Moon landing a giant leap for movies

In 1964, Stanley Kubrick, on the recommendation of science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, bought a telescope.

“He got this Questar and he attached one of his cameras to it,” remembers Katharina Kubrick, the filmmaker’s stepdaughter. “On a night where there was a lunar eclipse, he dragged us all out onto the balcony and we were able to see the moon like a big rubber ball. I don’t think I’ve seen it as clearly since. He loved that thing. He looked at it all the time.”

Space exploration was then an exciting possibility, but one far from realization. That July, NASA’s Ranger 7 sent back highresolution photographs from the moon’s surface. Kubrick and Clarke, convinced the moon was only the start, began to toil on a script together. It would be five years before astronauts landed on the moon, on July 20, 1969. Kubrick took flight sooner. “2001: A Space Odyssey” opened in theaters April 3, 1968.

The space race was always going to be won by filmmakers and sciencefiction writers. Jules Verne penned “From the Earth to the Moon” in 1865, prophesying three U.S. astronauts rocketing from Florida to the moon. George Melies’ 1902 silent classic “A Trip to the Moon” had a rocket ship landing in the eye of the man in the moon. “Destination Moon,” based on Robert Heinlein’s tale, got there in 1950, and won an Oscar for special effects. Three years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, “Star Trek” began airing.

It’s no wonder that the moon landing seemed like the stuff of movies. Some conspiracy theorists claimed it was one: another Kubrick production. But the truth of the landing was intertwined with cinema.

Ed Sheeran has to be the only sentient life form in God’s green garden to sit through a Grammy telecast and think, “I’d love to make an entire album that sounds like that.” Voilà! Here’s Sheeran’s “No. 6 Collaborations Project,” an album of mismatched duets designed to feel like prom night at the top of the pops.

Except it feels more like a hostage situation, with a starry gathering of rappers, R&B singers and other Hot 100 detainees pretending that they’re really quite happy to be hanging out with their good and real-life friend Ed Sheeran, a cool guy (from England!) who is definitely very good at rapping. If you can manage to get your ears around Sheeran’s rhymes against humanity (“I was bornamisfit/Grewup10 miles from the town of Ipswich”) you might be able to hear the soft scratch of pens signing checks.

Like so many marquee pop duets of the past decade, each song on this album only ever amounts to a transaction, a brand merger, a convergence of revenue streams. And

Audio recordings from Mission Control during Apollo 11 capture flight controllers talking about “2001.” The day of the landing, Heinlein and Clarke were on air with Walter Cronkite. Heinlein called it “New Year’s Day of the Year One.”

The landing was a giant leap not just for mankind but for filmmaking. The astronauts on board Apollo 11 carried multiple film cameras with them, including two 16mm cameras and several 70mm Hasselblad 500s. Some cameras were affixed to the lunar module and the astronauts’ suits, others they carried on the journey. Their training was rudimentary, but they were filmmakers. Armstrong, Aldrin and Michael Collins were all later made honorary members of the American Society of Cinematographers.

Those images, broadcast live on television, were crucial proof for the mission. Filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller, whose archival-based “Apollo 11” has been one of the year’s most acclaimed and popular documentaries, believes they constitute some of the most important images in cinema history.

“How could you argue with Buzz Aldrin’s landing shot with a 16mm camera using variable frame rate and shutter exposures out the lunar module window?” marvels Miller. “I mean, come up with a better shot in cinema history than the landing on the moon. And likewise, Michael Collins in the command module seeing the lunar module come off the surface of the moon. They’re incredible shots on their own and they’re also technically astute.”

The possibility of traveling to the moon had long invigorated the dreams of storytellers. But the realization of that vision, and the images it produced, opened up entirely new horizons. The moon landing inspired films that aside from Sheeran’s flagrantly overconfident rapping, nothing unexpected happens here. There’s no significant musical dialogue between Sheeran’s aspirant soft-pop mewls and Young Thug’s yelps, or Cardi B’s rasps, or Ella Mai’s purrs. No heat, no sparks, no chemical reactions.

There’s another transaction taking place, though, and it has to do with race. By collaborating with Sheeran, artists of color get to work with a global superstar famous enough (and white enough) to play himself in that new Beatles movie. That means more exposure and more cash. Meanwhile, Sheeran is trying to soak up some of his sidekicks’ style and credibility, priceless commodities that white artists have been mopping up off black dance floors since before the dawn of rock ’n’ roll.

