside Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. A full restoration came in 2009, when a 35mm print was telecined and released as a "Director's Cut" under Kamecke's supervision. That edition, which first premiered on the 20th of July 2009, included a director's commentary, a record of the film's making, and other features. The 2019 documentary Apollo 11 paid its own tribute by re-using the designs from Moonwalk One's animated spacecraft sequences in genuine computer animations.