Across this absolutely greatly expanded the realm of science fiction and began an ongoing dance between the space program and the movies: two sunny industries driven by technological discovery and starry-eyed daydreams.

Many of the foremost filmmakers then coming of age turned to space. George Lucas debuted “Star Wars” in 1977, the same year Steven Spielberg released “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” suggesting a less harmonious universe, came out two years later.

Science fiction runs on its own parallel timeline. It resides beyond contemporary reality while at the same time being informed by it. It’s built on future dreams past. Lucas was inspired by the 1936 serial “Flash Gordon.” Spielberg, who later made Kubrick’s “A.I.,” referred to “2001,” not the moon landing, as the genre’s “big bang.”

But, unmistakably, a new frontier opened when Apollo 11 landed. Philip Kaufman purposefully began his 1983 Oscar-winning epic “The Right Stuff,” based on Tom Wolfe’s book about the daring test pilots of the space program’s early days, with Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepherd) on a horseback.

“‘The Right Stuff’ is right from the beginning a continuation of the Western,” Kaufman says. “The hero of ‘The Right Stuff’ is a spirit. It’s called the Right Stuff and it’s something merciless album, Sheeran’s cred-mopping only becomes intolerable enough to make you wish you were dead during “Remember The Name,” a cursed encounter with Eminem and 50 Cent. Flanked by his childhood heroes, Sheeran finds the courage to rap like a whiny kid at Toys “R” Us: “You know I want way more than I already got/Gimme a song with Eminem and 50 Cent in the club.”

What else does Ed Sheeran want? Ed Sheeran wants to gaze into the “mmm, brown eyes” of Camila Cabello and sing the words “Te amo, mami” as Britishly as possible.

Ed Sheeran wants to let this unjust world know that white multimillionaire dilettantes should be allowed to rap, too: “I wanna try new things, they just want me to sing/Because nobody thinks I write rhymes.”

Ed Sheeran wants to invite Bruno Mars and Chris Stapleton over to his garage for an afternoon of Lenny Kravitz cosplay, just so he can shout, “You make me wanna make a baby!”

Ed wants, Ed gets. See you at the Grammys, everyone! that’s ineffable. It’s the ultimate modesty in a way. It’s in the great laconic characters of the Western. You don’t brag. You do your task in the best way possible. And maybe, as in ‘The Searchers’ or ‘Shane,’ you walk away at the end.”

The extraordinary height of achievement of the moon landing has ever since been a measuring stick for America. The partisan reception to last year’s “First Man,” with Ryan Gosling as Armstrong, was its own reflection of the country’s present. Kaufman, 82, imagines an ongoing search for “the right stuff.”

“How do we refresh that sense of adventure?” he wonders, citing the touristy lines on Mount Everest. “How do we memorialize the landing on the moon not just with parades and self-congratulation but a sense of reverence for the greatness of the people who did it?”

Ever since the moon landing made fantasy real, a strain of science fiction has ridden scientific accuracy for big-screen spectacle. Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” (2015) and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014) took physicsbased approaches to tell reasonably plausible tales of space travel, with scientists as consultants. NASA helped extensively on Ron Howard’s Oscar-winning “Apollo 13” (1995). Weightless scenes were filmed 25 seconds at a time on NASA’s KC-135 plane, in momentary zero gravity.

Margaret Weitekamp, curator of space and science-fiction history at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, sees a reciprocal relationship between filmmakers and scientists, with ideas flowing between the two — often to the benefit of NASA.

“When you see films in the post-Apollo era that really capture the spirit and triumph and the glory of human space flight, like ‘The Right Stuff’ and ‘Apollo 13,’ you see a direct increase in approval ratings for NASA and human space flight,” Weitekamp said. “After ‘The Martian,’ NASA had one of the largest recruiting application pools that they’ve ever had for the astronaut program.”

As has been often said, we went to the moon and ended up seeing the Earth more clearly. For Kubrick, glued to the Apollo 11 broadcast 50 years ago, that was literally true.

“I remember very clearly when we first saw a picture of our Earth, Stanley was immediately disappointed and depressed that he hadn’t gotten the model of the Earth in ‘2001’ the right color,” Katharina recalls. “In the film, it’s very pale blue and misty and cloudy . ... He just said, ‘Oh gee, I should have made it bluer.’ ”